• Robert Philipson

Long before modern sexual identities reached the East African coast, the Swahili shoga occupied a recognized place in women’s society, until colonialism and later Western frameworks remade them.

• Nyasha Karimakwenda

Despite renewed efforts to criminalize and erase queerness, LGBTQ Africans continue to challenge the myth that their lives and identities are somehow un-African.

• Rama Salla Dieng

As debt mounts and police violence on campuses goes unanswered, Senegal’s government is targeting its queer citizens.

• Jordache Ellapen

South Africa’s visual culture reveals that its racial categories were never fixed, while the history of indenture complicates the terms of solidarity and exclusion.

• Shelley Pryde

In echoing the anti-trans panic sweeping the Global North, South African political heavyweight Helen Zille joins a reactionary tradition of racialized sex policing.

• Lee Nxumalo

From trans bans to racial exclusion, the hard-won gains made in women’s football are being rolled back under the guise of protecting women.

• Ani Kayode Somtochukwu

Anti-queer laws in Africa are often framed as cultural defense — but their roots lie in colonial legacies, religious nationalism, and global reactionary alliances.

• Elsa N Kariuki

As political discontent rises in Kenya, silencing women’s and queer rights in the pursuit of economic justice risks compromising the movement entirely.

• Muriithi Kariuki

Homophobia doesn’t start with violence — it begins with silence, erasure, and everyday destruction. But straight people only seem to notice when it’s too late.

• Maher Mezahi

Removed from the facts, the firestorm around Algerian boxer Imane Khelif is the latest attempt by the right-wing in the West to find fodder for its culture war.

• Caio Simões de Araújo

A solidariedade socialista na Angola e Moçambique pós-coloniais tornou as pessoas queer invisíveis. Revisitar esse apagamento nos ajuda a reinventar a libertação de forma legítima.

• Caio Simões de Araújo

Socialist solidarity in postcolonial Angola and Mozambique rendered queer people invisible. Revisiting this erasure helps us imagine liberation anew.

• Aude Konan

La Côte d’Ivoire peut-elle devenir un havre de paix pour les communautés LGBTQI+ en Afrique de l’Ouest?

• Aude Konan

Could Côte d’Ivoire one day become a safe haven for LGBTQI+ communities in West Africa?

• Welcome Mandla Lishivha

Telling one's story as a black queer person isn't yet the luxury it is chalked out to be, especially when it remains dangerous to be queer in the world.

• Keith Mundangepfupfu

Although visibility is important, contemporary queer African literature reveals how easily representation privileges narratives of the resourceful and upwardly mobile.

• Promise Frank Ejiofor

How does it feel to be gay in an environment where homophobia is mundane and rampant, and where gays are silenced, ridiculed, and assaulted in everyday life?

• Lizzy Attree

Kayo Chingonyi's latest poetry collection is a powerful meditation on the cycle of infection, death, and mourning wrought by HIV.

• Maya Bhardwaj

Queer Indians are largely invisible in South Africa's LGBT discourse. But representation is not enough, we need political transformation and multi-racial class solidarity.

• Simon Adetona Akindes

In the second of five articles on Afrobeat music in South America, political scientist Simon Akindes writes about the all women and nonbinary Brazilian band, Funmilayo Afrobeat Orquestra.