In 1997, Guinea-born filmmaker Mohamed Camara wrote and directed Dakan, the first Black African feature film to depict homosexuality. Boldly, the film opens with two high school boys, Manga Mamady Mory Camara) and Sory (Aboubacar Touré), making out in the latter’s red convertible. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and was invited, curated, and selected by several international festivals. But when it screened at FESPACO, Camara frequently changed hotels for safety and left screenings early to avoid mob action. Accepted abroad, rejected at home, that was the fate of Camara’s film. Sadly, the director never made another movie after Dakan.
In the early 1990s, when Camara made Dakan, the African continent’s perspective on queer Africans was largely shaped by a mix of colonial legal inheritance, rising HIV/AIDS stigma, and emerging political assertions that homosexuality was “un-African.” Data from Council on Foreign Relations indicated that 39 African countries criminalized same-sex sexual acts. African politicians like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe began actively promoting the narrative that homosexuality was an imported, “un-African” western vice. Scholars have noted how this politicized homophobia was used to deflect attention from domestic issues and mobilize conservative nationalist support.
Although these harmful narratives monopolized mainstream attention, they were countered by pockets of brave queer activism. On 13 October 1990, organised by Gay and Lesbian Organisation of the Witwatersrand (GLOW), the first African Pride march took place in Johannesburg, drawing about 800 participants who insisted on their human rights. Simon Tseko Nkoli, founder of GLOW, asserted that the march was inseparable from the anti-apartheid struggle. The march was a pivotal moment in South Africa’s LGBTQ+ rights movement and led to the inclusion of an equality clause in the South African constitution in 1996. Conversely, South Africa is one of only twelve countries in the world, and the only one in Africa, to explicitly protect LGBTQ+ people in its constitution.
In Marc Epprecht’s Bisexuality and the Politics of Normal in African Ethnography, he argued that as far back as the sixteenth century, Europeans reported same-sex sexual relationships in horrified terms. When nineteenth and early twentieth century anthropologists visited Africa, they rarely recorded same-sex relations. This exclusion reflects their views of sex, gender, and race. Babatunde Tribe’s experimental Between Shadows and Light was inspired by the absence of queer representation and documentation in the Nigerian archive. The film contested this political and historical erasure.
For decades, queer Africans have combated institutional, religious, and politicized homophobia with protests. Ditto African filmmakers who use cinema not just as a medium of creative expression of joy but as a form of resistance against institutional and historical erasure. From Dakan, John Trengrove’s Inxeba (The Wound), Cameroonian Céline Metzger’s documentary Coming Out of the Nkuta, Kenyan Wanuri Kahiu’s Rafiki, Peter Murumi’s documentary I Am Samuel, Jim Chuchu’s short film collection Stories of Our Lives, Nigerian Uyaiedu Ike-Etim’s Ìfé, Tope Oshin’s We Don’t Live Here Anymore, Babatunde Apalowo’s All The Colours of the World Are Between Black and White, and others, these queercentric narratives have resisted erasure and politicized homophobia. While individuals, including Nkoli, Ditsie, Bandy Kiki, Richard Akuson, Bisi Almi, others, and organizations including National Coalition of Lesbian and Gay Equality, The Initiative for Equal Rights (TIERs), Pan Africa ILGA (PAI) advocates and protests against homophobia, the prior-mentioned filmmakers and their films center queer African narratives.
It’s impossible to discuss African queer cinema without centering politics making it pivotal for African filmmakers, critics, and audiences, unmindful of their sexuality, to be concerned about the current wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation across the continent. In 2014, Nigeria, under Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, signed the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act (SSMPA). Six years after, Ikpe-Etim’s Ìfé, considered Nigeria’s first full-fledged lesbian film, was released, and the director and producer, Pamela Adie were systematically targeted. The then National Film and Video Censors Board (NFVCB) director, Adebayo Thomas, threatened them with jail terms for promoting homosexuality. Adie understands the intersection of politics and creative identity and expression. For her, navigating the space requires separating legal intimidation from creative capacity. When Ìfé and the sequel were made, the approach wasn’t to look for loopholes in the SSMPA or court the favor of the NFVCB. There was a recognition that queer stories exist independently of state validation. This led to bypassing state-controlled distribution channels and prioritizing the community through independent streaming.
