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‘Was it supposed to feel like that?’: My experience donating my egg in Nigeria - Minority Africa
Ebimoboere Ibinabo Dan-Asisah
July 24, 2022
This piece is the second in a two part series on egg donation in Nigeria. To read the first part in this series, click here.
After my first visit to the hospital, I went back on Wednesday, November 25, 2020. This was after a back-and-forth with my agent. One of the things that annoyed me about the process was that they rarely gave more than 24-hour notice before you were expected to show up at the clinic . It was inconsiderate. Did the staff of the hospital seem to think that the donors didn’t have jobs? Or lives? You were told to show up the next day and if you didn’t your spot was given to someone else. Most of the hospital visits were on weekdays and some days we waited hours to be attended to. It was insane. I had to cancel when I was told to go to the hospital on November 24 because it was a busy day for me. I couldn’t possibly leave my job and spend all day at the hospital. They insisted I had to come the next day or lose my spot. Luckily I had very little to do that day so I went.
At the hospital, they saw me for 15 minutes, asked me about my cycle and gave me Levofem (the birth control I was taking before I decided to be a donor, which the head nurse had berated me for taking). They opened a file in my name with the forms I had previously filled, gave me a card with a number and for the rest of the process I was referred to as that number, never by my name. I was 2643. I was supposed to take the pills for 21 days and return to the hospital on the last day. I set a reminder and took the first pill in the hospital. Day one was gone. I had begun the countdown.
Taking the pills was easy. The pills were small and yellow, easy to dry swallow and my body had no immediate reactions. I knew the drill: take them once every day, preferably at the same time for best results. By December 15, I was done. I went back to the hospital. This time I met the doctor in charge. I had only dealt with nurses before and this was my second interview.
I waited a bit before I could see him. I was annoyed because the cubicle where we — the egg donors — stayed was hot and stuffy. Some of the girls had been interviewed the day before and didn’t know what to expect. Others were waiting for varying things like scans, their pills or a blood test. As we sat in the sweltering heat, we talked about everything but the egg donation process. We talked about how badly people reacted to the news that women were donating their eggs; some of the girls had to hide their participation from their parents or their partners while some had partners who actively encouraged them to do it for the money. For girls like us who were just starting the process, we had no idea exactly what the process entailed. Finally, one of them broached the topic. She was light-skinned and beautiful with a full figure. She announced to us that she had just started her period and intended to skip the pill phase and go straight to the next thing, which was injections.
“I’m going to use the money to get a passport. I know it’s going to finish after but I don’t care, I’ll get a passport and go abroad like my brother,” she said. “My mother doesn’t know I’m doing this sef. I’ll have to hide the drugs so she doesn’t find out; if she does she won’t like it and she’ll try to take the money.” She had an accent that made me put her state of origin as Anambra in southeastern Nigeria. When the girls teased her about it, she grinned and proudly announced her village. My assumption was correct.
But our moods dampened as soon as she got quiet. One of the girls voiced the thing that was on our minds.
“If you’re going to do anything in this life, you have to zero your mind say you go do am. Everything is hard so if you say you no wan do am because e hard na your own be that. This thing, we go carry mind do am.” The girl spoke with such conviction that others around her nodded in agreement.
Shortly after, I was called in to see the doctor. We had a brief conversation where he covered what I had written in my form. He asked for my name and age and then other questions to do with my degree, last period, the regularity of my cycle, if I had ever donated my eggs before and my relationship status. He then sent me to the office to get my injections. The nurse gave me a vial of Buserelin injection. When I asked what it did, she said it stopped my body from producing eggs to get my ovaries ready for stimulation. She showed me how to inject it. I was given those smaller insulin needles and told to measure 50 ML of Buserelin . After I did, she told me to inject myself in my lower abdomen. Anywhere on the lower abdomen was fine but I had to avoid my navel. My hands shook as I held the needle. I didn’t have a phobia for needles but I don’t find the experience of getting injected or having blood drawn pleasant either. I gritted my teeth, slanted the needle and tried to inject myself.
“No! Never slant the needle, stick it in straight,” she cautioned. I nodded and injected myself with the needle straight. I felt the needle go in and I felt the drug sliding in after I pushed on the stopper of the syringe. I braved  the pain. I sighed in relief after I was done. I cleaned the injection site and threw away the used needle. In the following days, the first thing I did after I woke up was take my injection. I didn’t want to  take it lightly or else I might chicken out. After  the first five doses, I went back to the hospital for a refill; I took the dosages from December 15 to December 24. My breasts became tender and sensitive and I began  to feel tired. My lower abdomen was sore but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t power through. On December 24, I went back to the clinic. That day,  I got there late because as usual, they didn’t inform me on time that I would be needed on a public holiday.
I was given another round of Buserelin injections with Follitrope added to the dosage. Follitrope had two vials – one was fluid while the other was powder. I was told by a different nurse to mix the two every day into one injection. That means I was injecting myself with two separate drugs per day. My body started feeling the effects. My breasts were swollen and sore to the point that I could not wear a bra. I was lethargic, light-headed and hungry all the time. I had moments of nausea. One of the girls had said the symptoms resembled the early stages of pregnancy. That same day, I did my first scan to check how the egg production was going. It was my first ever trans-vaginal scan and it was horrible.
I lay on the hospital bed while a nurse and a female doctor yelled instructions at me. The doctor was not patient. She slid the ultrasound wand at the tip of a gold circle condom and slowly rolled the condom onto this long penile shaped thing. It was cold, long and she manipulated it against my cervix and pressed it there. I made a sound before I could help it but she merely dismissed my discomfort with a sneer and shoved the instrument more against my cervix. My legs instinctively close when I think about that incident.  I took more injections- enough for another week and went home. After about a week of taking foliotrope, I had another scan to check how my body was responding to the hormones. The doctor counted about 12 or more eggs and was ecstatic they were big ones.
I celebrated the holiday by injecting myself twice a day. The countless hormones in my system made me feel miserable and I could pinpoint exactly where my ovaries were just by how sensitive they felt. I went back on January 2, after my Follitrope and Buserelin had finished and did a final scan. Afterwards, I was ready for the final stage before extraction.
I was given a final medication of a human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) injection on January 2 with explicit instructions to keep the drug refrigerated and taken at exactly 10:30 pm. As the nurse gave me and the other girls instructions, a woman in the next room started weeping.
“I can’t believe it.” She screamed those words over and over like a mantra while the other women murmured, “Madam it’s okay.”
She sounded so heartbroken I thought her treatment failed and she hadn’t conceived or something equally devastating. I felt it as if her wails were echoing somewhere in my chest. I had always wondered whether or not I wanted children but it hit me at that moment. I had never considered the choice of motherhood being anything but my own. I had never been told I might not have a choice in the matter, that my body might be incapable of it or that I might want it and never have it. What did that feel like? Especially for a lot of women who hinged their sense of self on the ability to procreate? Until that point, the other girls and I had been separated from the women who wanted to use the eggs; they had seemed like rich faceless people whom we knew would someday carry offspring from our eggs. But what were their struggles? What led them to the clinic? How long had they searched for children? How heartbreaking would it  be if your last hope was dashed after years of searching? All the answers were in that woman’s cries.
The woman made her way into the room we were in, still crying. She hugged the nurse and I realized the nurses behind her were smiling. I had been mistaken. She wasn’t crying in sadness or pain but from the sheer relief that she was finally pregnant. The nurses ushered us out to our hot cubicle to wait while they attended and fussed over her. It was satisfying to watch. Perhaps I can make somebody’s lifelong dream come true, I thought to myself.
I got home and set an alarm for 10:30 pm. At the appropriate time, I took the hCG injection but made an error. The drug had two vials. One of the vials was cone-shaped and contained  liquid. I had failed to get out all the liquid into the syringe because my room was dark. I entered a state of mild panic. Was my error going to affect the outcome? I was scheduled to go to the hospital on the evening of the following day. I packed my bags and went to sleep.
When I awoke the next day, I was overcome with nervousness. I didn’t know how exactly my eggs were going to be extracted, only that I’d be given anesthesia during the procedure. I knew they were going to go through my cervix and it was going to take anywhere from 15 minutes to one hour. As evening approached, I wondered what could go wrong. My imagination gave me the answers in different gruesome versions. There were stories of women’s wombs “bringing out water”, immense pain after the procedure and inability to give birth afterwards. What if something went horribly wrong in the procedure? It didn’t help that I was going through the extraction as the second for the scheduled three happening the next day.
