From Holy Celibacy to Secret Lesbian Marriage
This week, we start in Zimbabwe, where protesters vandalized the offices of a prominent LGBT rights organization. Next, we travel to Burkina Faso, where international aid organizations are failing to meet the needs of millions affected by the jihadist conflict. Finally, we stop in Nigeria, where queer people still struggle with housing discrimination and homelessness.
But first, at Minority Africa, we’re committed to sharing stories and issues of different minority groups. This includes sexual and gender minorities, religious minorities, persons with disabilities, refugees and other marginalized communities from around the world.
As part of this commitment, we’ve collaborated with FairPlanet on the Dual Life Project. To celebrate Pride Month, this project features a series that shows how LGBTQIA people in Africa are forced to lead double lives due to societal pressure.
The first story in this series follows Awele’s childhood, her journey to self-acceptance, and the daily struggle of keeping her secret marriage hidden from her religious parents.
Read an excerpt from the story here👇🏽:
From holy celibacy to secret lesbian marriage
When asked, “What kind of childhood did you have?” Awele responds cheerfully.
“I had a very happy childhood. I had a very protected childhood. I had a very soft childhood. I think you might say anything you want to say about my parents, but one thing I will always give them the accolades for is the kind of life they gave my siblings and me, both in terms of the schools we attended and the life they afforded us. Saying this does not mean we went for summer holiday every summer, but if any of us told our parents they wanted a rolling school bag, my parents would get it for them. It never mattered what issues they had between them; they always put us first.”
It is easy to imagine the beautiful memories of growing up she still holds on to as she speaks. Awele had what any Nigerian would agree was ‘a normal life.’
Stories to read
Washington Blade
Protesters vandalize Zimbabwean LGBTQ rights group’s offices
The New Humanitarian
International aid groups ‘utterly failing’ conflict victims in Burkina Faso: Egeland
From our site
From a mobile app to Facebook groups, Kenyan women are organizing around breastfeeding
In 2019, 31-year-old Kenyan Ann Mogaka returned to work six months after having her daughter. Given its benefits, Mogaka wanted to continue breastfeeding her child. Pumping presented a solution.
However, as a first-time mother, Mogaka did not have a pumping schedule. “I didn’t know I had to have [had] a pumping schedule while I was on maternity leave, so [when it was time to resume work], I didn’t have a lot of milk,” she says. “After going back to work, I would pump one side as the baby would be breastfeeding on the other in the evening. It was difficult.”
Luckily, two years later, when Mogaka gave birth to her second child she came across a Facebook post about Nyonyesha – a mobile application designed to educate women about breastfeeding – and decided to try it. The app sends notifications every two hours to remind mothers to pump. According to Mogaka, the app made pumping easier for her as she was able to pump at regular intervals, resulting in a consistent supply of breastmilk.
“When I was on three months maternity leave, the alerts would remind me to pump regularly, so I had a lot of milk stored in the fridge for the baby to use by the time I went back to work,” she says
Cameroon’s armed conflict is asking this ethnic group to pick sides
On a chill afternoon in January 2021, a group of gun-wielding men believed to be separatist fighters besieged Orti, a village on the outskirts of Ndu, a town in the conflict-affected Northwest region of Cameroon. Aissatou, a member of the indigenous Fulani people (Mbororos), a minority and disadvantaged group in Cameroon, had prepared her husband’s favourite meal (okra and cassava paste) and was about to serve it when she heard incessant gunshots.
“We were terrified,” Aissatou, now 24, recalls. “I and my two children laid flat on the floor to escape from stray bullets. We do that whenever we hear gunshots.” Her husband had gone out to look after their cattle and had exceeded the time he would usually come home. Though worried, she was sure her husband would find his way back home amidst the gunshots as he always does.
At about 7 pm, Aissatou received the news of her husband’s whereabouts: he was drowning in his pool of blood at the village square. The separatist militia had shot him.
“I fainted immediately after I heard the news. I probably would have followed my husband if Allah had not intervened,” Aissatou says.
The Mbororos have been disproportionately affected by the prolonged armed conflict that has erupted in Cameroon’s English-speaking regions since 2016. A report by Amnesty International says about 162 Mbororos have been killed, 300 of their homes razed, 2500 of their cattle seized or killed, and about XAF 180 million (about $ 293,897), paid in ransom for over 102 of their kith and kin who have been kidnapped as a result of the armed conflict.
