Obodo Nigeria’s Vision for Queer West African Creativity

“In the next 10 years, I want Obodo to be the biggest funders of queer arts and culture in West Africa” Matthew ‘Blaise’ Nwozaku says this as a parting statement over a Google Meet call from their Lagos residence. It had been three days since the Friends and Neighbours Festival, a gathering of queer creatives and folk in Lagos, which took place from 1st to 3rd October, 2026. Blaise was deep into post-event evaluation, receiving largely positive feedback about their most recent programming at Obodo Nigeria, the non-profit organisation they founded in 2022 to empower queer artists and the queer community. People needed more than a regular literary and arts festival. Obodo brought that dream to reality. Some people didn’t even know just what was needed until their first steps into the venue. And then they knew. 

Obodo, named after the Igbo word for ‘village’ or ‘community,’ might appear larger than life in its offerings. The non-profit’s programs Obodo Nigeria’s Vision for Queer West African Creativity

page, for instance, shows a multiplicity of events, funding opportunities, and resources, geared towards meeting creative needs and beyond. This is quite intentional and has been the organisation’s playbook from the inception, even when it was far from status quo renown. The idea was always to make people feel at home, with Blaise sharing that Obodo is as much a safe net as it is a home away from society’s noise; a moving site of documentation towards creating change. The lineup of speakers and sessions on all three Friends and Neighbours days lend further credence to their self-proclaimed ethos. On Day 1, Arinze Ifeakandu and Bangani Njalo held masterclasses in fiction writing and visual arts, respectively, while a session focused on Pan-African queer solidarity, which Blaise would later expound on as we spoke. Day 2 featured intimate workshops on ‘queer storytelling as community memory’ and collage storytelling—the former’s importance having increased over time as the internet democratises documentation. Day 3 was the motherlode, including a photography workshop with Temiloluwa Johnson and Rachel Seidu,  a session tackling what a Pan-African network looks like beyond language and the performance of friendship, facilitated by Rhema Omeh, talks on Law and Art, and creative accountability in cultural production, by A.N Okoyomoh, and Adebayo Quadri and Emmanjel Ndefo, respectively. That’s aside from film screenings on the final two days, among the lighter moments of fanfare. 

For an event more than three years in the making, Friends and Neighbours lived up to Blaise’s vision, one they recall dreaming up while in an entirely different country. “I’ve been thinking about the idea of a festival for a while. Three years ago, back in Nairobi, a group of activists, artists, and cultural workers were brought together by the Goethe Institute to think about what they’d like to do within the region, yearly or bi-annually, if they were given that support.” They recall having different ideas, not particularly zeroed in. “Last year, there was the Kinfolk Festival in Nairobi, sponsored by Goethe Institute. This year, it just happened coincidentally that I had been thinking of hosting a festival and the fund was coming to Nigeria, so I thought of realising these ideas through the support of Goethe.”

Deeper soulsearching, however, dates the idea farther down in time. Blaise shares that they’ve had a longstanding fascination with society’s basic unit. And while that’s morally didactic in a manner one might not typically expect of liberal spaces, this holds true regardless. “When things are not gotten right from the foundation, there are a lot of problems. A lot of thinking was from that lens that we need to do something for our foundation, which came with the idea of Friends and Neighbours, and we could also see that as a basic unit of society. I was quite interested in African queer friendship across borders. How they restrict our understanding of people, shape societal discourse and make us turn against each other instead of bringing us together, and how they influence how we interact with ourselves. Given that a flight from here [Nigeria] to Europe is way cheaper than a flight within Africa, I think that this also has messed up our perception of queer friendships across African countries. An African will most likely prefer to go to Europe and be friendly than they would with [other queer] Africans.” 

But they don’t want you to just take their word for it alone, citing feedback from attendees who sought more than a regular literary and arts festival. People reported feeling seen and validated in their identity and politics, going beyond mere conversations about sexuality and gender to pragmatic engagement with how these identities intersect with issues like the commodification of friendships and romantic relationships due to the economic situation. The festival, which was co-produced by Obodo Nigeria programs director, A.J Okoyomoh, and Folake Adesanya, drew from writer and activist Belle Hooks’ quote about love being the foundation of society. As an organisation at the front lines of queer advocacy in a Nigeria where the 2013 Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act is used as a framework to defend harmful, often fatal, acts of homophobia, reflecting on this divisiveness in society in a safe space was itself invaluable. 

This is why the organisation keeps investing in queer creativity and safe gatherings—combining both for the most part in a particularly busy 2026. In April, Obodo announced winners of their World Poetry Day contest. In June, they began the first of 5 sessions exploring rest, creativity, and community through indigo dyeing, in partnership with Indigo Circle.  That same month, a legal session on the right to queer assembly fittingly tagged ‘The Assembly’ also held. Interspersed between all of these were Book Club meetings, among other gatherings at Obodo’s physical hub. More recently, Obodo had a ‘Wellness Corner’ at the Group Collective’s V7, one of the major checkpoints in Lagos’ buoyant rave scene.  

However, what piques this writer’s interest the most are the Obodo Artists Fund, and the subsequent exhibitions of the products of the fund. This year, the exhibitions were held under the umbrella name ‘The Ellipsis.’ with 12 artists awarded, after a pilot grant of $3,000 to 7 artists, last year. Photography. 3D artistry. Performance art. Sculpture. Oil painting. Film. Podcasts. The cohort was a diverse affair, criss-crossing everything from Ìṣẹ̀ṣe worship to a film about the japa crisis and an esoteric performance hinged on a fictional euphoria pill. 

While attending Day 2 of The Ellipsis: Worlds Between Here and Home, it was impossible not to appreciate just how much raw expression was imprinted, regardless of artistic medium. Precious Harry’s Ase: Letters to Shadows, a celebratory documentary about Nigerian transmen, screened to grand applause, and a smattering of teary eyes. And with documentation through the forthcoming Port/Harbor Anthology, a sister of sorts to The Shit and the Sunrise anthology which accompanied the initial cohort. “What is there to reclaim? How do we use art to ensure we aren’t erased?,” they ask. Because everything has to lead back to documentation. And documentation itself is important for change. Already, this year’s fund has birthed fruits beyond the initial exhibition. One of the artists, Rachel Seidu, paired with a mentor from the Fund, had a solo exhibition in Berlin courtesy of the relationship. She also paid it forward with the photography workshop at Friends and Neighbours alongside her fellow 2026 Obodo Artist Fund recipient, Temiloluwa Johnson. 

Admittedly, they explain that programming has not been without its challenges, chief among which is funding. “This is a relatively new area. You don’t really have a lot of people funding artists in Nigeria. You have most of these institutions outside and you need to know someone to know someone to access these opportunities within these networks. That’s what we tried to cover.” As difficult as sourcing money has been, the joy of empowering artists financially makes up for it, a smiling Blaise shares as our conversation winds down. “I have these moments when I’m tired and so stressed from looking for funding. And I come into the Obodo space and someone tells me how something we’ve done changed their lives and I feel energetic and I go again. These little moments of testimonies make it all worth it.”

Ultimately, the vision for Obodo is to be a home for queer West African hearts and to queer West African art. Blaise sees Obodo as an intermediary funder that gets money and pushes it to queer artists doing impactful work, while funding infrastructure for queer Africans to live in. They want queer African creatives telling the ‘crazy’ stories. “Don’t try to water it down. Don’t try to box your imagination. Allow your minds wander. Allow yourself to think outside the box. Don’t stop telling the story.”  All with one friend and neighbour at a time.