Nigeria’s deaf community seeks inclusion
This week, we start in Senegal, where women watch as their husbands, sons, and brothers risk everything to reach Europe. Next, we travel to Uganda, where LGBTQ+ elders are being encouraged to speak up and share their stories. Finally, we look at the disappearing tradition of women-to-women marriages in West Africa.
But first, we look at one of the world’s most overlooked health problems. Noma is a rare and deadly disease with a fatality rate of up to 90 per cent. It is often not diagnosed until it is too late. This week, Minority Africa shares the stories of people who survived it.
Read an excerpt here👇🏽:
They survived a disease few ever do. Then the hard part began
In 1994, Fidel Strub was just three years old when the pain in his gums began. It crept quickly—into his jawbone, then his cheeks. Eventually, there was a hole in his face. Growing up in Burkina Faso, he watched his family struggle to find a diagnosis, afford treatment, and make sense of what was happening. But every effort led to the same end: nothing worked.
Strub was suffering from noma.
Noma, a little-known but devastating noncommunicable disease, often begins as a seemingly harmless sore in a child’s mouth. But without immediate intervention, it turns merciless, eating away at flesh and bone. Nine out of ten children who contract it die. Those who survive are left with devastating facial disfigurements—unable to eat, speak, or move through society without stares or silence.
“I couldn’t understand why I got the disease while others didn’t,” Strub says now.
Days later, hope came in the form of a radio broadcast. A local campaign was calling for people with facial holes to travel to northern Burkina Faso for potential treatment. His grandmother heard it, packed him up, and sent him north.
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One Ethiopia, One Culture, One Religion: The Isolation of Queer Tigrayans
“So did you dump the strap-on?” I asked a friend over text.
I had expressed my worries after police started searching the homes of Tigrayans in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital. As a queer woman, I had begun de-dyking my space, which included getting rid of rainbow-coloured paraphernalia, letters, my journal, books and films with queer themes, and anything else that was remotely queer-related. I had shared with her how difficult it was to get my hands on a strap-on; thus, I couldn’t find the strength to part with the one I had.
It was unclear what exactly the police were looking for during these arbitrary searches, but I worried it would be difficult and dangerous if I were caught with a strap-on. Explaining its use would have proved disastrous in homophobic Ethiopia, and it would, I feared, land my Tigrayan queer self in prison—if I was lucky.
At eight, Peter Ade gave his life to Christ in the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), one of the largest churches in Nigeria. Raised by pastors of the RCCG, Peter’s family attended church services from morning till evening every Sunday. There was no excuse for being unserious about the Christian faith, but Peter, now in his 30s, started looking at any form of Christianity with suspicion while in university.
“All my education had been Christian; there was no way I could become an atheist according to the plans my parents had for me,” he says.
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The view from the plastic chair in which Fatou Samba sits, looking out to sea, takes in many of the elements of the sorry tale of Senegal’s lost men. She can see the distant shapes of the big industrial foreign fishing ships and tankers from Europe and China strung across the horizon.
Closer to shore are dozens of empty pirogues, Senegalese wooden fishing boats, rocking idly on a sea mostly denuded of fish.
On the beach itself, just where the small waves break, bringing in their crust of plastic waste, is a heap of masonry rubble. “That was the mosque,” Samba says. The ends of her own house, a U-shape with the two arms facing out to the beach, have also crumbled, including her bedroom. “On 19 August the sea took it, the bed and the walls,” she says, nodding at the rubble. “Soon, the sea will take it all, this house my grandparents built.”