LGBTQ+ Ghanaians found freedom online – now they might lose it
This week, we start in Ghana, where the controversial anti-LGBTQ+ bill could criminalise queer-related content. Next, we travel to Kenya, where women say they’re under pressure to be agreeable and “non-disruptive” at work. Finally, we stop in Rwanda, where cycling is giving women stability, purpose, and new opportunities.
But first, in Ghana, young fraudsters are padlocked inside for months to work on online scams. These men are forbidden to touch women as part of a cleansing ritual. In the silence of that isolation, they reach for each other—and sometimes for trans women—exploiting a loophole that stays behind closed doors.
Read an excerpt here👇🏽:
“We touch bros but we no gay”: The hidden intimacies of Ghana’s fraud boys
Uche Kamal* built his first fortune by inventing an orphanage that didn’t exist. At twenty, with nothing but a borrowed computer in a dingy Accra internet café, he wrote to a Christian charity in the UK, spinning a story of abandoned children and desperate need. They sent $700, and he pocketed every cedi.
But, as he tells me now at 32, his path into the world of fraud began much earlier, at seventeen, when he left a quiet village in Umuaru, Imo State, for Ghana. His father had just died, and life at home had grown unbearably hard for his mother and seven younger siblings, meaning school was no longer an option. So when an uncle offered him a place in Abbossey Okai, a bustling spare-parts district in Accra, to learn the trade and earn something, he agreed.
In Ghana, he shared a room with eight other people in a slum near the Accra Cocoa Marketing Board station. He hated every part of it, he told me, sucking his teeth and dabbing at the sweat on his face with a handkerchief.
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Adorned in a flowing white garment, with pristine beads of white and green swaying gently around her neck—a striking symbol of her devotion to Esu and Ifa, deities at the heart of Yoruba spirituality—she walks with quiet confidence. Conversations falter. Eyes widen. Hushed murmurs ripple through the crowd. Some step aside as if she carries an unseen force; others glare, their disapproval barely concealed. Everything about her presence challenges the norm.
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How cycling is providing hope to Rwanda’s female riders
Olivia Maniragena has been racing through life, dealing with a lot at a young age. Orphaned at 14 and responsible for raising three siblings, she also became a mother of two before reaching 20.
Now 21, the Rwandan has found stability through cycling and is gearing up for the UCI Road World Championships in her homeland next month, where she is hoping to compete in the inaugural women’s Under-23 race.
For Maniragena, life on two wheels has always meant a level of freedom. She first learned how to ride a bike at the age of seven, and over the years cycling became more than just a skill. It became her means of survival.
“Cycling helped me take care of my family. Fetching water, collecting firewood, running errands and as a mode of transport,” Maniragena tells BBC Sport Africa when discussing her early life.
“It brings me happiness. When I ride, it takes away my anxiety and my depression.” But her freedom was short-lived.