By 9pm, I was at the hospital, already in bed and distracting myself with some work on my laptop. The first girl to go in before me the next day was nervous, she was fidgety, telling me all about the ways it could go wrong. Her fear was infectious. She eventually settled down. They lay around me in their beds as it got later. Afterwards, I curled up on the crinkly mattress and tried to sleep but I couldn’t. The night was cold and I was thirsty. We had been told not to take any food or drinks after 10 pm. A nurse came into the ward and told us she would give us drugs so we stayed awake, waiting. She didn’t come back and eventually, I fell into a dreamless slumber by 1 am.
Before I fell asleep, I had set my alarm for 5:30 am because we were told to shower and be ready before 6 am. I woke up shortly before my alarm rang. My body was tired but my mind was racing a mile a minute. I showered with the cold water provided and woke up my roommates who had failed to set alarms to do the same. By 6:30 am, the nurse from the previous night visited us. She brought cannulas to insert in our arms for the anesthesia and other drugs we might need. I had seen cannulas before but I had never needed to be put on a drip so I didn’t know what to expect except more pain. I watched the first girl – there were only three of us in the room – flinch as the needle was inserted into her arm. Soon it was my turn. I went  and sat next to the nurse.
“Hold out your left hand,” she ordered. I did. She slapped my hand a few times, inserted the needle and hissed – something was wrong. She had missed the vein. She ripped out the needle and patted my hand with a cotton ball soaked with methylated spirit. I drew a sharp breath at the pain I felt. She slapped my left hand some more, gave up and moved to my right hand. This time the needle slid home into a vein but the pain was worse. Immediately, my arm grew heavy, as if I was carrying a small bucket of  water. My elbow hurt too.
“Was it supposed to feel like that?” I asked, but she didn’t deign to answer. Instead, she fitted the third girl, gave us post-procedure drugs and told us how to take the pills without actually telling us what they did. I deduced from a quick Google search that it was a combination of some antibiotics for a possible yeast infection; they were after all going in through the vagina and vaginas are primadonnas when it came to reacting to foreign bodies. Amongst the drugs were Panadol tablets and white vitamin C tablets.  The nurse told us to wait for the extraction. Nobody spoke; instead, we went back to sleep.
We were woken up when one of the nurses came and yelled, “10:00 pm! Go and use the restroom and prepare yourself.” She turned and left.
10:00 pm was a girl named Goodness (not her real name) who lived with her boyfriend. She had brought Golden Morn as an after-surgery meal. She caught my gaze and I saw fear and worry in her eyes.
“You’ll be fine,” I said. “They said the procedure doesn’t take very long so you won’t waste any time.” She nodded and went to pee. While the air conditioner hummed, I stared at the walls that were painted a color that couldn’t decide if it wanted to be yellow, brown or cream. After the nurses  came to escort Goodness out, the two of us in the room couldn’t go back to sleep. We could only stare at each other or the TV on the wall showing some grainy old action flick.
When Goodness returned, she was in a wheelchair and passed out. The nurses heaved her up and set her in her bed. I saw a pad on the  seat of the wheelchair stained with brown blood. Goodness was spotting. Her hospital gown had ridden up her thighs and the nurses made feeble  attempts to cover her up.
“This one is very stubborn,” one of the nurses said. “She gave us trouble. Can you imagine she ran away and started screaming?” The nurses hissed. I felt sorry for Goodness. She was just scared; wasn’t it obvious?
“10:30 pm, go and ease yourself and get ready,” one of the nurses said. I answered to the moniker I was given the day before and did as I was ordered.
By now, the back of my right hand was swollen and I couldn’t move my elbows or  fold my fingers. The needle hurt. I sat on my bed, texted my partner that I was about to go in, added a joking but not joking “if I die, I love you” and took a deep breath.
I’m going to be fine. I repeated the mantra until I walked into the theatre. It was the male doctor who did my second scan that was going to do the extraction. He encouraged me with a smile as I scooted up onto the gynecologist chair. I wondered why the equipment of gynecologists had to look like medieval devices of torture. As I lay back, I put my feet in the stirrups and the doctor did a scan to make sure the eggs were where they were supposed to be. He stood up and gave me an injection through my cannula. I tasted it in the back of my throat.
“This is going to hurt,” he warned as he approached me with another injection. As he pushed the injection into me, it produced a sensation that burned through my hand and up to my shoulders. Later, the pain turned into lethargy and I hung between wakefulness and sleep. In a drug-induced haze, I wondered if this was the twilight zone. I heard conversations floating over my head. Somebody was saying something about her marriage and about how her husband treated her well. Then the ceiling began to move. It grew and grew until it pressed down against my chest. Then it moved up again. I saw free-floating shapes in the air, cubes that grew in sizes from the ceiling where the tiniest cube lay to the floor where the biggest one stood in descending order. The cubes moved like a tesseract would. My sister had always been obsessed with the fourth dimension and it felt like I was peering into it. I stared at those fascinating shapes until I felt the echo of a sharp pain breaching what I assumed was my cervix. Then everything went black.
I woke up at about 1 pm, still hazy from the drugs and feeling nauseous. My arm had swollen some more but I didn’t  feel pain. I texted my partner to let him know I was done with the extraction and that I was fine. Then I fell asleep. I woke up again by 3 pm. This time, I was lucid. My vagina felt sore but it was nothing compared to the pain in my right arm. I couldn’t even lift it without a lot of effort. The girls around me were up, the nurses were there. I checked my bed; I wasn’t bleeding or spotting. My vagina felt fine and I was hungry. But I felt a little woozy as I struggled to sit up, using my left arm for support. Another nurse came in to take our account numbers and I sleepily reeled off mine.
Goodness was mixing Golden Morn. She mixed up half and passed the remainder to me because I had forgotten to pack food myself. I gladly took it and mixed it up. The first bite was torture. It tasted like sawdust and immediately I felt my gag reflex awaken. I felt I was going to throw up if I took another bite.
“That’s the anesthesia. It’ll go away once the drugs leave your system,” one of the nurses said.
I nodded and ate  another spoon of food. The nausea receded. I finished my meal and felt a bit  energized. I texted my partner that I was going to try to get a cab. The girls around me had finished their meals when the nurses came in again.
“If you’re going to sleep in this hospital, you have to move to the other building so people can use this one,” one of the nurses said. “You can’t stay here, others will soon come. If your stomach starts swelling, come back to the hospital [and] let us check you. Only if it starts swelling and it is strong oh. Some of you will come and waste our time when there’s nothing wrong with you.”
I didn’t feel strong enough to go back home jumping buses but I didn’t want to stay at the hospital. So I ordered an Uber ride and went downstairs to get my cannula removed with Goodness. She wanted to leave too so I offered her a ride to the nearest bus stop she could use. As the nurse ripped out my cannula, I screamed. The pain lessened a bit but it traveled from my right hand to my right elbow to my right butt cheek.
I got home in the evening, tired, sore and still groggy from the drugs. I managed to shower, and then I crawled into bed and fell asleep. The next day the pain lessened but my arm was still useless. I lay in bed and took stock of my body. Besides the pain in my arm, the soreness in my vagina had disappeared  but I felt wetness there; that meant I was either spotting or had contracted a yeast infection. I checked and confirmed it was the latter. I sighed, took my antibiotics and other meds and remembered the nurses insisted we stayed hydrated. When I decided to have a meal, there was a tightness in my belly, as if my stomach was straining against muscle. I was uncomfortable and my stomach was bloated. It took a few days of staying hydrated and eating smaller meals before the bloating went away and I became good as new.
I got paid on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, two days after the procedure. Was it worth it money-wise? I don’t think so. I think many people consider  it an easy way to make money but it isn’t. Your body is put through a rollercoaster with barely any  thought and there is no adequate way to prepare yourself because people react differently to the drugs. But to give women a chance at motherhood, especially women who can’t have children, is worth it. I think of my mother and how she was made to feel inadequate because she didn’t  give birth to boys. How much worse would it have been if she’d been unable to have children at all?
I also think I was one of the lucky ones because I went through the process and turned out fine. Many  women are not as lucky as I am and end up with complications. A girl told me her stomach had bloated and she had to return  to the clinic in Ikoyi  where she did the extraction. She said she spent more than she’d earned treating herself. But there she was with us, donating again. It was a scary reality that I had to grapple with.
Since I went through the procedure, I have told only about four other people minus my partner. The last man I told, my boss, stared at me in shock. “But do you know what eggs are? Those are your children!” he said  and I shrugged.
I think Nigerians attach parenthood to only biology; if you didn’t give birth to children, they aren’t your children. If they didn’t come from your eggs or sperm, they aren’t your real children. No matter how much you love them. It’s why women will only whisper to their friends who are passing through similar things about the possibility of egg donation or in vitro fertilization (IVF). Having children through  other ways than the “normal” way is taboo, even to the most educated individuals.
It takes more than eggs and sperm to make a child, just the same way it takes more than shared genes to make a parent. If Nigerians accept that, perhaps egg donation would be less of a shameful secret for women or a get-rich-quick  scheme for both the hospitals and the donors.
I believe egg donation is a gift and an opportunity for those who truly need it.
Edited by PK Cross, Uzoma Ihejirika, and Caleb Okereke.
Features a roundup of fresh MA reports, announcements, events/workshop listings, and minority content curated from across the web.
Ebimoboere Ibinabo Dan-Asisah is a Nigerian freelance writer and storyteller based in Lagos, Nigeria. She is a graduate of Law and spends her time ghostwriting biographies and other kinds of stories with a clear focus on the difficulties and complexities of everyday living. She
has been telling these stories for eight years.

