NPR News

'Un-African'? Photos Challenge Notions Of LGBTQ Identity In The African Diaspora

By Isabella Gomez Sarmiento

Published November 2, 2019 at 8:03 AM EDT

Tobi, pictured with their daughter Gabrielle, is a nonbinary Yoruba Nigerian who lives in the United Kingdom. Tobi identifies as queer, bisexual and femme. They say they have to change the way they present when they visit Nigeria to avoid conflict with family members they're not fully out to. But Tobi finds peace in "living in their truth" as much as possible.

In 2005, when Mikael Chukwuma Owunna was 15 years old, he came out as gay on MySpace.

At the time, many of his Nigerian family members deemed his sexual orientation "un-African." Owunna is a Nigerian-Swedish engineer, photographer and Fulbright Scholar born and raised in Pittsburgh, where he's still based today. But when he went home to Nigeria for the holidays as a teenager, a priestess performed several forced exorcisms to "wash the 'gay devil' out," he recounts now in the preface for his new book, Limitless Africans.

Jihan is a French-born, Algerian trans man living in Belgium. He identifies as Two-Spirit because of the strong masculine and feminine energies within himself. He says he hopes <em>Limitless</em> provides younger generations with the representation they need so they don't feel alone in their identities. — Jihan is a French-born, Algerian trans man living in Belgium. He identifies as Two-Spirit because of the strong masculine and feminine energies within himself. He says he hopes *Limitless* provides younger generations with the representation they need so they don't feel alone in their identities.

For years, he says, he felt as if his gay and African identities were at odds with each other. And there were existing laws to enforce that idea. Same-sex conduct is currently illegal in more than 30 African countries and punishable by death in four. Just last week, police in Uganda arrested a group of 16 LGBTQ activists on suspicion of homosexuality. But Owunna points out that these laws aren't rooted in African traditions — they can actually be traced back to British colonial rule.

That's why he knew there had to be more to the experiences of LGBTQ people in Africa and the African diaspora besides invisibility or suffering. He began researching different sexual orientations that existed in precolonial Africa, and then set out to document what queerness looks like for African people today.

As a Somali growing up in Canada, Wiilo Greedi recounts the struggle to "reconcile" their queer and Somali identities. Although they grew up afraid of wearing clothes that would reveal their queerness, they now turn to style as a form of self-expression and creativity.

Starting in 2013, he spent six years traveling across Europe, North America and the Caribbean, photographing LGBTQ African immigrants, refugees and asylum-seekers. The result, Limitless Africans, is a narrative celebration of how young queer people from myriad African countries define themselves and their cultures.

"Through each portrait, I got a little bit of an answer on how each individual views their LGBTQ and African identities together, and through that I cumulatively found my own answer for myself on how I can be both of these identities at the same time," Owunna says.

Alicia is a trans Burundian woman who grew up in Senegal and now lives in Montreal. Although she's no longer in touch with her family, she likes to think her mother, who passed away when she was young, would have embraced her full identity. "I love how my life is an act of defiance toward ignorant people," she says.

Across the individual experiences explored in Limitless Africans, similar themes surface. In the text alongside their photographs, many of Owunna's subjects discuss feeling rejected by their African culture because of their gender or sexual identity. But in Western countries, they recount feeling excluded from mainstream, predominantly white queer spaces.

"Even when I was growing up, I didn't know any other LGBTQ Africans until I was 18 years old," Owunna says. "And so there is that kind of recurring isolation which can also lead to depression and anxiety because if you feel anxious about expressing yourself within any context, you can't live as your full self."

Juliet is Ugandan from the Acholi ethnic group. She grew up in Sweden and identifies as queer. She says she struggled to feel seen by the white LGBTQ community in Sweden, so she formed an organization called Black Queers Sweden. Her family accepts her sexuality, which Owunna says challenges the assumption that all African families are homophobic or would reject their children for being LGBTQ.

For many of the people Owunna interviewed, the solution has largely been to create spaces of community with other black queer folks who understand and uplift one another. Many told him they simply hadn't met or been exposed to other people who fit both identities when they were growing up.

History was also a big factor in a lot of the subjects' healing. Several people allude to their own research on indigenous African sexualities and the British empire's role in enforcing heteronormativity in African society. The historical theme and idea that queerness is not new to the continent is present in Owunna's creative decisions, too.

There are symbols from the ancient Nigerian writing system, Nsibidi, throughout the book, such as one translated to two women sleeping and embracing one another. Owunna also organized the photographs into four chapters in accordance with the four Igbo calendar days, depending on which day they were taken.

Olave is a self-described nonbinary trans femme from Burundi. Growing up in the Netherlands, she says she felt cast out by Dutch society until she stopped trying to fit in. She dove into her African, trans and queer identities instead. "As we develop and root ourselves in 'African-ness,' we should imagine it as spacious and inclusive," she says.

"Through how the book is formatted, I was trying to help debunk this idea that it's 'un-African' to be LGBTQ by putting LGBTQ Africans within an African cosmological and spiritual framework through the days of the week," he explains.

Limitless Africans' book launch was held at the Museum of African Diaspora in San Francisco in early October. During the event, Owunna says, a Nigerian audience member stood up in tears to thank him for what they described as his "historic and life-changing" work.

Brian is Rwandan but grew up in Tanzania, Niger, Kenya, Benin and the Central African Republic. He now lives in Montreal. He says he felt for a long time like his queer and African identities were "mutually exclusive" but felt a weight lifted off him when he decided to embrace both. "My Africa is one that is intrinsically hate-free, welcoming, comprehensive and protective," he says.

Terna is a Nigerian-Liberian American who identifies as black and bisexual. She lives in Boston and says she is still struggling with a lack of acceptance from some members of her family. "I think I learn to live with it differently at different moments in my life," she says. "I think there are moments where it causes me a great deal of distress and moments where it's more bearable."

He says the long road it took to create the book allowed him to heal from his own trauma while also acknowledging that the narratives surrounding blackness and queerness don't have to only focus on negativity. He credits Terna, one of the participants of the project, with helping shift his perspective.

"I realized that the power of the camera and the image was that we can imagine new worlds and realities where all of us, where people from all types of identities, can be free," he says. "Thinking about what image would have been important for me when I was 15 — and when I was going through all that isolation that I was feeling — I knew that it would be a positive, uplifting image that could give me a space to believe in myself and believe that I deserved to be here, that these identities could co-exist in my body and have a positive outcome long-term."

Naára is a queer lesbian whose family is from Angola. She was born in Lisbon, Portugal, and grew up in a religious home that didn't allow her to explore her sexuality until adulthood, when she left the church. "Normative heterosexuality and patriarchy are white concepts, and it wasn't until Africa was colonized that those two became the norm," she says.