Strangled e tortured: this is how the well-known Kenyan LGBTQ+ activist allegedly died, Edwin Chiloba. The lifeless body of the model and designer of 25 years old was found – on January 4 – inside a metal caseabandoned along a road 40 kilometers from the city of Eldoret, in the Rift Valley, Kenya.
In the last few hours, the Kenyan police have arrested a photographer from Nairobi, in relation to the murder of the activist, which probably took place on New Year’s Day. She was Chiloba’s older sister, Melvin Faith, to tell the Criminal Investigation Directorate of Uasin Gishu County about the presumable last hours of the 25-year-old, as reported by the newspaper “Daily Nation”. “I had invited my brother to the nightclub in Eldoret, where I work, to celebrate the new year. We had fun and took selfies and short videos to usher in the new year, he left with a friend I don’t know” are the words of the sister who added that since then her brother’s cell phone has been turned off. According to the police, the man was a young man from Nairobi, a photographer by profession, whom the neighbors saw loading a metal case on a car. The same one in which Chiloba’s lifeless body was found about twenty kilometers from her home, after a motorcyclist had seen her unload from a vehicle which then fled at high speed. Opening the box, the agents had found the body in a state of decomposition of the activist he was wearing women’s clothes.
Chiloba was well known in Kenya’s LGBTQ+ community and the fashion world. In his latest Instagram post, shared on Dec. 29, Chiloba wrote that he hoped to achieve several goals in 2023, including making grow your own brand of fashion and work with important companies. Among the latest posts on social media, the activist also wrote: “My movement is for everyone. It’s about inclusion. And if I’m going to fight what I was marginalized for, I will do it for all marginalized people.” The site “Nairobi News” recalls that four months ago Chiloba he had been attacked by strangers and beaten but managed to save himself, suffering cuts and bruises.
LGBTQ+ rights activists have called for the investigations proceed rapidlyreferring to the killing of another LGBTQ+ rights activist, Sheila Lumumbaperpetrated last year. “It is really worrying that we continue to witness an escalation of violence against LGBTQ+ Kenyans. It is reprehensible and deeply unfair. Every day, the human rights of LGBTQ+ people are violated with little consequence for those responsible,” the Khrca non-governmental organization that has been fighting for three decades to establish a culture of human rights and democracy in Kenya by monitoring violations of the rights themselves.
In Kenya, LGBTQ+ people still come heavily discriminated against within a predominantly Christian and conservative society where homosexuality is taboo, as in many African countries. Same-sex sexual relations are punishable by lawwith sentences of up to 14 years in prison. In 2019, the High Court of Kenya rejected an appeal by civil society figures asking the repeal of law dating back to colonial times.