author: Ebimoboere Ibinabo Dan-Asisah


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“We all deserve love”: Queer Nigerians on celebrating Valentine’s day - Minority Africa
Shade Mary-Ann Olaoye
February 14, 2023
Valentine’s Day is the global day of love, on which lovers celebrate each other over food and flamboyant gift-giving. However, it has also had strong heteronormative undertones — from brands whose marketing strategies are tailored towards cis-gendered people and romantic opposite-sex partners to ‘his or hers’ gift packages. The interests of queer partners are, by default, excluded from this day.
But Chisom and his current boyfriend will be celebrating their first valentine this year, daring to recognize their love in Nigeria, a country that criminalises it.
“We are both people who aren’t in the closet so from calling me ‘baby’ while we are outside, hugging and holding me, [to] kissing me on the cheeks, the public display of affection is always great,” says Chisom, adding that “The celebration of love is important to queer people because we all deserve love. At the end of the day, we fall in love just like every other person.”
Queer love is not only erased from the itinerary of Valentine’s Day vendors, but it is also not recognized by the Nigerian state and the majority of the people who live in the country. With the Same-Sex Marriage [Prohibition] Act 2013 [SSMPA], cultural biases, religious teachings and beliefs, LGBTQIA+ persons living in the country have had to develop connections and express their love and desire in secrecy.
Laws like the SSMPA not only criminalize same-sex marriage but also condemn the public display of affection between people of the same gender; this makes it acceptable, in the eyes of heterosexual Nigerians, for queer persons to live in fear as they constantly face harassment, violation and discrimination.
Over the years, queer Nigerians have experienced various degrees of hostility from the general public, which intensified after the passing of the SSMPA, making state and non-state actors executioners of justice. Due to this situation, there is only so much queer couples can do in public and little they can get away with.
Earlier in their relationship, Ahunna* and her girlfriend often met up in a hotel as both of them still lived with their parents at that time. While checking out one morning, the receptionist hinted at the fact that she was aware of the nature of their relationship.
“You know when somebody is giving you that knowing look of I know where you are coming from and I know what you have been doing, that’s when I figured that I can’t be here anymore, so we had to keep switching hotels,” Ahunna tells Minority Africa.
For people like Ahunna whose partner is as feminine-presenting as herself, the stares and questions are a bit reduced, unlike situations where it is two gay men or where a partner is masculine-presenting and another is feminine-presenting, which could raise a lot of speculations concerning their sexuality.
“Because my partner and I are both feminine, this isn’t really hard but it is still a challenge because there is still only so much we can get away with in public,” says Ahunna. “In the club when it’s dark and everyone is tipsy, we get away with a lot of things [but] in a restaurant or a park, [we] can’t.”
But one of the many joys of Valentine’s Day is being able to show off your partner and have unhinged moments of affection. “It’s hard, you know, to be able to not express love for your partner, especially during [Valentine’s Day] when everybody is loved up,” Ahunna shares. This type of feeling is not out of place for queer couples, whether it is the day of celebrating love or not. However, Ahunna and her partner still find ways to show their love. In their first year together, they exchanged gifts on Valentine’s Day and proceeded to meet at a hotel because public meetings were almost impossible. However, this year, she doesn’t know what her partner has planned, even though she has been asked to clear her schedule.
As the mood for the season edges closer, social media is awash with gift packages and vendors getting ready for the day. For Chisom, the fact that most of the gift items are catered to heterosexual couples doesn’t make celebrating Valentine’s Day easier, but he tries not to think about it.
“I mean, I was looking at gift ideas and boxes and they were all heterosexual and honestly kind of meaningless because they are often generic and are almost always about gifts that do not make sense to me,” he says. “They are always something –  from money to flowers to other things that make you realise that these gift boxes are about the grand gestures with no thought behind them.”
Ahunna, who is in the third year of her relationship, shares this sentiment and doesn’t rely on packages from vendors. “I don’t take cognizance of ‘his and hers’ boxes because I am a different type of gifter; I like to curate intentional gifts,” she says. “There is no vendor that knows my partner more than me, so I don’t really concern myself with all those vendors.”
As the culture of homophobia still prevails within the country, queer lovers push through, determined to let love win no matter what. “Every day, my boyfriend expresses his love in the open regardless of what other people think because, for him, people will be fine,” Chisom says. “At the end of the day, we are in love and it is our love that matters. And while I used to have anxiety about that because of society, I also do the same and that’s not going to take a back seat anytime.”
Although gay couples in Nigeria cannot express their love as publicly as heterosexual couples can (and do), Ahunna says it doesn’t stifle her expression of love.“Valentine’s Day is not owned by heterosexual couples,” she says. “Yes, they dominate a lot of spaces, right? But it doesn’t mean that they own the day. Valentine’s day is lovers’ day and if your lover is another woman like you or another man like you, please go ahead and celebrate with them.”
Edited by Uzoma Ihejirika.
Features a roundup of fresh MA reports, announcements, events/workshop listings, and minority content curated from across the web.
Shade Mary-Ann Olaoye is a gender and queer rights reporter whose work has appeared in Sahelien, AZ magazine, The Daily Dot, Media Diversity Institute and elsewhere.

source: news-minorityafrica

created: February 14, 2023

license: Creative Commons - Attribution - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

author: Shade Mary-Ann Olaoye


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‘We are not giving up’: The undocumented migrants challenging South Africa’s vaccination policy - Minority Africa
Mkhululi Chimoio
October 2, 2021
Image description: In this illustration, a syringe trying to poke into the arm of a figure dressed in red is curved. The image background has a barbed-wire fence.
While Kevin Mabovu was trying to register for his vaccination in South Africa, the online form asked for an identity document, which the 37-year-old Mabovu who migrated to South Africa in 2010 from Tanzania as an economic refugee did not have.
Mabovu resolved to go to a vaccination center despite his inability to complete the form but was turned away by officials who cited his undocumented status.
“The officials told me that their machines do not allow for undocumented people to be vaccinated, as they [have to] keep identity records of whoever gets the vaccination,” he tells Minority Africa. “This bothered me a lot as I fear being excluded and exposed to Covid-19 [because] I have lost some of my family members to it.”
Refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, and undocumented people are estimated to make up around 5 million of the people living in South Africa and Mabovu is one of many undocumented migrants who are struggling to get vaccinated in the country, leaving them susceptible to COVID-19.
Spurred by the rejection, Mabovu, a street mechanic in Johannesburg is now lobbying fellow undocumented migrants to approach both the Department of Home Affairs and the Department of Health to negotiate inclusion in the ongoing vaccination campaign.
“I [think] the best way to go forward is to engage the government,” Mabovu says. “With dialogue, anything is possible.”
South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa has previously stated that everyone, including undocumented migrants, is eligible for vaccination, yet messages sent to those who register for the vaccine indicate that a vaccine registration code and an ID or passport is required.
According to the country’s Department of Health, South Africa has fully vaccinated 13.2% of its population with nearly eight million people inoculated and over 15 million doses administered
While access to health and treatment remains a right under South Africa’s Bill of Rights, enshrined in Chapter 2 of the country’s constitution, the National Health Department said it was still awaiting directives from the cabinet, an indication that President Ramaphosa’s proclamations are yet to be followed by political commitment.
“From the public health perspective, it is ideal to vaccinate all those who reside in South Africa,” said Popo Maja, a spokesperson for the Department of Health, in an emailed response to Minority Africa. “As government, we need to come up with means and methods of registering these undocumented immigrants as they cannot be vaccinated without some form of identity.”
But Mabovu says they do have some form of identity. So far, he has been able to convince 20 people to join the lobbying group and he’s encouraging members to present identity documents from their countries of origin, whether outdated or not, which he says will be used in dialogue with the government.
“This will help the [South African] government to know who we are,” he says. “We cannot seek help without assisting the government as well, so with our national IDs from our countries of origin we can negotiate further.”
The group intends to approach the government when its membership reaches at least 100 people.
Lesotho’s Sindiso Khumalo, a vegetable distributor, and activist who is also undocumented is one of the members that recently joined the social lobby group.
“We are a growing group with our only focus being vaccinated,” he says. “We know it is not easy for the government to deal with undocumented people but we are willing to meet the government in the middle.”
The group currently meets online using WhatsApp and sometimes in person in parks around Johannesburg.
“We provide all the resources we use ourselves, from data for online meetings, credits to make phone calls, and to transportation costs for mobilization,” Khumalo says.
Vaccination programs that include migrants are necessary because migrants live with locals in the community, says Lily Sanya, Chief of Mission for the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in South Africa.
“Everybody should be included when it comes to vaccination,” she says. “Leaving a section of this community out of the programme would only be a drawback to the otherwise good work being done.”
Nigerian migrant, Nnamdi Okechukwu*, who is also undocumented, shares Sanya’s perspective and warns of the dire consequences of excluding immigrants from receiving the Covid-19 vaccine – whether they are documented or undocumented.
“[Government] must know that we do not only cohabit with them in the same community but also shop at same stores, our children play and go to schools with the children of these documented and undocumented immigrants,” says the 57-year-old graphic gesigner who migrated to South Africa to find work two decades ago.
In the meantime, Mabovu and his group continue to have their meetings and prepare to lobby yet the process of finding migrants to join them is not hitch-free.
“Some people see me as a crazy person when I try to convince them to join us in our quest to be considered by the government,” Khumalo says. “They have lost hope and they think that engaging the government from our status won’t yield any result but we are not giving up.”
For Mabovu, the group, in general, is about rebelling against the segregation migrants face, even outside of vaccination and health services.
“It is sad that we are having people losing their lives because they are deemed to be undocumented migrants yet the African Union sells an idea that we are one Africa,” he says. “It is a serious disgrace that shows our continent still lives in colonialism and division.”
* indicates names have been changed to protect identity.
Features a roundup of fresh MA reports, announcements, events/workshop listings, and minority content curated from across the web.
Mkhululi Chimoio is a Zimbabwean-born investigative journalist residing in South Africa. He is a full member of the Southern Africa Freelancers Association (SAFREA) and holds a qualification in Communication Science, another qualification in Journalism and Media studies, as well as in Forensic investigations.

created: October 2, 2021

author: Mkhululi Chimoio


text:
‘[We] are ready,’ Botswana decriminalizes gay sex - Minority Africa
minorityafrica.co
December 3, 2021
Botswana’s Court of Appeal has upheld a June 2019 ruling that decriminalized gay sex, where it was previously punishable by up to seven years in prison. But what does this mean to LGBTQ+ people in the country?
Features a roundup of fresh MA reports, announcements, events/workshop listings, and minority content curated from across the web.
Editorial.

