As a queer teenager growing up in northern Nigeria, Arinze Ifeakandu often found himself searching for books that reflected what he felt.
She combed the books at home and imagined closer bonds between characters of the same sex. She scoured bookstores in Kano, the city where she lived, hoping to find stories that focused on LGBTQ lives. Later, on clandestine visits to Internet cafes, he came across gay romance stories, but they often focused on lives far from his own, with closeted white jocks living in snowy towns.
Ifeakandu wanted more. After college, he began writing short stories in which gay men struggled with loneliness but found lust and love in conservative, modern Nigeria.
“I’ve always taken my own desires, my fears, my joys seriously,” said Ifeakandu, 29. “I knew I wanted to write characters who are queer. That’s the only way I’ll show up on the page.”
His stories won the attention of readers and critics. In 2017, he was a finalist for the Kane Prize for African Writing, and last year, his first collection, God’s Children Are Little Broken Things, won the Dylan Thomas Award for Young Writers.
Ifeakandu’s work is part of an explosion of books by LGBTQ authors across Africa. Long obscured in literature and public life, their stories are taking center stage in boundary-pushing works across the continent — and earning rave reviews.
Major publishing houses in Europe and the United States are getting in on the action, but so are new publishers popping up across the continent with the goal of publishing African writers for a predominantly African audience.
Thabiso Mahlape, who founded Blackbird Books in South Africa, published Nakhane, a queer writer and artist, and “Exhale,” a queer anthology. “A lot more can be done,” he said.
The momentum of the gathering is coupled with a broader cultural moment. More Africans are openly discussing sex and expressing their sexual and gender identity. Small pride marches and film festivals celebrate queer experiences, and some African religious leaders are speaking out for LGBTQ people.
Young people, who make up the majority of the continent’s population, are turning to social media to discuss these books, and the big screen is bringing some of them to a wider readership: “Jambula Tree,” a short story by Uganda’s Monica Arac de. Nyeko about the romance between two girls, inspired by “Rafiki”, a film that was screened at Cannes.
Books — novels, non-fiction and graphic novels — are also being published as a way to counter aggressive homophobia and anti-gay legislation across Africa.
By writing them, the authors say they hope to engage readers and challenge widespread perceptions that homosexuality is of Western significance.
“These books are an invitation to change our mindset and start a dialogue,” said Kevin Mwachiro, who wrote “We’ve Been Here,” a nonfiction anthology for queer Kenyans age 50 and older.
“These books say, ‘I’m not a victim anymore,'” she said. “It’s gay people who say, ‘We don’t want to be tolerated. We want respect.”
The dynamic is new, but books focusing on queer stories are unprecedented in Africa.
Mohamed Choukry’s 1972 novel For Bread Alone caused outrage in Morocco for its depiction of same-sex intimacy and drug use. South African Booker Prize winner Damon Galgut’s spellbinding 2010 novel In A Strange Room followed an itinerant gay protagonist. And Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina made global headlines in 2014 when he published a “lost chapter” of his memoir, I’m Gay, Mom.
But the books being published now, literary experts and publishers say, are expanding Africa’s literary canon. These stories—family sagas, thrillers, science fiction, and more—dive into the complexities of being queer in Africa and the diaspora.
Their authors interrogate the silence surrounding queer culture in their own communities (“Love Offers No Safety”, edited by Jude Dibia and Olumide F Makanjuola) and the hope and pain of being transgender or genderqueer (“The Death of Vivek Oji” by Akwaeke Emezi”), intersex (“An Ordinary Wonder” by Buki Papillon) or lesbian (“La Bastarda” by Trifonia Melibea Obono)
They examine the intersection of politics, religion and sex (“You Have to Be Gay to Know God” by Siya Khumalo) and the vicissitudes of the secretive gay scene in a bustling metropolis (“No One Dies Yet” by Kobby Ben Ben. )
Books also explore the awkward and difficult process of communicating with conservative parents (“Speak No Evil” by Uzodinma Iweala) and imagine entire families whose members are on the LGBTQ continuum (“The Butterfly Jungle” by Diriye Osman). “More Than Words,” a 2023 picture book by Kenyan creative collective The Nest, examines the everyday lives of gay Africans through science fiction and fan fiction.
Writers often use works of fiction to imagine brave new worlds.
Nigerian-American author Chinelo Okparanta focuses on the coming-of-age story of a young woman during the civil war in Biafra, Nigeria in her 2015 novel Beneath the Trees of Udala. The book’s protagonist, Ijeoma, meets Ndidi after she ends the school. Together, they attend secret lesbian parties in a church, explore sexual pleasure and even talk about marriage.
Growing up, Okparanta said she read “So Long A Letter,” a 1979 epistolary novel by Senegalese author Mariama Bâ, in which a widow writes to her longtime boyfriend, and found herself imagining “a world where there might be more to relationship of women. ,” he said. “I must have been hungry for an African novel with a story like that.”
“Under the Udala Trees” ends on a hopeful note: Ijeoma’s mother accepts her, and she and Ndidi end up together after her marriage to a man falls apart. Ndidi even envisions a gay-safe Nigeria – a powerful statement given that the book was published a year after Nigeria’s former leader signed a punitive anti-gay law.
“There has to be room for people to have hope,” Okparanta said.
Nonfiction writers also share their experiences of love and dating, of navigating hostile workplaces and dealing with rejection from their relatives, and finding what they call their “chosen” families. Even as they prioritize confession and purification, some of the books also aim to provide a window into gay life on the continent.
“Sometimes people think we’re just freaks having sex with each other and that there’s no love, no desire, no sensuality,” said Chiké Frankie Edozien, whose memoir Lives of Great Men: Living and Loving as African Gay Man’. won a Lambda Award.
“I wanted truth, honesty and vulnerability,” she said.
Like Edozien, who lives in Ghana’s capital Accra with frequent stays in New York, some queer African writers have moved or established their careers in the West and are using their work to explore not only the communities they left behind them, but also those I live in.
Among them is Abdellah Taïa, the Paris-based writer of Moroccan descent who is often considered the first openly gay Arab writer and director. Taïa has written nine novels that explore what it means to be Muslim, queer, Arab and African. He has also made two films: “Salvation Army,” which is adapted from his novel of the same name, and “Never Stop Shouting,” which is directed at his gay nephew.
But Taïa’s work has also focused on France and Europe and the anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiments that have sprung up there.
“If you’re gay and you only think about gay liberation and that alone, it means you don’t understand anything about how the world works,” Taïa said. “I am not completely free because other people are not free.”
For many of these authors, publication has brought public recognition and even appreciation. But some have faced harassment or even death threats.
Edozien hopes the books will inspire younger generations to read a “dignified and balanced” portrayal of gay Africans.
“Books are really powerful, books are really intimate,” Edozien said. And having these queer-centric stories in “libraries for decades to come is great, because the needle has moved even when it doesn’t want to.”
Ifeakandu dreams of a future where queer-centric African stories are no longer the exception to the rule.
“I didn’t choose the country I was born in, just like I didn’t choose my sexuality,” Ifeakandu said. “Unfortunately, hopefully, we’ll get up.”
