By NYAMBEGA GISESA
A few hours before US President Barrack Obama stumbled into controversy when he urged African leaders to accept gay marriages, a shop in Nairobi was introducing finger condoms.
On Wednesday, the shop located along Moi Avenue, Nairobi, started retailing the condoms formally known as ‘finger cot’.
“Each poach contains one fingerdom and we are selling it at Sh100,” a lesbian seller at the shop told The Standard on Sunday.
The shop is a convenient outlet for gays and lesbians where they buy products that they use for identification.
In Africa, President Obama’s remarks have elicited as much controversy as his decision to skip visiting the homeland of his father, Kenya.
The introduction of the ‘finger cot’ that is used for oral sex in Kenya is one of the ways in which the gay community is pushing for its influence locally and also efforts to ensure safer sex.
President Obama has been seen as using his tour to push for gay rights. During his speech in Senegal, he compared gay rights in Africa to racial struggles in the United States.
Many African nations treat homosexuality as a crime and some punish violation with death.
Consensual same-sex conduct is a crime in 38 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Africa’s population that is predominantly made up of Muslims and Christians has vowed to reject decriminalising gays.
African bishops have differed with their brethren in the UK and US over gay marriage.
Gays’ rights South Africa is the only African country that has given considerable rights to gays. In 1996, the country outlawed discrimination against gays but it took a decade for samesex common law partnerships to be decided and civil unions to be allowed.
“When it comes to how the state treats people, how the law treats people, I believe that everybody has to be treated equally,” Obama said.
President Macky Sall of Senegal told Obama whereas Senegal was not “homophobic” his society was not ready to decriminalise homosexual behaviour.
Mr Sall told Obama that countries make decisions on complex issuesin their own time and went onto lecture Obama that the US is oneof the few democratic nations that maintains a death penalty.
