Welcome, fellow Afro-kwea lovers!  This is the second installment of my Afro-kwea literature mission. I decided to embark on this mission after my recent disappointment with how we are viewed in other parts of the world. My goal is to read solely Afro-kwea books for at least the next year. Aside from my anger at the dismissal of African lives elsewhere, this ambition was also motivated by a new wave of homophobia that has spread across the continent — and indeed in other countries. It’s hard to say who inspired whom. 

My goal is to counter this intolerance by doing my bit to increase our visibility. 

It is a strange and unsettling feeling when you realise that you are an endangered species in the place you have called home your whole life; the place you have dedicated your entire productive life to. Truly, the feeling of being rendered homeless in your own home is a mind-bending, soul-twisting feeling of being cast away, put out, left defenceless, and deliberately, for dead.

For the past twenty years, from my post on the tip of Africa, I have recorded the stories of my immediate and wider community. Trawling through my journalistic archives recently, I came across stories about the transition from apartheid; the HIV/Aids pandemic; crises in neighbouring Zimbabwe, and, much further afield, the Congo and Sudan.

My output documents a troubled continent, to be sure, but also one that is trending, albeit ever so gradually, toward democratic rule. Perhaps it is my residual 1994 optimism (or my refusal to accept that we have strayed hopelessly from those euphoric days) but any news of strife in these parts still catches me off-guard. Africa is vast, but I cannot help but consider every inch of it part of my neighbourhood — blame Thabo Mbeki’s poetic pan-African aspirations for sullying my mind in my easily inspired 20s. 

Already we have seen prominent politicians like Helen Zille mimicking Trumpian/Republican Party slogans about anti wokeism, a harbinger of what could come if we do not ward off these ideologies before they take root. In case you didn’t know how far the political pendulum has swung in South Africa, Zille was the same woman who revealed evidence that the death of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko was not an accident, but caused by injuries inflicted by security officers while Biko was in prison in 1977.   

These considerations aside, opposing anti-democratic tendencies anywhere is the right thing to do – for all our sakes. Not only that: it is the pro-African thing to do. Along with climate change, gender equity, anti-poverty strategies, homophobia, transphobia and other forms of discrimination are counter to everything that our best leaders have strived for since the independence movements of the 1950s and 1960s. No matter how many roads, clinics, schools, and power stations we build, collectively and individually, we will never reach our fullest economic, political and human potential — inscribed in so many declarations and speeches since 1963 — if we do not respect the fundamental rights to life and dignity of LGBTQ folk. Emphasis on the latter — folk, people, kin, our very own. 

My Afro-kwea Journal, entry #2: The Death of Vivek Oji By Akwaeke Emezi

A very fragrant novel. Every second page includes references to florals of varying shades, shapes and smells: roses, hibiscus, bougainvillea—as if the author is garlanding the characters with a world they are clearly enchanted with. Interestingly, only the young people speak in the first person, including the title character, Vivek Oji, whose rendering is one of the most beautiful descriptions of a queer persona and sexuality that I have ever read. From birth to death, there is an air of reverence and mystique around Vivek’s existence, which is enacted not only in the language but also in the structure of the novel, as it gradually reveals clues about what happened to Vivek. The way these glimpses appear in the story serves as much more than an intriguing plot device. It suggests the hidden nature of Vivek’s life, which is left lingering even at the end of the novel. Perhaps it’s a function of the author’s youth and the modern setting of the novel, but there is no shame attached to Vivek’s queerness. The shame mainly belongs to the third-person elders and those who despise Vivek. Despite the dark material being dealt with in the novel, there is a delicateness to the storytelling. 

The violent act of the title does not feature heavily; that honour goes to the grief of Vivek’s loved ones. The story is also a paean to photography, in a very surprising way, and a tribute to a group of largely Asian immigrants who have settled in Nigeria and married local men. The Nigerwives, as they call themselves, form their own subcommunity, sharing problems and recipes, and they pass their solidarity on to their children. 

For me, perhaps the most important aspect of the novel is the fact that it situates Vivek’s demise in a larger cultural context, where violence has become a customary response to real or imagined threats, felt by those on the lowest rung of society; in other words, anti-queerness is not innate to this community, but it has become a byproduct of larger social problems and disaffection, manifested by Islamophobic and xenophobic resentment and violence. 

Whether dealing with the interior lives of its major or minor characters, this is a deeply humanising novel. The loving, tender descriptions of Vivek, including the character’s sensuality (which I will leave to the reader to discover) are queer life-affirming. The significance of that cannot be overestimated when it comes to queer lives and African lives in general.

Gershwin Wanneburg is a South African writer and editor, whose career credentials include Reuters news agency and the African Development Bank. See more of his work on Substack, on his website, his blog purpletolavender, and on Instagram at gershwinwanneburg.