Adie disagrees that the recent wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation across the continent is an organic expression of “African culture,” other than a highly orchestrated, two-fold political theater. “First, it is heavily funded by Western right-wing evangelical groups who, having lost the culture wars on “family values” in their own countries, are exporting their machinery and capital to Africa to weaponize hate.” That Ghana’s parliament recently rushed through its severe anti-LGBTQ+ bill, when Accra will be hosting the 4th African Inter-Parliamentary Conference on Family and Sovereignty, isn’t coincidental. These laws are a classic tool of state distraction. African governments, similar to Mugabe, have historically used it to distract their economic and social failures. “Goodluck Jonathan signed the SSMPA to curry favor ahead of an election he still lost. We see it clearly in Senegal right now, where the government signed a harsh 10-year anti-gay law precisely as the country faces staggering debt, a frozen IMF credit line, and severe public austerity. It is a morality theater designed to keep the public looking the wrong way.” Although there’s a rise in regressive laws, there exist countries like Botswana, Angola, Gabon, and Seychelles that have decriminalized colonial-era anti-gay laws in recent years. “As a filmmaker, my work aims to capture this complexity. The state’s control is an illusion maintained by noise, but the reality on the ground is that African queer life, and the cinema that mirrors it, is resilient, organized, and expanding.”
South African filmmaker, Sandulela Asanda, finds it ironic that African governments are denouncing queerness as un-African, whilst citing ‘Christian values’ and accepting funding from Western parties and institutions. It’s a telling sign of imperialism. Homosexuality, although with a different term and appearance, dates to pre-colonial African history. For Asanda, the disinterest in addressing this historical erasure is fueled by the disinterest of power-and-money-conscious politicians who have modelled their idea of power on a traditional white patriarchal paradigm. Queerness, in Asanda’s comment, is the antithesis of this, refusal of tradition, refusal of any binaries that colonialism has imposed on us. Thus, queer Africans are vulnerable and a threat to them.
“But, what history has also taught us is that these Western and white supremacist groups are only looking to serve themselves, and even as tools, Africans will only become blunt from use. Once you allow the dehumanisation and violence against a group of people, you also make way for the same treatment of others. If we continue to allow foreign and right-wing actors to extend their influence, then all Africans are in danger,” she concluded.
This danger is better contextualized using Nollywood. Nollywood, thanks to its production volume, is one of the most popular and watched film industries in the world. The film industry, operating under the gaze of the government and NFVCB, is structurally silent on representing queer and marginalized Nigerian life and people. The creative and political effect of this state-imposed and sponsored censorship and silence is dire. Adie explains Nollywood’s structural silence as commercial survival masquerading as cultural preservation. Censorship doesn’t just create an illusion but actively degrades creative expression and distorts artists’ ability to portray reality. The state’s anxiety about protecting its image affects how its institutions are depicted. Filmmakers cannot freely depict authentic queer life, police uniforms, or accurately depict prisons, police brutality, or state corruption without inviting severe regulatory backlash from the NFVCB or other institutions. This state-imposed sanitization is the exact same machinery used to enforce the silence around queer Nigerian life.
The Nigerian state uses censorship to control the national narrative and decide who belongs. By banning the reality of state violence on one hand, and criminalizing the reality of queer existence on the other, the state uses Nollywood to present a fabricated, monolithic society. When queer cinema gets censored, the state isn’t just banning intimacy, it’s censoring the truth of how marginalized people survive within these very state institutions, including our policing and prison systems.
“We saw a glaring consequence of this recently when the trailer for a new Nollywood series on Netflix dropped. It featured a prison scene where the inmates wore jumpsuits, looking less like a Nigerian correctional facility and more like an episode of Orange Is the New Black. The public criticized it as unrealistic and detached. But what looks like a lack of directorial imagination(although it could very well be that) could actually be the structural byproduct of censorship. When the state criminalizes the depiction of its grim realities, filmmakers are forced to substitute authentic local textures with sanitized, Westernized proxies just to clear regulatory hurdles.” The effects are deep and far-ranging. “When cinema is forbidden from capturing life in its true form, it fundamentally alters our history. It dictates what is remembered, what is lost, and how people think of themselves as a society. Mainstream Nollywood’s compliance means that instead of cinema acting as an authentic historical archive of all its people, it functions as an extension of state propaganda, maintaining a sanitized facade while erasing the true, complex forms of Nigerian life,” Adie concludes.
The existence of queer media shows that homophobia and homophobic legislation hasn’t stopped African creatives from telling queer-centric stories. But with the ongoing legislation, it’s important to interrogate the specific and general “effect” or “change” these legislations will have on individual filmmakers, their films, the queer community, and cinema. Ghanaian multidisciplinary artist Joewackle Kusi mentioned that Ghanaian cinema has historically leaned towards systems of moral, religious, and political regulation while being didactic. From colonial censorships to post-independence classification authorities, film has been treated as requiring constant surveillance. For him, there’s an urgent need for the representation of minorities in all artforms, not as abstract political controversies, but as intimate, everyday narratives.