The constant violence has pushed some Mbororos to fight as militias alongside government forces against armed separatist fighters, commonly referred to as Amba Boys, who want to create a separate state for Anglophone Cameroonians.
Around the world
CBS News
The Taliban banned Afghan girls from school 1,000 days ago, but some brave young women refuse to accept it
June 8 marks 1,000 days since the Taliban banned girls over the age of 12 from all schools in Afghanistan. The ban, issued just days after the group retook control over Afghanistan in 2021, has left hundreds of thousands of girls with little hope of a formal education.
Human Rights Watch said in a statement marking the 1,000 days that Afghan society “will never fully recover” from the loss of so many future female professionals, especially in a country that was already struggling with low youth literacy rates.
The United Nations accuses the Taliban of enforcing a “gender apartheid” with its draconian edicts, policies and system of institutionalized discrimination against women and girls, calling Afghanistan under the hard-line Islamists a “graveyard of buried hopes.”
Despite the risks, however, many Afghan girls have refused to give up hope, and they’ve turned to unofficial schools hidden away from the eyes of the Taliban to continue getting an education.
Their hope is that if the Taliban regime collapses or is forced through international pressure to relax its restrictions, their clandestine schooling will keep them apace with their international peers, and enable them to pass exams.
Washington Blade
Queer Nigerians still struggle with housing discrimination and homelessness
In Nigeria, the pursuit to secure a safe and comfortable home is often fraught with challenges for many, but for the LGBTQ community — especially those who are openly gay — these challenges are often insurmountable.
Some two years ago, Fola Francis, a popular transgender woman who has since passed away, had to leave her home in Ibadan and fled to Lagos due to transphobia. A now deleted video of her had gone viral on TikTok, and it got to the hands of her transphobic landlord and neighbors. They held a rally to make her leave the house, breaking into it many times.
“I got death threats from my neighbors due to them finding out I’m a trans woman on social media when my videos went viral,” she said to the BBC.
Francis’s experience doesn’t exist in isolation.
“For me, all I had to do was be visibly effeminate before my neighbors began to clamp down on me and force me to move out,” Damian Okpara, a student at the University of Nigeria, told the Washington Blade.
DW
Migrants turn to Mauritania as new EU transit route
Lala grew up in Senegal and Mauritania, where she has long dreamed of a better life.
She had saved enough money to pay for a pirogue — a traditional fishing boat that human traffickers use for their businesses. The small fishing boat was to take her from the capital, Nouakchott, to Spain’s Canary Islands. She was looking forward to a future in the EU.
But the journey was treacherous, she told DW, as she struggled to recount her ordeal.
“There were all sorts of nationalities. Malians, Cameroonians, Nigerians, Mauritanians, Senegalese. The police themselves came to take us to the beach,” Lala said.
According to her, the small boats brought to take the migrants can accommodate only 20 people.
“Not everyone could get on because there were so many of us, more than 100 or so people. Only 80 were lucky enough to get on,” she said.
“I’ve seen people who almost went mad. Sometimes people fought with each other, but the captains have big knives, they threaten you and tell you to shut up or they’ll throw you on the beach and they’re not kidding.”
Stories we’ve enjoyed reading
CNN
Against the backdrop of rising anti-LGBTQ sentiment, these Nigerian fashion labels feel forced to show in private
Since its inception in 2011, Lagos Fashion Week has been a twice-yearly highlight of the African fashion calendar, a multi-day showcase attracting the continent’s top design houses, big name sponsors, as well as an international audience.
In a deeply religious and conservative Nigeria, where LGBTQ people suffer extremely high levels of homophobia, intolerance, and even violence, Lagos Fashion Week quickly established itself as an inclusive space for marginalized communities and unconventional brands to be seen and heard.
For more than a decade, Nigerian label Orange Culture has staged catwalk shows featuring male models in skirts, makeup, or wearing ribbons down the runway as a way of provoking conversations about how fashion can be used to break down gender norms. Maxivive — which describes itself as “a Lagos-based fashion organization founded… on ideas of nonconformity and the subversion of norms” — has also made waves showcasing graphic, gender-bending pieces addressing issues around sexuality and identity over consecutive seasons.
Over the past few years however, members of the LGBTQ community in Nigeria say Lagos Fashion Week’s inclusive stance has come under pressure amidst a growing culture of hostility towards non-binary and gay people in the country.