created: December 3, 2021


text:
“We don’t have a body to bury.” Families of Nigerians missing in police custody want closure - Minority Africa
Ope Adetayo
October 18, 2020
Lagos, Nigeria (Minority Africa) — Andrew Mbang was just about to turn 20 when the police arrested him in 2007 at an apartment, which he rented with two of his friends, Kingsley and Obele in Port Harcourt, Nigeria.
The reason for the arrest is unknown but men from the Nigeria Police Force stormed the apartment while the trio watched a football game and arrested them.
“We got to know of his arrest the second day, some eyewitnesses who saw them taken by the police informed us,’’ Irene Andrew Mbang, his sister who adopted his name, says.
Andrew Mbang had the ambition of working in the oil industry, a multi-billion dollar industry that majorly fuels the  Nigerian economy.
Before his arrest, he had started working towards this goal by studying welding and fabrication at Government Technical College in Abak, Akwa Ibom State, and then working as an apprentice while waiting for university admission.
The arrest not only scuttled that dream, but it also left ongoing grief for his family, especially his mother and two siblings who have not seen him since he was taken 13 years ago.
They do not have any idea if he is alive, dead, or in prison.
Like Andrew Mbang, Chijioke Iloanya, 20, was at a child dedication ceremony in Ajali, Anambra State in 2012 when the police arrested him in the company of his friends and other attendees.
Believing it was a minor incident, his mother went to the police station the next day to bail him out.
She was told the arrested persons, including her son, had been transferred to a police unit, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) station in Awkuzu, a place she had heard horror stories about.
When she got to the SARS station with her husband, the Officer Commanding (OC) at the time, James Nwafor denied having Chijioke Iloanya or his friends.
“When my parents got to Awkuzu SARS, they were told my brother was not there,” Obianuju Iloanya, his sister, tells Minority Africa.
As they left the station though, Obianuju’s mother coincidentally saw a group of boys being led out and identified her son to be one of them.
“[Nwafor] ordered that they be thrown out of the station,’’ Obianuju says. “The next day, they went back and he told them the boys had been killed and there is nothing that can be done about it. That was where our challenges started.”
Similarly, shortly after Andrew Mbang’s arrest, Irene says her mother went to Old GRA police station in Port Harcourt where the boys were being held.
“She saw them, the three of them but she was asked to come back the next day because the officer in charge, Superintendent Bassey, was not around that day,” she says.
Superintendent Bassey was understood by Irene and her family to be the highest commanding officer on the case.
“We don’t know his full name, my mother got his first name on his badge,’’ Irene says. “She left the station and went back the next day and they said they had been transferred to the state’s Criminal Investigation Department.”
But the CID said the boys were not there. When her mother returned to the police station, the police who denied ever arresting the boys chased her, Irene says.
Earlier in October, a video of a man, Joshua Ambrose allegedly thrown out of his vehicle by security operatives in Ughelli, Delta State went viral. The officers who are part of Operation Delta Safe (a special unit of Nigeria Army) left an injured Ambrose on the street and vacated the scene in his car.
He survived the incident but the video sparked anger across the country with the ignition of the hashtag #EndSARS, which had been used at different times in the past few years to protest police brutality, harassment, extortion, and killings.
Now, in many parts of the country, thousands of young Nigerians have poured into the streets to demand police reforms and the unconditional disbandment of SARS. At least 15 people have died from excessive force by the police at these protests and several others have been injured.
Two killed as Governor Oyetola’s convoy drives into #EndSARS crowd in Osogbo https://t.co/TiF4DMzDEl
— Peoples Gazette (@GazetteNGR) October 17, 2020
Suspected hoodlums on Friday swooped on #EndSARS/SWAT protesters in Benin, killing two protesters. Another protester was killed in Akure when a car rammed into protesters also on Friday. https://t.co/8a6Hh7RkeF @PoliceNG @NGRSenate
— The Nation Nigeria (@TheNationNews) October 17, 2020
Irene, who was in secondary school when her brother was arrested, is now 27 and has been protesting in Ibadan where she now stays, carrying placards with the names of the three boys and asking for answers even 13 years after.
“I want to get justice for my brothers and his two friends. Those boys were too young,” she says, her voice stifled by tears. “Kingsley’s mother died in the process, she had lost a son before Kingsley’s disappearance. She could not cope with missing two sons.”
Irene also says her mother went into a coma and was in shock. “Obele’s sister did not marry because the arrest took place a few weeks before her wedding and she was hoping her brother would show up one day and attend.”
SARS was created in 1992 to stem the tide of armed robbery during a period in which the Nigerian Army and the Police Force were in dispute over the extrajudicial killing of an army officer at a traffic stop.
The unit was meant to be intelligence-driven and to carry out covert operations on cases like armed robbery. However, there is a wide berth between their institutional responsibilities and what Nigerians experience in the hands of officers of the unit.
Due to the unit’s original nature to operate covertly, its officers do not wear a uniform and move about in unmarked vehicles.
Many missing persons have been linked to SARS, popular for its use of torture and extrajudicial killing of detainees.
In 2016, Amnesty International published a report on how former detainees have been subjected to “horrific torture methods, including hanging, starvation, beatings, shootings, and mock executions in the hands of corrupt officers from the feared Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS)’’.
In Chijioke Iloanya’s case, all avenues Obianuju and her family took to get justice and answers hit a brick wall, including church visitations and various petitions to the Inspector of Police and the National Human Rights Commission.
“I can’t believe I am speaking of him in the past tense… what if he is alive somewhere?’’ she says.
Obianuju has joined End SARS protests in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, ensuring her voice and the questions about her brother are heard despite the brute force the state continues to respond with.
“On Friday, we were tear-gassed and beaten. On Saturday, we were tear-gassed and shot at. On Sunday, we were tear-gassed and shot with water cannons,’’ she tells Minority Africa. “If they catch you, you will be beaten mercilessly… I was beaten mercilessly.’’
After protests broke out, Nigeria’s Inspector General of Police, Mohammed Adamu announced the dissolution of SARS. However, the announcement has done little to assuage the anger of protesters who remain unconvinced that it signifies true change.
Four times in four years, different measures of reforms have been announced with no significant change in the conduct and personnel of the unit.
In 2018, the acting president, Yemi Osinbajo announced reforms and constituted a seven-man committee within the National Human Rights Commission to investigate abuse by SARS.
On June 3,  2019, the committee submitted its 2,084-page report to President Buhari. To date, the report is yet to be implemented and people like Chijioke Iloanya and Andrew Mbang are still missing.
I want justice, that is why I keep going out here, keep protesting and shouting my voice out,’’ Obianuju says, her voice hoarse from hours of screaming. “We don’t even have a body to bury… it is painful living that kind of horrible life, it is unfair.”
For her, scrapping the unit is not progress if there’s no justice.
More recently, Nigerians took to social media to demand for the arrest of Nwafor, the OC in Chijioke Iloanya’s case who was accused of committing various extrajudicial killings of SARS detainees during his time at the Anambra State SARS office.
Nwafor went on to become the senior special assistant on security to the Governor of Anambra State, Willie Obiano who on Thursday, October 15, while addressing a crowd of protesters announced that he had sacked Nwafor.
While this might appear to be short-term succor, what is most important for Obianuju is an answer to what happened to her brother. “What I want is justice, full justice. If he is alive, let him tell us what happened… if he is dead, let him give us an answer to what happened,’’ she says.
Between 2009 and 2010, Irene’s family heard from Superintendent Bassey, the officer who had been in charge of Andrew Mbang’s case, again. It started one day when her mother received a text from him.
The text read, “Some people paid me money to arrest your son. Your son is alive. Your tears are disturbing me.”
By this time, the family had moved to Akwa Ibom State to, according to Irene, escape their trauma in Port Harcourt so when they received the text, they were not able to directly follow up on the case.
“My mother called him and told him she had forgiven him but he should let her know where her son was but he started shouting at her,” Irene tells Minority Africa.
“We also heard [Superintendent Bassey] had been transferred to Akwa Ibom but all efforts [to reach him] were futile because he did not want to speak with us.”
For Irene and her mother, each day is an opportunity to hope for Andrew Mbang’s return.
“We have not mourned… people who lost their loved ones are better, because they have a grave… something physical to hold on to and remember,” she says. “But us, we keep looking every year, no rest, it is like a horror movie, something that haunts you every time.”
“You keep thinking… How did they die? Are they dead? Were they washed down the drain? Were they punished? Were they dropped in an ocean? Did they tie them to a rope? What really happened?”
Features a roundup of fresh MA reports, announcements, events/workshop listings, and minority content curated from across the web.
Ope Adetayo is an editorial intern at Minority Africa. He is a writing fellow at African Liberty. His work has appeared in Aljazeera, Humangle, Africaisacountry, The Stockholm Review of Literature, The Guardian NG, and elsewhere.