The most immediate, tragic effect of the ongoing legislation is the total erasure of queer-positive stories from domestic screens. There is currently no cinema in Nigeria that can show a queer film. This isn’t just a loss for the queer community; it is a profound starvation of the entire Nigerian film industry. By locking out an entire spectrum of human experience, we consciously deny our cinema the complex, intriguing storylines that drive artistic growth. Instead, the domestic audience is fed a cyclical loop of repetitive, safe narratives, which fundamentally stunts Nollywood’s evolution as a global creative powerhouse. Queer African filmmakers are forced into a complicated migratory pattern. Filmmakers turn towards international film festivals and institutions to screen and discuss queer-positive stories. As Camara’s story exemplifies, it’s an uphill battle trying to get continental distribution. When filmmakers bypass local censor bodies by turning to independent streaming platforms, they are often forced to charge in US dollars or other foreign currencies, which prices out the very local audiences we want to reach. Global access is still limited. YouTube’s algorithms frequently suppress queer content, hiding it from view, while major global streaming services that acquire independent films rarely invest the marketing capital needed to push them to the forefront.
“The ongoing legislation forces us into a state of hyper-innovation, but at an immense cost. It means we cannot just be directors and writers; we have to be digital architects. We are forced to build our own tables from scratch, whether that means developing independent, decentralized streaming platforms or negotiating hard for visibility on global networks. The legislation hasn’t stopped us from telling stories though, but it has created a fragmented ecosystem where making the film is only ten percent of the struggle; the real battle is fighting ,through the algorithmic and financial walls just to be seen,” Adie concludes.
Although Asanda lives in a country whose Constitution enshrines rights and protections for the LGBTQI+ community, she still thinks queer Africans are still in danger from the attitudes that come with this wave of legislation. “We are still experiencing loss in the form of hate crimes against queer people in South Africa. There is still a lot of conservatism in the country, and this may rise with this wave. This then could impact the acceptance of queer stories on screens and in homes, leaving young queer people without anything to see themselves in and me, possibly unable to make the work that I love.” As a queer filmmaker, she’s also aware that her work might have limited distribution on the continent due to its queer narratives. “Will this also now extend to me as an individual? My personal mission as a filmmaker has been to expand the representation of LGBTQI+ people in the media. This is also a political mission for me, that has now become much more urgent than before. I’m now thinking about how I can make work that resists, that empowers and that dreams of a better future for queer Africans.”
When quizzed what would it take — politically, socially, culturally — for queer African cinema to exist without apology and state “control”, the three filmmakers have variant but converging responses. For Asanda, aside from repealing any anti-LGBTQI+ legislation in Africa, she believes there needs to be a commitment towards anti-imperialism and all its influences. There also need to be clear, solid, and reliable protections for the community against hate and violence. A society-wide understanding that the existence of queer people is not a threat is important. This will include the need for normalisation, queer Africans are everywhere, and shouldn’t have to hide like some boogeyman. “We should be seen and acknowledged in every facet of society, as part of society, the economy, and culture. I guess what I am describing is the principle of Ubuntu, that a person can only be a person through others. That our value is how we see each other as humans. Once we can do that as a society, and become united, it provides the freedom and safety for queer Africa to exist and flourish.”
For Kusi, groundbreaking queer African films like Camara’s Dekan, Trengrove’s Inxeba, Kahiu’s Rafiki, Apalowo’s All The Colours …, and his Nyame Mma are seen as forms of resistance against the political climate under which they were made. For decades, African films like these are mostly for foreign audiences, academic spaces, and international festivals, instead of the people whose experiences inspired these. “Queer cinema existing without apology means making these films accessible to local audiences: local cinemas, and community screenings. The more films are made accessible, the easier it becomes to move boundaries of what is allowed to be shown.”
Politically, Adie mentions, it requires the outright repeal of colonial-era laws and modern totalitarian legislation like the SSMPA. The continued existence of the legislation means the state will always weaponize its regulatory bodies to criminalize the art. Socially and culturally, however, the shift cannot wait for state permission; it requires a complete restructuring of Nigeria’s economic and technological autonomy. When she produced Ìfé, she didn’t just stop at making the film but built an independent digital platform to host and distribute it. As she told Culture Custodian, the issues she faced weren’t a lack of audience appetite or a shortage of compelling content. The platform ultimately became unsustainable due to systemic financial constraints and banking restrictions. “The profound irony is that while Ìfé is currently banned from domestic screens, it is being taught in universities and film schools outside Nigeria to educate global students on queer African cinema.”
Nigerian audiences are the ones missing out on their own cultural archive. For queer African cinema to exist without apology, queer filmmakers must secure intentional, substantial financial investment to build and sustain independent distribution ecosystems. The existence of robust pan-African co-production frameworks and secure decentralized streaming platforms that can withstand state interference and bypass global algorithmic gatekeepers is pivotal too. “True artistic freedom is fundamentally tied to economic independence. When we have the resources to fund, sustain, and distribute our own work, the state’s censorship machinery becomes entirely irrelevant. We cross the line from begging for acceptance to asserting our permanence,” Adie concluded.
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