Queer authorship and queer stories have been blossoming in Africa over the past several years. Publishers like Cassava Republic Press, which was founded in Abuja, Nigeria in 2006, have spent years supporting the development of contemporary African prose rooted in diverse African experiences and realities. She Called Me Woman: Nigeria’s Queer Women Speak is a pioneering work that successfully brings to the fore the voices and experiences of queer women in Nigeria.
She Called Me Woman is an anthology of stories written by queer women in Nigeria and co-edited by Azeenarh Mohammed, Chitra Nagarajan, and Rafeeat Aliyu. A unique feature of this book is the method of authorship. The co-editors set out to capture snapshots of the experiences, realities, and histories of queer women in Nigeria through their own various professional and social networks. In doing so, they capture a range of sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender expressions. Further, they successfully capture different ethnicities, religions, language groups, and class backgrounds. Though there are limitations in the age range represented (20 to 42-year-olds), we still gain insight into a broad cross section of transgender and queer women’s experiences in Nigeria within its pages. Mohammed et al. travelled across Nigeria conducting one-to-one audio-recorded interviews, which they then transcribed and wrote into narratives. What affirms to the reader the authenticity of these stories is that the co-editors took time shaping narratives that were true to each person. The co-editors did this by working closely with the narrators to shape the narrative into what each individual narrator wanted it to be. The maintenance of authenticity to the narrator does lead to inconsistencies by way of certain contradictory statements in some of the stories. Nevertheless, this difference adds another level of analysis to the stories and the inner perceptions of the narrator.
The narrators tackled a number of realities through their stories, including their newly-increased hypervisibility as a result of the discourse surrounding the passing of the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act (SSMPA) in 2014 and the effects of this legislation on their day-to-day lives and the wider public conversation. Religion is deftly dealt with by the narrators who engage with the complexities of Christianity and Islam. Some narrators see religion as a site of trauma, while others regard it as a shroud, something perverted or manipulated by those seeking to further their own personal and queerphobic agendas. Though there were stories of severe pain and trauma inflicted by a range of figures in the lives of the queer women, from family members, to intimate partners, to school yard crushes, we are reminded in each story that not each and every day of the lives of queer people in Nigeria is filled with pain, trauma, and abuse. There were tales of the strength of allyship and the support one can receive from friends, family, chosen families, and the queer community, to stories about falling in love, romance, and wholly embracing one’s sexuality and gender identity. Within these narratives the reader is reminded both of the ongoing struggle for the decriminalisation of same-sex sexual relationships in Nigeria and the reality that even in the differences that arise—especially when queer activism is approached from an intersectional lens—there are similarities in their experiences. Globally, without conflating and diminishing individual and particular hardship, many experience the same struggles as well as the same joys in living life as a queer woman and enjoying partnership, companionship, love, sex, and romance.
It is not an overstatement to say that this book is a seminal piece of literature. Literature like this is part of the ongoing work to transfer much of what has been oral history to written history, which does not occur enough in Africa. It forms part of the effort to create history that is recorded and preserved for future generations of queer Nigerians, scholars, activists, and historians to engage and grapple with. To record the stories of queer women in Nigeria is incredibly important in tracking the trajectory of change that will one day happen in the country.
I would urge anyone who works or aspires to work in queer activism in the Global South, and especially in Africa, to pick up a copy of this book. This book enables us to understand the fundamental importance of being a supporter and a facilitator who enables the voices of queer and Black women to be platformed internationally, without dilution or polishing to fit into white Western narratives of queerness in an African nation. It also shows us how, for example, that notions of the best tools to strike down “draconian laws” to bring legislation of queerness in Nigeria in line with the Global North can easily be rooted in discourses of colonisation and oppression. Ultimately, She Called Me Woman shows us that the uplifting of the voices and stories of queer and Black women is essential for effective work arising from African epistemologies. Now more than ever the importance of listening and empowering those at the grassroots level to formulate their own solutions and strategies needs to be emphasised, as it is increasingly an ever-present notion in the hegemonic human rights narrative that the “West is best,” while time and time again we see the failure of the global applicability of the structures and institutions that are purported to move us towards a more just and equitable world.
And as Miss saHHara once said to me, “the more we speak out the more people will learn –– the baton of responsibility when it comes to education should not be for one person to bear. It is for everyone. We all have the moral responsibility to speak out, educate, and learn about LGBTQIA people and moreover about every human being so that we can respect them.”
Tofunmi Odugbemi is a challenger and disrupter of spaces. She applies her developed sense of justice, ingenuity, and leadership in areas where academia intersects with the legal world. Womanism, Black feminism, anti-ableist, anti-racist, anti-establishment, abolitionist, anti-capitalist, and queer movements inform her work.