A sustainable backpack supporting deaf kids
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This week, we start in Malawi, where an NGO is supporting kids in the deaf community with eco-friendly backpacks. Next, we travel to the eastern DRC, where the ongoing conflict is causing a rise in gender-based violence against women. Finally, we stop in the US where new bills are being proposed to further restrict queer rights.
But first, in Lagos, Nigeria, queer communities helped shape Lagos’s underground party scene. Now, as alté culture moves into the mainstream, the people who built it are being pushed to the margins – again.
We take a closer look in our latest article, read an excerpt here👇🏽.
“It’s incredibly frustrating”: Queer Lagosians made alté cool. Now they’re being pushed out
This story is published in collaboration with Obodo Nigeria as part of Intersect, a series on the ways queer love, trans identity, and cultural expression collide with and sometimes push back against social expectations. Read a foreword from the editor, Richard Wills and other stories in the series here.
In a corner of Lagos, the lights dim and the hypnotic pulse of electronic dance music fills a room where young people gather under neon strobes, their outfits as defiant as the music. This is one of the city’s rare safe havens. Queer spaces in Lagos have always existed on the margins, born out of necessity in a country where LGBTQ+ identities are criminalised.
“They weren’t just playing music; they were curating a vibe that told queer people, ‘You’re safe here.’ That’s what made it special,” recalls Ayo, a raver who has been a regular at these events since their inception.
Nigeria’s Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act (SSMPA) of 2014 not only criminalises same-sex unions but also penalises public displays of affection between same-sex individuals, with punishments of up to 14 years in prison. The SSMPA has fuelled widespread discrimination and harassment, forcing queer Nigerians to seek safety in underground spaces.
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Is my love queer enough for you?
This story is published in collaboration with Obodo Nigeria as part of Intersect, a series exploring the ways queer love, trans identity, and cultural expression collide with and sometimes push back against social expectations. Read a foreword from the editor, Richie Wills and other stories in the series here.
On an unassuming day in October 2022, I met my current partner. At the time, I mistook him for someone else and called him the wrong name, yet neither he nor our mutual friend corrected me. The early days of our friendship were filled with music, memes, banter, and me running off with his phone as I was without one myself at the time. I had bricked mine trying to change the operating system.
After about four or five months of honest conversations, sharing immaculate music finds, and creating time for each other amidst our busy schedules, we became a couple. And that’s when the questions began.
As a queer person in a relationship with someone who isn’t queer, I have had to defend and explain my love to so many people: friends and strangers alike. For an allocishet person—someone who is allosexual, cisgender, and heterosexual—being in a relationship with a queer person often comes with the pressure to claim a queerness that may not feel like their own.
It was a deceptively sunny Monday in Cameroon’s embattled northwest region. The streets lay eerily silent—shops shuttered, taxis absent. It was no ordinary day off but a “ghost town” enforced by Anglophone separatists in their war against the Francophone-dominated government. Into this tense calm stepped Claudia, 21, on a simple mission to buy sanitary pads. Little did she know that her mundane errand would spiral into a horrific ordeal and lifelong psychosocial battles.
“Suddenly, there were gunshots, and I was going back to my house. I bumped into them, and they asked me what I was doing outside,” Claudia recalls. “The sanitary pad was visible, and they could all see that’s what took me out.”
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