created: October 18, 2020

author: Ope Adetayo


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“We look out for one another”: Queer, Hausa, and Woman in Nigeria - Minority Africa
Rabiat Madaki
July 28, 2023
TW: This article contains descriptions of suicide.
Maryam remembers watching her girlfriend overdose.
It was 2018, and 24-year-old Maryam and her girlfriend of two years, Safiya, had agreed to come out to their Hausa families. The couple had met in Zamfara State when they were both students at Federal University, Gusau. After school, they stayed back in the city and eventually moved in together.
Coming out didn’t go well for either of them but Safiya took a harder hit. Her family publicly disowned her and informed her homophobic employer, who terminated her contract. In the blink of an eye, she lost both her job and her family. This triggered a depression that led her down a path of alcohol and drugs until Safiya overdosed one day, causing convulsions and prompting Maryam to take her to the hospital.
She was declared dead on arrival.
“Safi was very beautiful and cheerful; she was always full of life,” says Maryam. “I felt very guilty [because] I was the one who pressured her to come out; I didn’t know it would go this way. I try not to think about it so much or blame myself but sometimes, it’s hard not to.”
For queer northern women like Maryam and Safiya, acceptance by family is often difficult. Found predominantly in northern Nigeria, the Hausa people are one of Nigeria’s largest ethnic groups. They have strong cultural and religious values that hinge on strict gender roles.
Although now largely homophobic, the Hausa society did not always have homophobia rooted in its culture. Queer people in the north – particularly queer men – were at some point historically recognised. Whilst this recognition did not equate to acceptance, there was a general sense of tolerance for their ‘lifestyle.’
On the other hand, queer women were much less documented. While it’s easy to attribute this to their nonexistence, another queer woman, Martha, told Minority Africa she believes that even in the era of tolerance, there was no place for women to be as openly queer as their male counterparts.
Having no place in Hausa society in the past and present, queer Hausa women are forced to hide and navigate multiple intersecting identities, trying to balance their sexual orientation with religion and ethnicity.
“After Safi’s death, I felt a lot of emotions, but the strongest was anger,” Maryam reveals. “I was so angry. I was angry at her family, at mine and at every older Hausa person I came across. Everything they did repulsed me.”
At that point, she saw older Hausa people as an extension of her parents and their conservative views; they represented everything she hated about the culture.
“Safi’s family never came for the funeral. I reached out, but they never came,” Maryam continues. “Their daughter was no more, but they did not care. I had a lot of anger and resentment for my own culture. I hated being Hausa. To me, it felt like Yoruba and Igbo people would still love their child, but ours didn’t. Their love for us was conditional. I’m older now and I know that this is relative but then, I was angry.”
In a bid to escape her identity and reinvent herself, she moved to Lagos barely months after Safiya’s passing. She also spiralled into an identity crisis and later discovered herself through friends and therapy. Family, on the other hand, remained a distant part of her life that she never reconciled with. Even though she was not disowned by her parents, they refuse to talk to her unless she changes her sexuality.
“They don’t want me to bring shame to them so I was excommunicated, but I understand. I don’t even wish to talk to them, so it’s fine.”
Amidst the difficulty of coming out to conservative Hausa parents, there are some people fortunate to have parents who embrace them.
“How my dad spoke to me and loved me when I came out to him wasn’t what I expected,” Aisha, a bisexual gender nonconformist from Kogi State, recounts. “I expected backlash and trauma, but I didn’t get that from my dad.”
Even though she discovered her sexuality at a young age, Aisha was always conservative in her beliefs; tradition and religion shaped her life and self-image. In trying to merge her ethnic and sexual identities, Aisha struggled with self-confidence and tried to conform to heteronormative expectations and gender ideals; this eventually led to self-hatred and internalised homophobia.
“I wasn’t happy that my religion did not accept who I was,” she says, explaining how difficult it was to navigate through those times. She recounted conducting some research and not finding anything pointing to homosexuality being a sin, even though the prevailing argument among Islamic scholars is that it is.
For Aisha, the journey to acceptance and self-discovery began at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.
“I had the agency to decide what I wanted, whom I wanted and in what terms.”
With this in mind, she cut her hair, removed her hijab and began dressing differently.
Just like Aisha, Martha, a Hausa lesbian who grew up in a strict Christian household, fully explored her sexuality in university. But unlike Aisha, the major conflict Martha faced as a queer woman was not religion; it revolved around reconciling her queer identity with societal struggles at the American University of Nigeria in Yola.
“It was shortly after I discovered my sexuality that they passed the SSMPA,” she says. “It was a point of concern as to how I would live freely if queer people were criminalised in the country.”
Passed in 2014, the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act (SSMPA), criminalises homosexuality and any form of sexual identity and orientation against heterosexuality. It limits the rights of queer people and inadvertently gives civilians the authority to mete out punishments against them.
This made Martha not only be scared of her family’s reaction to her queerness, but society’s as well. She has come out to her siblings, but can’t bring herself to do so to her parents because of their strict religious background.
“I know they want my safety and well-being and I know they wouldn’t do anything to hurt me, but I can’t say I believe that one hundred percent.”
For Aisha, despite her father being accepting, her mother is not. “My mum found out in 2019, and it wasn’t a good experience,” she says. “It was blackmail after blackmail, tears, and prayers. It was crazy, but my dad encouraged me and gave me strength.”
Aisha’s journey towards self-acceptance as a sexual minority in a conservative society had its challenges. In the early years after discovering her sexuality, she was very lonely.
Aisha eventually found solace in a Chinese dating app for lesbians.
“I joined the app to feel like I was not alone.” With the app, she found a friend, whose friendship was so dear to her she referred to it as “pure.”
This friendship would eventually help her discover the LGBTQ+ community in northern Nigeria, where she formed relationships and found her tribe.
“Before I knew it, they invited me to LGBTQ parties in Abuja. I would leave Zaria, pack my bags and get on the road. It was an amazing time,” she says.
“I attended anniversaries of lesbian couples and became really hopeful. I started relationships of my own, made good friends, and realised that within the LGBTQ community, most of the time, we all look out for one another.”
Edited or Reviewed by: Samuel Banjoko, K.S, Caleb Okereke, and Uzoma Ihejirika.
Features a roundup of fresh MA reports, announcements, events/workshop listings, and minority content curated from across the web.
Rabi Madaki is a writer and Psychology student that's passionate about humanitarianism.

author: Rabiat Madaki


text:
“We paid the price”: How a voluntary forest restoration in Kenya ended a decades long security problem - Minority Africa
Jackson Okata
July 14, 2023
In 2000, together with his three brothers, Jeremiah Chepkore moved into Kirisia forest from a neighbouring village 10 kilometres away.  After a whole day of trekking, the family made it to the forest, a place they would call home for the next 19 years. According to the 56-year-old Kenyan, they were allocated five acres of forest land by people he described as forest officials in exchange for five cows.
“Our elder brother convinced us to make the journey into the forest,” Chepkore recalls. “We only had a one-acre piece of land to share among three brothers, we had no option than to leave our village and join the many others who had already settled in the forest.”
The father of four says that the search for grazing and farming land and the ease of settling in the forest made them move into the forest. “We carried along our livestock and household items and set for the journey at night to avoid detection by the few government operatives who were then present in the area.”
Mary Nairesia, 52, another former settler in the forest, joined tens of her neighbours who moved into the forest in 1991 in search of farming land. She was only 20 years and then a mother of one. Today, she is a mother of five and notes that the fertile forest land attracted them to start farming deep inside the forest before slowly settling in.
“People moved into the forest in groups depending on the village they came from. Our group had some 200 people, [the] majority being women,” Nairesia says. “We started by subdividing the forest land for farming because there were no government forest rangers guarding the forest.”
Nairesia adds that charcoal burning,  logging of trees, beekeeping and hunting of wild animals were also lucrative deals inside the forest, things she admits led to the destruction of the forest ecosystem.
However, in 2019, Chepkore and Nairesia were among the ten thousand ‘illegal’ settlers who decided to voluntarily vacate the forest and relocate to alternative pieces of land allocated to them by the government. This was a result of a series of environmental conservation training for the community by a group of conservationists.
“At first we were reluctant to leave the forest, but after a series of sensitization sessions, we saw the sense in it and understood why it was important to protect the forest,” Chepkore says.
The Kirisia community from Samburu County, 400 kilometres north of Kenya’s capital Nairobi, then embarked on a restoration drive to save the degraded and dying forest. To this effect, Kirisia’s Community Forest Association (CFA) was created. According to the association’s chairman, Douglas Leboiyare, their focus is on mitigating the effects of climate change like prolonged droughts that have ravaged the region.
The destruction of the forest water catchment area through human settlement led to the drying of rivers and prolonged drought seasons, something that resulted in hunger and communal conflicts over water and animal pasture.
“As a community, we destroyed the forest and paid the price. Our rivers run dry, our food stores run empty because our land was ravaged by unending drought,” Leboiyare says.
According to Leboiyare, excessive and uncoordinated livestock grazing, charcoal burning and logging had for decades threatened the existence of the forest which supports over 10,000 households.
Before the Kirisia community voluntarily moved out of the forest and formed their forest association, the government had on many occasions unsuccessfully tried to forcefully evict the settlers from the forest. But interventions from community leaders and non-governmental organisations eased the process.
Chepkore and other settlers were offered alternative livelihoods and sources of income, an opportunity that made them agree to not only leave the forest but also partake in its restoration.
“By breathing life back into the forest, we revived water sources that had dried up. The forest is once again a source of fruits, traditional medicine and pasture for our livestock,” Leboiyare says.
Chepkore adds that had they not made the “wise decision to restore and conserve the forest,” they would “have no life by now.”
The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and government agencies including the Kenya Forest Service, the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, the Kenya Water Towers Agency, the Kenya Forestry Research Institute, the County Government of Samburu, and the Green Belt Movement offered technical and financial support to the community-led project.
The community kicked off the Kirisia forest restoration project in December 2019 by planting the first 11,000 tree seedlings. With a total coverage of 92,000 hectares, Kirisia forest is among the largest water towers in Kenya according to Julius Kamau, Kenya’s Chief Conservator of Forests.
Kamau says 30,000 hectares of the forest had been destroyed at the time the restoration drive began. He credits the successful rebirth of the forest to the voluntary movement out of the forest by the community and the sustained restoration drive, which he says is giving the forest back its glory.
Between  1973  and 2015  the forest had lost 20% of its tree cover. To date, the Kirisia community has managed to restore 11,000 out of the 30,000 hectares of the destroyed forest with 80,000 tree seedlings being planted since 2019.
Charles Ochieng, the Samburu County Forest conservator,  notes that community scouts have been critical to the success of the initiative through regular patrols within the forest. “We have plans of scaling up tree planting to realize our target of 450,000 new tree seedlings.”
FAO Kenya Representative Carla Mucavi says efforts by Kirisia’s Community Forest Association have helped attain “better food production, enhanced nutrition and improved life for the community.”
The government of Kenya granted the community the right to use the forest sustainably,  leading them to practice agroforestry, beekeeping and even grazing within the forest. A total of 1300 community members are engaged in controlled beekeeping inside the forest under the Samburu Beekeepers Cooperative Society.
John Lelesit, chairman of the Samburu Beekeepers Cooperative Society, says the community can generate income from selling honey, a situation he admits has changed the economic fortunes of those involved. Today, the community has more than 400 beehives in the forest.
According to Lelesit, the community has been able to enhance its food and nutrition through honey production and forest farming. Regeneration of water springs and rivers, enhanced fodder for livestock and forest fruit farming have also boosted the economic well-being of the Kirisia community.
“Our young warriors are busy inside the forest keeping bees and farming,” Lelesit says. “They have no time for war or cattle rustling and this has put an end to communal conflicts which caused many deaths and destruction of property.”
Tourism is also booming in the area, with wild animals including elephants which had disappeared for years finding their way back to the restored forest.
According to Nairesia, the community and especially women are registering many benefits of being part of forest conservators as opposed to when they participated in destroying it.
“I’m among women engaged in controlled and monitored farming inside the forest,” Nairesia explains. “The government has allowed us to grow African leafy vegetables, fruits, and maize which not only acts as a source of food for our families but also a source of income because we sell the surplus to neighbouring communities.”
Nairesia adds that with increased food production, women can now easily provide a balanced diet to their children, something she says has led to “enhanced nutrition of families.’’
“Currently we don’t have any problem with the forest rangers because we are all friends of the forest,” she says. “We can still access the forest to source for traditional medicine, water and firewood, graze our cattle and practice bee farming inside the forest while at the same time conserving it. What we do not allow is tree cutting and charcoal burning.”
Mariana Kelporen, a mother of six says the restoration of the forest has given them peace as women and helped keep their husbands at home.
“We not only have food for our children, but we also have our husbands at home,” she says. “Initially, they would go for days looking for cattle to steal or following stolen cattle and some would never return.”
On October 14, 2022, during the World Food Day celebrations, the small rural Kenyan village made global headlines on the sidelines of the event that was held in Rome, Italy.
The Kirisia Community Forest Association (CFA) won the maiden Achievement Award from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) under the FAO Achievements Awards programme. FAO honoured the Kirisia community forest protection efforts that saw the restoration of a critical forest and water tower.
Launched in 2020, the FAO Achievements Award recognises individuals, communities, and institutions with outstanding performance in the efficient execution of programmes related to FAO’s work. The award focuses on fishery forestry, climate, land and water, animal and plant, and the health sectors.
FAO Director-General (DG) QU Dongyu presented the award to the Kirisia CFA chairman Douglas Leboiyare. Speaking after receiving the award on behalf of his community, Leboiyare mentions that the award was a statement to the whole world that the solution to climate change and environmental degradation squarely lies with communities.
“Communities can save and protect nature if they decide to,” he says. “The same way we take part in destroying nature is the same way we can be part of the solution.”
Edited/Reviewed by: PK Cross, Uzoma Ihejirika, and Caleb Okereke.
Features a roundup of fresh MA reports, announcements, events/workshop listings, and minority content curated from across the web.
Jackson Okata is a multiple award-winning journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya. Jackson boasts of experience in both broadcast, print and online journalism spanning over 8 years. Jackson specializes in agriculture, environment, women and gender, political and governance, tech and innovation, science as well as education stories. Jackson is a fellow of Health Journalism Network, Earth Journalism Network, Internews, Journalists for Human Rights, Africa Centre for Media Excellence (ACME), LIDA Network, YALI Network and Thomson Reuters Foundation

