WHEN FRIENDS ARE ENEMIES (A Kito Story)

I recently learned of Kito Diaries through the kito alert Instagram page. And as I was going through the various photo updates of the scum on the page, I came across the alert post of someone who was there as part of the gang the day I was set up. That day was the worst day of my life.

But it actually started a little over a year ago.

This guy buzzed me on Facebook, and without wasting time, went straight to asking me to visit him for us to hook up. I do not remember his name (don’t even have his Facebook ID or photos at this point), but let’s go ahead and call him Douche. So, Douche kept pestering me for us to see, and this made me very uneasy. The fact that I didn’t know about Kito Diaries didn’t mean I didn’t know about the existence of kito, and this guy was coming off as somebody who didn’t mean me well. So I confronted him with my suspicion, and he didn’t even bother to deny it. He admitted that he was kito and added that he would get me by all means. I immediately blocked him.

Well, this guy, for whatever reason, must have had it in for me, because in the months that went by, he kept trying to get me to see him. He would send me a friend request with a different Facebook account, slide into my DM and start hitting on me, always ending with him asking me to come see him. He stays in Ayobo, after Igando, and I didn’t know then that these areas were red zones. However, I could always tell that it was him behind the different accounts in the way he always urged me to come see him at this same place. And sometimes, I would confront him with my knowledge of him being the one behind the account before blocking him; other times, I wouldn’t even bother, I’d just block him straightaway. For the life of me, I didn’t know this guy and I didn’t know why he was so obsessed with setting me up.

Then a few weeks ago, after a long period of not getting harassed by whatever latest Facebook disguise Douche had on, I got a friend request from a really good looking guy. After I accepted the request, he sent me a Hello. This guy was so fine, and a quick search through his profile confirmed for me that he not only had various pictures of him in different locations (something that made me a little more certain that this account was legit), but he also had on his friend list some community members, some of whom I knew personally.

One of such people was a friend of mine, Emeka. Emeka and I were mostly online friends; we’d met once, but we shared so much online that I could safely call him a friend. And as a fellow gay man, I could also count on him to have my back. So, I buzzed him to ask him about this fine man whose message I’d just responded to, wanting to know if he knew him.

And Emeka responded, telling me that he knows the guy, that he is a nice guy. “I know him very well,” he said. “He is a very nice and playful guy.”

At this point, this guy had started flirting with me, very nice, making it clear he wanted us to hook up. And when I told Emeka this, he basically encouraged me to go for it.

So, when the guy asked – very nicely, I might add – if we could see, I asked him where. He suggested his place and I didn’t even hesitate. I said I would come over. After all, what better endorsement of an online hookup’s authenticity is there than a friend’s say-so?

The day we scheduled for me to go see him, I had some things to purchase. I was in Ejigbo and planned to go on to Igando from the market. I did some serious shopping that day; I bought perfumes, some jeans, belts and a bag. I also purchased some arthritis drugs from the pharmacy for my granny; my mother asked me to.

Then feeling good with myself, I set off to meet my hookup. I am just going to skip the details of how I fell into the kito trap, because it’s still traumatizing and mortifying to think of, and go straight to how I eventually found myself facing off a group of nearly ten guys. To see them swarming me with their cutlasses, knives and clubs, you’d think I was some sort of hardened criminal that they desperately wanted to detain.

And to my everlasting mortification, Douche was there, the mastermind who looked me in the face with a triumphant expression and said, “Shebi I tell you say I go catch you.”

Fortunately for me, after the initial pushing around and slaps, they didn’t beat me. And this was because as they rifled through my things, they came upon the arthritis drugs. They didn’t know what it was, and when they asked me, I lied that those were antiretroviral drugs, that I was HIV Positive and that was my medication. And this was when the ignorance surrounding HIV did some good; it played in my favour. They suddenly wouldn’t touch me; whether they thought I was too fragile from being HIV positive or they thought they’d somehow get infected if they beat me, I don’t know.

But they took everything I had, including the palm slippers I was wearing, giving me bedroom slippers in exchange. They also made a video of me, where they were asking me questions that would cause me to admit that I am a homosexual before the camera. (Among them was this guy, Alex William Smith, whose kito alert I saw on the kito alert page.)

Eventually, they let me go, saying they were freeing me because of my “condition”. It was at this point that Douche reiterated his satisfaction, that it’d been long he wanted to set me up. I looked at this guy carefully, trying to ascertain if I knew him from somewhere or had offended him somehow. But I honestly didn’t know him. The only thing I could think of to justify his obsession with me was that he’d felt slighted by the fact that I called him out for being kito the first time he buzzed me and had decided not to let that go.

When I eventually got home, I buzzed Emeka and narrated what I went through to him. At no point during that ordeal did I see the fine guy who asked me to come see him, the fine guy that Emeka assured me he knew. So, I needed to understand what happened, why my friend would tell me he knew this person who was clearly used to catfish me.

And after everything I told him I went through, he told me sorry. Just that! That he was sorry, that he didn’t actually know the guy. I felt so devastated, so betrayed. He didn’t say this, but it was obvious that he’d been interested in the fine-guy-profile himself and when I buzzed him to ask about him, instead of telling me the truth that he didn’t know him, he decided to lie to me as a way to use me to confirm the authenticity of the guy. I was so embittered by this realization, and it reinforced the reservation I’ve always had about people in our community and how they are lying, backstabbing pieces of shit. This was a simple act of honesty that wouldn’t have cost him anything: simply tell me, “Oh, I don’t know him well, he’s just someone I like on Facebook” – and let me decide for myself if I want to take the risk. The pain of his betrayal became even more unbearable than the pain of my kito experience.

I mean, with friends like this, who needs enemies?

Written by Wizzy