Activism and Agency: Reflections on Emergent Queer Life Writing from Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

This article examines how queer authors from sub-Saharan Africa use writing about their lives to expose the vulnerabilities that they face in their specific communities and how they try to elude the restrictions of homophobia in their activism. I read Siya Khumalo’s You Have to be Gay to Know God (2018) and Brian Pellot’s edited collection Hopes and Dreams that Sound Like Yours: Stories of Queer Activism in Sub-Saharan Africa (2021) as autobiographical testimonies that explore means of queer activism in sub-Saharan Africa’s homophobic publics to challenge the sustenance of homophobia by dismantling its systematic ideological structures of power differentials in these societies. By championing activism, African queer writers engage in a process of creating new subjectivities that demand rights and visibility for their unthreatened presence on the continent. I argue that these life stories suggest that queer activism in sub-Saharan Africa ought to be multidimensional, inclusive, and cross-sectional to circumvent the prohibitions and restrictive forces of heteropatriarchy. The narratives also reveal that activism can become therapy and a source of resilience in the face of homophobia.