author: Jackson Okata


text:
‘We were scared’: Revisiting Africa’s first Pride march 31 years on - Minority Africa
PK Cross
July 10, 2021
One Saturday morning in October 1990, 34-year-old Yusoof Abdullah made his way to the Great Hall at Wits University to be part of an event that would make history in South Africa.
It was the South African Pride March, the first of its kind in the country and equally on the continent.
“I was nervous, we were scared, there was anxiety everywhere,” Abdullah, who is now 65, says. “Some people who were at Wits Hall chose not to walk in the parade [at the last minute], they retreated when they saw the police,” he adds.
At 10:00 am on October 13, 1990, Edwin Cameron, who would later go on to become a Supreme Court judge, kicked off the march describing the various illegal apartheid laws.
During this time, the protocol for safety and protection as well as the code of conduct was also discussed.
Police stood on both sides of the road where the march was taking place and although a sense of fear loomed in the atmosphere, Abdullah alongside others peacefully walked the planned route chanting slogans of “Freedom now” and “The right to choose.”
The march, which had around 200 people in attendance including activists like gay and anti-apartheid advocate Simon Nkoli and organizations such as the Gay and Lesbian Organisation of the Witwatersrand (GLOW), began and ended in an estimated 90 minutes.
“Although it was a 6km walk, for me it seemed like 60km. It is the longest walk I have ever done in my life,” Abdullah says, laughing lightly.
Some marchers nonetheless could not risk exposure; they wore brown paper bags over their heads, with cutouts around the eyes, nose, and mouth.
“A number of people did not want to be identified. Some were prominent business people, others were professional men and women,” Abdullah, who was in charge of logistics, operations, and safety, explains, adding that he did not wear a paper bag over his head.
“I believed in this march. I knew I was doing the right thing spiritually, morally, and ethically,” he says.
The first Pride March was born out of defiance and a need to challenge the power structure as it existed in the days of apartheid, attendees say.
“It culminated [from] a lot of factors. It was a defiance march against segregation [and] it was a defiance march against the Immorality Act,” he explains with a hint of pain in his voice.
“[It was] inspired by the discrimination I received as a person of colour, being thrown out of my house, being unable to get on a bus, or get on and have to sit at the back; that discrimination, I can never forget.”
The Immorality Act, which prohibited extramarital sex between white people and Black people, was passed in South Africa in 1927, becoming the first major piece of apartheid legislation. It also outlawed homosexuality in public.
In 1950, the Act was amended to apply to sex between a white person and any non-white person, equally nullifying interracial marriages of South Africans that occurred outside of the country.
Two years after that, the apartheid government passed the Immorality Act amendments, which banned homosexuality. These amendments were designed to drive gay culture further into hiding.
The minority government believed that if South Africa wanted to avoid the fates of ancient Rome, and Greece, it must maintain its Christian purity and avoid ‘homosexual debauchery’.
By 1988, the apartheid government had continued to implement amendments to the Immorality Act of 1957, which further punished the LGBT community by enforcing harsher punishments to already existing sexual “crimes.”
“Pride started because of the severe statute laws that affected the community whether one was heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual,” Abdullah says. “And that’s why it was able to bring together many people from these different walks of life.”
Organisers say they realised that apartheid was akin to sexual discrimination and the march was a fight for perfect inclusion regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation.
“Pride from the onset was always a very diverse organisation,” says Kaye Ally, the Chairperson of Johannesburg Pride. “We had a collective of people; white, Indian, Colored, [and the] Black community that came together to ensure that pride started in Africa.”
Every year since the first event in 1990, people across South Africa – where each of the nine provinces now hosts a Pride March – and in many places on the continent come together to celebrate pride.
Today, the Johannesburg Pride is the biggest event on the continent, dubbed by many as “The Pride of Africa.”
For many, Pride is a celebration of identity, representing freedom of expression and freedom from social oppression. For Anathi Jongilanga, a queer man from South Africa, it evokes so many emotions.
“Pride has enriched my convictions and the way that I look at the world. [It] has brought comfort within myself, it brings me joy, it gives me hope that our lives will get even better in the future,” he says.
But that is not all.
“It also makes me angry that things like Pride had to happen for people to enjoy the rights they have today,” he adds.
The Johannesburg Pride as an organization has equally grown beyond the march.
Today, they curate several events like a queer fashion show, lifestyle conferences, and award ceremonies.
With the COVID-19 pandemic, the organisation is also extending relief to LGBTQ+ asylum seekers and refugees in the country from food, rent and funds for COVID testing and treatment.
“Our intention was to retain the essence of Pride, the celebration of the march, the message, and the activism while at the same time positioning ourselves beyond just that one day of the march,” Ally, who has been with the organization since 2013, explains.
On December 1, 2006, the South African government passed the Union Bill, which legalized same-sex marriage, making South Africa the first African nation to do so.
This gave homosexual couples parity with heterosexual couples for the first time. It also allowed gay spouses to make decisions on each other’s behalf, receive alimony, and adopt children
Despite securing these rights in the country’s constitution, LGBTQ+ people still face series of hate crimes, discrimination, and murders.
In April, a 22-year-old gay man on his way from his birthday party in Western Cape was raped and murdered, making him one of at least ten known gay men and Trans women who have been murdered in the last three months.
“It saddens me that given how far society has come in terms of human rights and inclusion, we still suffer hate crimes simply because we are queer,” Jongalinga says. “I hope that there will come a time when people will look at each other in their full humanness.”
Organising Pride for Kaye Ally, attending Pride for Anathi Jongilanga, and being one of the founding members of the first Pride for Yusoof Abdullah shows the evolution of this parade from a political struggle to a celebration.
“Pride is where people feel safe to be completely themselves, it has not been easy to get here, but we still have a long way to go,” Ally says.
Abdullah vividly remembers the singing and dancing at the end of the first pride. They had completed the 90-minute walk with no violence and injuries despite the police presence.
“The inclusion of the equality clause in the South African constitution in 1996 was one of the greatest outcomes of that march,” he says. “And being part of it makes me very proud.”
Features a roundup of fresh MA reports, announcements, events/workshop listings, and minority content curated from across the web.
PK Cross is a journalist at large at Minority Africa.

author: PK Cross


text:
Weaponizing queerness to disseminate white supremacy has to stop - Minority Africa
minorityafrica.co
June 8, 2020
We saw this video a few days ago. In it, Brain Buster who is a United States Marine is reacting to the George Floyd protests on his Instagram story.
Buster is, however, more worried, and in his words “disgusted” “disturbed” and “really pissed off” about the protesters burning the American flag than he is about the reason behind the protests in the first place.
RACIST WHITE GAYS AT IT AGAIN (THREAD):
BRIAN BUSTER (insta: @ htown.b), a current United States Marine from NY, posted this video on his story in response to seeing a video of protestors burning the American flag. pic.twitter.com/m8MXgvbrWK
— Cesar (@Cez_Zamudio) May 31, 2020
We will not go into the details about the significance of flag burning to the oppressed class, we will, however, address Buster’s claim when he says: “I am white, I am gay,” implying that being gay is in some way supposed to rid him of his white privilege.
Here is a man trying to weaponize his queerness into further perpetuating oppression. Let’s break down the problem with this speech that nobody asked for beginning from what was in our opinion, some of the most worrying statements.
The best way to prove you’re not a white supremacist when you in fact are is to mention and pretend to address your white privilege, deploy another system of oppression to your rescue, other the group calling you out,  say you’re friends with them, and then allude to understanding their struggle.
James Baldwin brilliantly captures what would be our response to this section when he says: I know a great many white people, men, and women, straight and gay, whatever, who are unlike the majority of their countrymen. On what basis we could form a coalition is still an open question. The idea of basing it on sexual preference strikes me as somewhat dubious, strikes me as being less than a firm foundation. It seems to me that a coalition has to be based on the grounds of human dignity.
To add to Baldwin, we are going to say that whatever form of unity we have as White gays and Black gays has to begin from a point of human dignity and not sexual preference. While the latter is without a doubt a unifying factor, and this coalition can culminate in sexual preference but if we are going to eliminate the possibility of weaponization which we so often see, it has to begin from a mutual belief in justice and freedom.
When you succeed every statement about justice with a “but,” then you do not really want justice, you want it only on certain conditions and within certain parameters. You are more importantly making yourself the center of a conversation and a theme that should never include you.
Referring to George Floyd as “this man” is equally an attempt at othering him and keeping him out of a dialogue that is in fact centered on him and the many other Black people who have died from anti-Black violence.
When you are more worried about disrespect than about murder, check yourself.
When you’re more concerned about symbolism than actual progress, when you would die for representation than actual work, you need an introspection.
Also, can someone clarify how saving a burning flag is helpful to the LGBTQ community? What we see here is the attempt to insert into a conversation about race, queerness. And it is it not to say that queerness doesn’t matter in racial conversations, it does.
The problem with Buster is not that he is White and gay, it is that he attempts to brandish and defuse his queerness into being racist. And that should never be okay.
Features a roundup of fresh MA reports, announcements, events/workshop listings, and minority content curated from across the web.
Editorial.


