By Gershwin Wanneburg

Welcome, fellow Afro-kwea lovers!  This is the third 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 #3: Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta

First of all, let me say: Chinelo Okparanta, you have my heart. For daring to write a novel that tackles so many taboos – queer love, religion, politics – all wrapped in the language of African idiom and folklore.  

Young Nigerian writers like Okparanta are clearly trying to tell us something. In the past decade, two writers from that country have produced novels that centre queer characters firmly in the history of the nation. In The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi, published in 2020, ethnic tensions provide a backdrop to the unfortunate fate of the titular character. A few years before, Okparanta attempted something even bolder in her novel Under the Udala Trees, which is set in the Biafran war in the 1960s.

Okparanta makes her intentions clear on the acknowledgments page of the book: “This novel attempts to give Nigeria’s marginalized LGBTQ citizens a more powerful voice, and a place in our nation’s history.” The use of the word “citizens” stood out for me, as one of the main objectives of the violent campaigns that African leaders have directed at their people via legislation appears to be to criminalise their very existence. Accompanied by sordid rhetoric of “un-Africanness”, the aim is obviously to alienate LGBTQ people and separate them from the rest of their larger community.

Okparanta points out that in January 2014 Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan approved a law that criminalises same-sex relationships with a prison sentence of up to 14 years. In the northern states, the punishment is death by stoning. The novel can therefore be seen as a deliberate and pointed intervention in the discourse around the treatment, or mistreatment, of LGBTQ people; the insistence that they are people, that they belong to Nigeria, and have always done so.

Under the Udala Trees tells the story of Ijeoma, whose wartime experience is filled with tragedy and abandonment. Her first sense of relief comes in the form of Amina, another youngster she falls deeply in love with while they both are suffering the losses wrought by the war.

The novel traces their love story and the travails that they experience as a result of it.  

There are certain aspects of the novel that I felt were lacking – the chronology of the structure lets the plot down somewhat, and parts of the characterisation are perhaps flat. Halfway through the novel, I had a sense of the dramatic events that unfolded, but not the psychological impact they had on Ijeoma. That could be because of the youthful perspective of the novel, which doesn’t necessarily lend itself to detailed self-examination. Or it could be that one of the key plot points unfolds early in the novel before the reader has had a chance to engage fully with Ijeoma and her motivations, in order to understand the extent of the loss and rupture that she suffers.

All that said, by the time I read the last page, I was thoroughly taken with the author’s handling of such ambitious topics. This is obviously a writer who doesn’t shy away from polemics. Sorry that I came so late to this one. I cannot wait to dive into Okparanta’s other works and I hope that this one becomes a classic.

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.