The African Dream: Attitudes and Prejudices in African Schools

Abstract

In 2014, Nigeria reaffirmed its stance against same-sex relations by adding the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act 2013 (Nigeria’s anti-gay law) to its already existing list of anti-gay laws such as the Criminal Code, Penal Code and Armed Forces Act. The effect of this is that the human rights situation of sexual and gender minorities in Nigeria has gone from bad to worse. This is in spite of Nigeria’s national and international human rights commitments which amongst other things demand that the right to dignity and non-discrimination of all persons be upheld by the state. These rights encompass all human rights inclusive of the right to education. Though the right to education on its own is not enforceable in Nigeria, umbrella rights such as the rights to dignity and non-discrimination are. In this light, this paper focuses on the illegality of Nigeria’s anti-gay law based on its normative and practical implication on the enjoyment of human rights, education and dignity in Nigerian schools by sexual minority children and young persons as such establishing the inconsistency of Nigeria’s anti-gay law with the inclusion goal in Africa’s Agenda 2063 .