Meanwhile…

The lived realities of young queer people in
African contexts are not well documented. On the one hand, homophobic
political discourse tends to portray queer people as ‘deviant’ and
‘unAfrican’, and on the other, public health research and advocacy often
portrays them as victims of violence and HIV. Of course, young queer
lives are far more diverse, rich and complex. For this reason, the Qintu
Collab was formed to allow young queer people from a few African
countries to come together, share experiences and create
context-specific, queer-positive media that documents relatablestories
about and for queer African youth. We see this as a necessary step in
developing a complex archive of queer African life, whilst also
personalising queer experiences and challenging prejudicial stereotypes.

The
Collab is made up of eighteen queer youth from Botswana, Kenya and
Zimbabwe, two academics, three artists and a journalist. We first worked
in small groups in each country through a range of creative
participatory methods that focused on personal reflection and
story-telling. Young people created personal timelines, and made visual
maps of their bodies, relationships, and spaces. We then had group
discussions about themes that emerged to help decide what to include in
the comic works. At the end of 2018, we all came together in Nairobi,
Kenya, for a week to collaborate on this comic book, and a set of
podcasts on similar topics. We worked through various ways of telling
stories, and developed significant themes, including family, religion
and spirituality, social and online queer spaces, sex, and romantic
relationships. Each young person created a script and laid out the
scenes for a comic that told a short story from their lives. They then
worked one-on-one with an artist to finesse those ideas into a workable
comic, andthe artists thereafter developed each story through multiple
rounds of feedback from the story’s creator and the rest of the group.