Reporting by Thomson Reuters Foundation, Editing by Chris Michaud and Claire Cozens
YAOUNDE, Nov 13 (Openly) - Cameroonian athlete Thierry Essamba still trains every day, even though he has little hope of reviving a career cut off when he was ousted from the national squad in a scandal over homosexuality. The 38-year-old hurdling champion was training for the 2014 Commonwealth Games when a senior sports official told a crowd of journalists and fellow athletes that he was gay - a career-ending slur in a country where homosexual acts are illegal.
"I felt as if my body was being torn apart from the inside," Essamba told the Thomson Reuters Foundation as he sat on the bleachers after finishing his daily solitary training in a dilapidated stadium in Yaounde. "That day I saw all the people in the stadium who used to look up to me with admiration, with respect. Now they regarded me with contempt."
Same-sex relationships are taboo across much of Africa, which has some of the world's most prohibitive laws against homosexuality. But few countries are as assiduous in applying them as Cameroon, whose penal code punishes "sexual relations between persons of the same sex" with up to five years in prison.
Between 2010 and 2014, at least 50 people were convicted for crimes ranging from cross-dressing to a man texting "I love you" to another man, according to CAMFAIDS, an LGBT+ advocacy group.
Essamba said he was suspended from the national squad after the public accusation, which was broadcast on national television, leaving him fearful for his life. The Cameroonian Athletics Federation did not respond to requests for comment about Essamba, whose case the U.S. State Department cited in its 2014 human rights report on the African country.
He is not the only top athlete to have suffered from such claims in a country where sports officials openly express homophobic views. Berthe Ngoume, who runs a support group for female footballers in Yaounde, said she knew of at least three women who were forced to leave the national team and banned from international competitions over rumours they were gay.
"One player who was ousted from the national team emigrated to the U.S. Another ended up killing herself with drugs," said Ngoume. Read more via Openly