text:
What can African history teach us about queer belonging? - Minority Africa
Etamaze Nkiri
June 29, 2022
From the 1960s to the early 1980s, Ukonu’s Club was hailed as Eastern Nigeria’s most popular television program. The show featured a variety of entertainers like Mazi Ukonu, the show’s namesake and Christy Essien. In the 1970s, one unique entertainer made a name for themselves on the show, an individual by the name of Area Scatter.
The story of Area Scatter begins sometime during the civil war, when Scatter, who was previously a civil servant, disappeared into the forest and emerged seven months and seven days later as a well-endowed woman. Per their admission, the gods had blessed them with supernatural powers that enhanced both their musical talent as well as their feminine qualities.
On Ukonu’s Club, Scatter is seen dressed traditionally as a woman and playing their thumb piano to an audience of well-respected elders and leaders. They watch Scatter with an intense focus, in admiration of the performer before them. Scatter is not met with disgust nor discrimination; the room of spectators seeks only to enjoy their music.
Five decades later, one must wonder just how different the reactions to Scatter might be with today’s elders as opposed to those of the past. It is as if the ancestors, the long-gone elders of yesteryear, saw individuals like Scatter from an entirely different, more ancient, and traditional perspective.
As a child of the first decade of the 21st century, it’s no secret that I, like many gay men, was drawn almost innately to the intensely feminine characters and personas I saw in the media. I was obsessed with the ladies of the Winx Club cartoon series, with Flora being my favorite. I was infatuated with the “badassery” of cartoon characters like Kim Possible and the girls of Totally Spies. Female pop stars of the era like Britney Spears, Beyoncé and the Pussycat Dolls were dropping music videos I couldn’t get enough of, and in a family of boys that loved the WWE, Trish Stratus was easily a favorite wrestler of mine.
I watched these ladies on television and came to idolize them. Their femininity wasn’t a weakness, it was a strength and it inspired me. In many ways, I came to adapt much of their character into my personality. Lines were drawn rather strictly, however, regarding gender-appropriate behavior at home.
It’s a common belief amongst Africans that the gender binary has always existed rigidly in traditional spaces. The recent popularity of social media personalities like Bobrisky, a trans woman, in Nigeria has once again brought out this rhetoric. The belief that “lifestyles” like Bobrisky’s are the consequences of the west, pushed upon us by a mass-media agenda. Now that I am an adult, one with a history degree, I’ve come to challenge those notions. I’m re-thinking what I’ve been taught about my ancestors, coming to view them not as one-dimensional icons of bigotry, but as individuals who often themselves were queer, and came up in societies where their identities could be fully embraced.
While doing research last year on the Ekpe, a form of government that emerged during the 17th century in the Cross-river regions of Southwest Cameroon and South-east Nigeria, I came upon the story of a woman by the name of Nne Uko. Nne Uko Uma Awa was a woman who according to legend not only joined but climbed the ranks of the Ekpe, a society whose rites were exclusive to men. Like other senior members of Ekpe, Nne Uko is believed to have had several wives, at least two.
According to legend, when asked about why she dressed as a man, Uko responded that by creation she was meant to be a man but had instead been born into the body of a woman (Nne Uko). The discovery of this dazzling icon completely altered my perceptions of my ancestors, bringing them closer to me in the process. Looking through the work of European anthropologists in pre-colonial Africa, I ran quite frequently into individuals like Uko and Scatter.
In the 17th century, Andrew Battell, a British traveler who was a captive of the Portuguese in Angola lived amongst the Imbangala peoples. Battell wrote that several Imbangala men lived with “men in women’s apparel,” who they kept as wives. Olfert Dapper, a Dutch writer, also wrote of the Chibados of Angola, individuals who constituted a third gender. Known as spiritual guides, they numbered up to fifty in the court of Queen Nzinga. They were noted to have “walked and dressed like women,” and even married men, without reproach.
It’s easy to get the feeling that concepts like gender and sexuality in these societies exhibited a fluidity not commonly found in the West. It was typical of European scholars to label such practices as beastly and degenerate, placing the conduct of those who participated under the broad term sodomy, an act then punishable by law, up to and including death. The need for Western scholars and travelers to put derogatory labels to identities seen in other cultures directly coincided with the colonial objective of reshaping these societies to fit squarely into a Western gender binary. Those who didn’t fit into the binary were oftentimes targeted for violence.
In the Americas, Spanish Conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa, disgusted by the Berdaches, a population of native men who dressed and behaved like women, massacred up to forty of them when he came upon their dwellings in a local village in 1513. Contact with Europeans, the eventual adoption of Christian ideals and the colonization of most of these societies by European nations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, saw the purposeful decimation of such identities throughout the continent of Africa.
In later years, when Africa and its people came to be viewed as the pinnacle of man and his primitivity, European ethnographers could further erase the diversity of the identities observed on the continent to push their agendas about the rigidness of gender and sexuality. As a people who were without traditional writing systems, who passed our histories down orally, we are left to wonder what may have been erased from our collective histories under the new constraints of Christian morality and piety.
The conversations being had today about trans identities and their validity are proof of how Western society has evolved to begin to acknowledge the diversity of the individuals that comprise it. Despite that, it is important to shed light on the fact that these identities are not new, nor were they products of the West. Framing conversations about queerness around the modernity of first-world nations and their global influence does a poor job of recognizing the ancientness of queer identities and how they often manifested all around the world in pre-colonial societies.
There is a rule of thumb I apply as a student of history, which is that there is not a single feeling any one person feels today, that millions have not felt over the vastness of human history. Understanding our present is only achievable by coming to terms with our past. What makes history interesting, at least for me, are the dichotomies that exist between what we’ve been taught about our past, and the thinly veiled truths that lie underneath.
As LGBTQ+ Africans, it’s easy to feel disconnected from our cultures, and I’ve struggled with those feelings myself. Learning of individuals like Area Scatter, Nne Uko, and identities like the Chibados of Angola helps to rebuild that bridge and repair the damage meted out by imported bigotries. Making our ancestors icons of intolerance only takes away from the colorfulness of the lives many of them led. Our sexual and gender identities are not modern consequences of Western influence, they are indigenous and ancient expressions of ourselves and our people, and much like our ancestors, we reserve the right to express them as we please.
Edited/Reviewed by Cassandra Roxburgh, Caleb Okereke, and Uzoma Ihejirika.
Features a roundup of fresh MA reports, announcements, events/workshop listings, and minority content curated from across the web.
Etamaze Nkiri is a freelance writer based in Oklahoma City. With a degree in History from the University of Oklahoma, he specializes in writing pieces centered around the subject. He has thus far written for American History magazine as well as for the Gay & Lesbian Review. As the gay son of Cameroonian parents, Etamaze has just recently began the journey of bridging the gap between his identity as an LGBTQ+ individual, with the more traditional aspects of his culture and upbringing. Etamaze also runs as Instagram page (antique_afrique) about African history and culture.

