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For us in anglophone Africa, the word queer is a liberation, allowing us to define our own existence and our own identityObinna Tony-Francis Ochem is a freelance journalist reporting on queer issues and also a full-time content writer.
As a gay man, you first gain a sense of your sexuality when your body starts to react towards people of the same sex. Later this is followed by hearing the words “homo” and “homosexual” again and again in the churches and schools by pastors and teachers, and at home from families constantly telling us that it’s bad.
The word homo, for us here in anglophone Africa is a slur, followed closely by homosexual.
For many LGBTQ+ Africans, queer is an unknown word that they have learnt from the western media. When a member of the Nigerian LGBTQ+ community for example, finally accepts themselves for who they are, they seek out positive role models.
But, apart from South Africa, most African countries are ultra-conservative and there is simply no way to access LGBTQ+ content except through western media. Netflix, for example, has recently become available and African queer authors have started to become published. So when we were introduced to the word “queer”, we saw it as positive.
Queer is a new term for most of us here in Nigeria, the most populated country in Africa, and is currently mostly used by middle-class and educated LGBTQ+ citizens.
After I came to terms with being gay and started becoming aware of LGBTQ+ spaces – bars and clubs and meeting places – in Nigeria, I became aware of how people described themselves as “TB”, which is a derivative of the local slang “Tibi”, which means “one of us” and is used by older gay men to identify themselves, just as lesbians use “Lola”.
I have seen there is much controversy on social media platforms such as Twitter over whether people who have not been called queer, should not use the word. But this is not the case for anglophone African LGBTQ+ folks.
Now, middle class, educated LGBTQ+ people prefer to use queer, as it is a broader term that encompasses everything we feel about gender nonconformity.
We are being abused and attacked by homophobes from the older generation through words like “homo” and “homosexual” and by younger people with terms like “faggots” and “gay”, so we feel that the word queer represents a change, a chance for a new generation to assert itself and use its own terminology.
For me, queer means deviating from the norm in a conservative world. When we arrive at a world where I can be myself fully and honestly without an iota of bigotry, then queer and other words used to describe my identity will become irrelevant.
In the real world, no one calls a heterosexual person by their identity except when describing them as a group. In the ideal world, there won’t be a need to call anyone anything other than by their actual names. But for now – and for us here in anglophone Africa – the word queer is not a slur, but allows us to define our own identities.
In anglophone African countries, queer is a word homophobes have not yet become aware of or managed to destroy what it means for us as queer people; it is a word that has yet to gain a negative connotation.
We are queer in the sense we are different from the norm. That’s a fact.
Oppressors will always take an innocent word, destroy it and make the oppressed despise their identity. Queer doesn’t have a single meaning, it means many things that include minorities defining their own existence and their own identity. I am proud to describe myself as a queer African man.
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