Drawing a Portrait of L.G.B.T.Q. Life
African émigrés share their stories about searching for acceptance afar.
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Text and photographs by Mikael Owunna
I closed my eyes and looked down, as the priestess poured oils from a basin over me. Stinging my body from head to toe, she repeated the motion several times, taking my underwear afterward for destruction. The spiritual bath was intended to wash the “gay devil” out of me.
I was 18, a few months into my freshman year at Duke University in 2008, and we were back in Nigeria for Christmas. This was my third exorcism in just a few days’ time that holiday season.
There would be more exorcisms to come, and more years of pain. I struggled to understand my experience and my father’s condemnation of my sexuality as “unacceptable” and not of “our culture.”
What exactly did “our” culture constitute? And why did my identity mark me as someone in need of “purifying” to be let back in?
Six months after that first series of exorcisms, I found photography as a way to share my voice when I felt voiceless, to express my joy and pain when I had no other outlets.
I began making images for myself. If I didn’t see any images of L.G.B.T.Q. Africans, I could create them. If I had grown up without stories of gay and transgender Africans to rebut my father’s words, then I could fill that gap in the historical record with my work.
I began traveling the world and exploring the beauty of my community, a beauty that existed when I was a child but that I had never seen: A gay Nigerian mother and their daughter in England; gay Kenyan twins in Germany; transgender Burundian women in Canada; a gay Somali asylum seeker in Sweden; and many more. I photographed and interviewed over 50 L.G.B.T.Q. African immigrants in 10 countries across North America, the Caribbean and Europe.
As I completed the four-year project called “Limit(less),” the answers to my father came as well. I found that the people I had worked with were not different from many of our pre-colonial African ancestors. The Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba (a region in modern-day Angola) was a woman who ruled as a “king” of her people in the 17th century. She dressed in male clothing with a harem of young men, dressed as women, who were her wives.
Reflecting on Nzinga’s story and imagining it in a modern context, I saw a butch queen with a harem of African drag queens leading a 40-year war of resistance against European infringement.
My work has shown me that one of the most potent tools of colonization is the intentional destruction of histories and cultural traditions; of stories like Nzinga’s; of stories like my own and the dozens of L.G.B.T.Q. Africans whom I have worked with. Our histories and stories as same-gender-loving and gender-variant African peoples have always existed. I work to reclaim this space where we can be free — again.
Mikael Owunna is a Nigerian-Swedish photographer raised in Pittsburgh. His work imagines new realities for marginalized communities around the world.
Tobi and Gabi
“There have been lots of times when I have felt and been pushed away from my African and queer identity. I am not fully out to all my family members and the few times I have been back home since we moved to England, I almost always have to hide my identity as a queer, non-binary person — take out my piercings; deal with being misgendered or read as a woman; hide my shaved sides with unnecessarily long braids; wear clothes that are definitely not my style or choice; refrain from talking about my partners or just how intertwined in my person being queer is for a mixture of reasons: fear of rejection, worry about the kind of upheaval it would cause my nuclear family ... the list goes on.
“It makes me feel ‘othered’ within my own culture and in my own home but I have decided — for the sake of both my mental health and the kind of influences that I want to have on my child that living in my truth, whatever that may be, and doing so as honestly as I can is the only way that I’ll be able to survive and feel at peace within myself.” — Tobi
Jihan
“For me, Limit(less) is an important project for the next generations. That they can have some faces, some references and not waste time as we did because we were scared or we felt alone and/or ashamed. We grew up with only Caucasian and heteronormative representations, so that is hard sometimes to realize that we will never match this limited model.”
Subira and Wandia
“Before Western colonialism, norms about sexuality and gender in Africa looked very different to how they did after the violence of colonization. In many African countries, societies were built differently, nuclear families were not the normal constellation in which children were raised, gender was not binary, cisgenderism and heterosexuality were not the norm. But the white colonizer’s narrow ideas of what constituted ‘civilization’ were forced upon people on the continent, and cultural practices, religions and traditions were brutally and violently erased and replaced in part with homophobic, transphobic religious teachings.” — Wandia
Abdi
“My family, they don’t like me to be gay, and Somalia also, they don’t like it. That’s why I moved. My brother called the police and the religious groups and that’s why I had to run. In our law in Somalia, when you are gay, they can charge you with death.”
Netsie
“I spent such a large part of my childhood trying to “pass” as straight that by the time I came out, I had exhausted my ability to care how most people thought of me. I dress accordingly.”
Po
“Being African and queer was two outsider identities and for me it never seemed impossible to combine. In both spaces I was supposed to be fitting a norm that I wasn’t able to fit. Whether it’s the white one or the straight one.”
Brian
“My Africa is one that is intrinsically hate-free, welcoming, comprehensive and protective. It’s not about knowing if L.G.B.T.Q. is “un-African” or not, but it’s more about understanding that homophobia and transphobia are clearly not derived from African values, culture and traditions.”
Olave
“I do not have contact with my parents and the siblings I grew up with.”
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