author: Etamaze Nkiri


text:
What did Sheila Lumumba want? - Minority Africa
Elizabeth Okwach
May 18, 2024
Alone, Sheila Adhiambo Lumumba, a 25-year old non-binary lesbian lay dead in their one-bedroom apartment in a small town, north of Nairobi, for three days before finally being discovered.
Lumumba was sexually assaulted, hit on the head with a blunt object and stabbed in the chest, face, neck, and one of their eyes was partially gorged out. Their death on the 17th of April 2022 sparked calls for justice in Kenya where homosexuality remains illegal.
But who was Sheila Lumumba and what did they want? To be happy, but also to love and take care of family.
Brenda Akinyi, Lumumba’s cousin who knew them their entire life, described them as someone with a bubbly personality, a people’s person who loved partying.
“Sheila was just a normal young person who loved to party and go out with friends in their own free time. They were an independent, strong and ambitious person, loved people, was funny and a great friend to everyone,” says Akinyi.
Another of Lumumba’s cousins and friend Stacy Ogola testifies to Lumumba’s love for the party. “One day my mom went to work and left me some money for food. So I called Sheila. I told [them] we got money to drink but I don’t know what mom will eat when she gets back home.”
“So we went to celebrate [their] birthday and we celebrated mine too because I knew I would be grounded.. [their] birthday is 1st August and mine is on the 14th,” Ogola reveals fondly.
According to Akinyi, Lumumba was also “harsh and not easily swayed.”
“When Sheila would make up their mind no one could convince them otherwise, even if one will get hurt and they know that they are standing for the truth, they won’t back out,” she tells Minority Africa.
Born and raised partly in Nairobi’s Umoja Estate before relocating to Naivasha, a town in the Rift Valley region where their father had been transferred to from Samburu, Lumumba stood out for being more adventurous than their peers.
Lumumba came from a family of four. To their close knit family, they were fondly called “Leila.” They attended Milimani Primary in Naivasha before relocating to Nairobi at the height of post-election violence in 2008 when Naivasha town was worst hit by clashes in the country.
In Nairobi, Lumumba’s family lived with Akinyi where Lumumba joined Kileleshwa primary. Later the family became more financially stable and they again moved to Umoja estate where Lumumba completed their primary education at Busara Primary.
They then proceeded to join Parkland Girls Secondary school in the heart of the city.
“When Sheila was in high school, their teacher called the dad to school and informed him that there were speculations that his ‘daughter was a lesbian.’ He refuted the claims strongly. He could not believe it then.” Akinyi disclosed.
When school would close for mid and end-term breaks, Lumumba’s first destination was mostly Akinyi’s place in Nairobi’s Kileleshwa suburbs. At one time in their routine work at the kindergarten that Akinyi owns, Lumumba confided in her that they were gay.
Lumumba also shared their secret with Ogola. “I was the first person [they] told [they were] a lesbian. We didn’t know how the family would take it. So we kept it to ourselves. That was when [Lumumba] was in high school,” Ogola recalls.
When Lumumba finally shared their identity with their parents, it was a big blow creating a distance with their father with whom they had a very cordial relationship.
“‘Sheila is telling me that she is a man. What is that?’” Lumumba’s dad would ask Akinyi every other time they had a telephone conversation.
Their blossoming father-child relationship, although it didn’t break completely, suffered due to Lumbumba’s identity and a whole year passed without father and child seeing or even talking to each other, Akinyi reveals.
“[Lumumba] changed the way they were talking, dressing, looking and even their walking style. People were not accepting them. It was the darkest moment of [Lumumba’s] life but they had to soldier on,” says Akinyi.
Speaking to local media in June 2022 after their death, Lumumba’s mother refuted their sexual orientation and gender identity and maintained that Lumumba was “purely a girl.”
“Sheila was a girl and there is nothing again about that. Even if my daughter was like that, I loved my daughter so much and I was not aware. I am the one who is in pain and I loved my daughter so much,” Millicent explained.
When contacted for this story in 2022, Lumumba’s mother was too emotional and declined to speak and their father requested that we speak to Akinyi instead. Although not being fully there, Akinyi admits that their attitude to Lumumba changed over the course of the years making them more accepting.
However, the rejection from close family members at the time as well as having no job made the 23 year old very sad. Lumumba felt alone and slid into depression.
Further complicating things, Akinyi who had for long been their support system within the family and Lumumba also had a quarrel of their own. The cousins did not speak to one another from 2019 to 2021. Akinyi explains that the rift was attributed to the fact that she wanted them to reduce their drinking, and stop hanging out with friends she considered bad for Lumumba.
“Sheila sometimes would not listen to anyone. There was this time I was guiding them and they felt offended. So, we stopped talking,” Akinyi says.
“In fact, I changed my cellphone number and they couldn’t reach me. But they used to talk to my mum more often and requested that I unblock them. Sheila would tell my mum that now they understand what life was,” Akinyi adds.
Part of that understanding involved Lumumba beginning to fend for themselves. In 2019, Lumumba moved to Naivasha to work as a bouncer in a nightclub. It was there that they met Edel Kimani who would become their best friend. Kimani used to frequent the night club Lumumba was working at.
Kimani, like Lumumba, is also non-binary and lesbian and was one of the last two people to speak to Lumumba on the phone before they were found dead. Of their friendship, Kimani describes Lumumba as originally shy but notes that they immediately “hit it off and our friendship bond became stronger.”
Later in 2019, Kimani got a job in Nairobi and a few months later, in January 2020, Lumumba also moved to Nairobi, working as a housekeeper in an inn in Westlands and then in July 2020, working as a hotelier in Karatina, the town where they would be murdered less than two years later.
In Karatina, Lumumba worked at FK Resort & Spa. Lumumba had big dreams even in the small town and received a promotion twice for their hard work.
“Their desire was to be self-sufficient besides supporting their family,” Akinyi says.
One of their biggest dreams was to support their mother and give her the money to build a house upcountry.
“Very soon, nitakutumia doo uanze kujenga,” Lumumba would say to their mother in Kiswahili which translates to “I will send you money soon you start building.”
They were never able to fulfill that dream.
Meanwhile, in their social and professional life, Lumumba had battles of their own. According to Akinyi, they were receiving threats from a colleague via SMS.
Lumumba confided in their mother about the threats and she asked them to report it to the authorities.
“She reported the matter to the police and they were called in for questioning. However, the authorities let them go,” Akinyi says, an account corroborated by Lumumba’s father.
All of this, however, was news to their best friend Kimani.
“Sheila never revealed to me that they were unsafe or they were being threatened. I came to learn about them being threatened by a former colleague through their girlfriend,” Kimani tells Minority Africa.
“I think it was not a big deal to them that is why they never bothered to mention it to me,” Kimani says about Lumumba never telling them about the threats.
They had also planned to meet Lumumba around that same time.
“Sheila would visit me in Nairobi, so would I,” They say. “This time around, it was my turn to visit them. But since they did not communicate, I assumed [Lumumba] was busy and I didn’t try to check on them.”
When they didn’t show up to work on both Friday and Saturday, colleagues at the resort raised an alarm which led to Lumumba’s house being broken into where they were found dead.
Following this, investigators stepped in. However, Lumumba’s family and friends, alongside activists across the country, decried the snail’s pace with which they said the police approached the case. This led to a wave of online campaigning with the hashtag #JusticeForSheila that trended on Kenyan Twitter from late April 2022 to early in May. A fundraiser for their funeral costs also raised nearly $4000.
Subsequently, Lumumba’s family took up pursuing the case and were able to make some findings missed by investigators. For example, Human Rights Watch reported that family members found a knife and razor blade in Lumumba’s bedroom and additionally, a family friend found CCTV footage of Lumumba leaving a bar with three men on the last night they were seen alive.
One of the men in the CCTV footage, Billington Wambui Mwathi, was Lumumba’s former co-worker. He was arrested on the 19th of July, arraigned in Karatina law courts and charged with aggravated assault and murder on Tuesday 21st July, 94 days after Lumumba was brutally murdered.
In December 2023, Mwathi who was 23 at the time of his arrest, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30 years in prison. However, Lumumba’s family is not satisfied with the penalty which is far from their proposed 50 year sentence. It is a disposition echoed by activists in the country who describe it as “lenient” and not “addressing the gravity of Mwathi’s actions.”
A joint statement by the National Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, galck+, and the Initiative for Equality and Non Discrimination (INEND) following the judgment expressed profound disappointment at the sentencing, adding that it fell “tragically short of the justice Sheila deserves and the severity of the crimes committed.”
The statement also noted that the sentence sent a disconcerting message about the value of LGBTQ+ lives in the country.
Kenya’s laws and regulations against sexual and gender-based violence don’t name LGBTQ individuals, and the National Policy on Prevention and Response doesn’t reference murder. According to Human Rights Watch, the brutality and specific targeting that Lumumba faced as a lesbian and non-binary person are rendered invisible under Kenya’s current policies as a result.
53% of LGBTQ+ people in Kenya have also reported being physically assaulted and only 29% of LGBTQ+ persons report an assault to the police because they are often revictimized if they report crimes committed against them.
In recent years, there have been multiple deaths of LGBTQ+ persons in Kenya under circumstances right groups have described as “hate crimes” motivated by homophobia.
Joash Mosoti, a peer educator at Pema Kenya and a security focal person at Hapa Kenya was found dead in his apartment in 2021 under what was termed as suspicious circumstance in Mombasa, the coast of Kenya. A few months before his death, Mosoti had reported concerns about his safety to his close family members and friends, according to GALCK.
That same year, in what activists suspect to be a transphobic attack, a transgender woman, Erica Chandra Kitula was mudered and their body dumped in a ditch along General Mathenge Drive in Westlands, Nairobi.
March 2021 saw Chriton Atuhwera, a Ugandan refugee in Kenya’s Kakuma camp die from burn injuries associated with an attack on a group of queer refugees. Atuhwera was one of two gay men who suffered second-degree burns at the camp.
On their Facebook profile, Lumumba’s bio reads “Trust the vibe you get, energy don’t lie. Mind over matter.” They are remembered very fondly by people who knew them for their own energy and equally their ‘silent activism.’
“Sheila was not fighting for the queer representation or rights in Kenya. But what I can say is that they were proud and bold to be who they were,” says Riziki Lenga, who is also queer and got to know Lumumba through one of their daughters who schooled with them.
“Through Sheila, I have learnt not to shy away from who I am but to love and accept myself,” they added.
In a 2022 piece on Mamba Online titled I Knew Sheila Lumumba: Here Is My Story, activist and Lumumba’s friend Dennis Nzioka describes them in a similar way.
Echoing their love for Vodka and cigarettes, Nzioka goes ahead to write; “Sheila was not an activist, but their death has energised the cause for so many queer people who connected with them in life and in death.”
Today, Ogola still mourns the death of her cousin. She vividly remembers the last conversation with Lumumba before they met their untimely death.
“We had planned that [Lumumba] comes to Muranga because I stay in Muranga for the Easter festivities on the eve of Thursday 14th April,” Ogola narrates.
Beyond sharing the same birthday month, Ogola and Lumumba also shared a second name.
“What I hold close to my heart is the fact that [they] trusted me and when [they] were distressed, [they] could always confide in me; when [they] found love it was me [they] would tell…I feel like I lost my soulmate, my person,” she continues.
“Sometimes I wish that I was in a long dream and that I would wake up at some point.”
This story was reported between 2022 and 2024.
Edited and Reviewed by: Caleb Okereke, PK Cross, and Samuel Banjoko.
Features a roundup of fresh MA reports, announcements, events/workshop listings, and minority content curated from across the web.
Elizabeth Okwach is a freelance journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya. She writes mostly on culture, women, business, technology, climate among other topics. Her work has appeared in Zonk News, Zenger News, Techub, and OkayAfrica.

author: Elizabeth Okwach