By Obinna Tony-Francis Ochem
In the era of Heated Rivalry, it has become trendy to embrace queer media. Yet queer media, in and of itself, often remains confined within Western contexts. In Nigeria, queerness is celebrated in obscurity, where people gather to discuss their lived experiences, and art as a form of expression is explored in abstract. In between, however, lies “intersectionality” and the ways different LGBTIQ+ identities are portrayed in Nigerian media, often reflecting real-life experiences. Intersectionality stands out for its insistence on understanding how those at the margins of multiple identities are affected. In Kimberly Crenshaw’s social argument, she highlights Black Women in particular. Under the Udala Trees (2015) by Chinelo Okparanta, Lives of Great Men (2017) by Chike Frankie Edozien, and Walking with Shadows (2005) by Jude Dibia, though different in form and characterization, similarly bring to light the importance of intersectionality in society and how multiple factors like wealth, religion, and ethnicity reshape queer narratives and perspectives.
All three novels narrate the experience of sexual minorities in Nigeria. Under the Udala Trees follows the life of a lesbian woman named Ijeoma through her coming-of-age story, while Walking with Shadows centers on a gay man navigating life and attempting to exist in a heteronormative society. Lives of Great Men similarly details the author’s life growing up and living as a gay man.
By 2005, the Nigerian market was already rich with African Literature like Purple Hibiscus (2003) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and The Devil That Danced on the Water (2002) by Aminatta Forna, yet queerness was largely absent from mainstream storytelling until Jude Dibia took the bold step of publishing his novel. But instead of a boom, queer Nigerian literature experienced a long pause. In 2014, the Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act criminalized the existence of LGBTIQ+ Nigerians through a vaguely worded law that goes beyond marriage to target identities, depending on interpretations. In 2015, Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees opened the floodgates for a new wave of Nigerian fiction that would come to shape the literary landscape. Since then, there has been a surge of queer Nigerian writing like Freshwater (2018) by Akwaeke Emezi and Speak no Evil (2018) by Uzodinma Iweala. While many of these works share themes of identity politics around queerness, their deeper strength lies in how they explore other intersecting identities.
The overlapping themes in these works include class, gender, and sexuality. Yet when queer Nigerian novels are reviewed, the focus often remains on oppression and the struggle to exist as LGBTIQ+ in Nigeria, rather than on how intersecting identities shape these lives and affect these individuals. This may explain why, despite anti-SSMPA and other homophobic laws, urban spaces like Lagos Island remain vibrantly queer through fashion and entertainment. Class dynamics exist even within the LGBTIQ+ community in Nigeria, and they have been explored. Certain classes seem to favor queer individuals, particularly those working in the corporate sector, who are not openly or visibly queer.
In his 2017 memoir, Lives of Great Men, a gay Nigerian writer Frankie Chike Edozien narrates his life and what it meant to live as a gay man in Nigerian society in the 1990s. Edozien lived an underground life as a gay man in Nigeria. He was raised in Lagos, Nigeria, and educated partly in Port Harcourt, navigating both cities while concealing his sexuality. In the memoir, he describes living as an upper-class gay man who could afford a degree of freedom, even before the rise of digital platforms for finding community and love. As narrated in the memoir, he makes it clear that it was possible because within Nigeria’s hierarchy of LGBTIQ+ privilege, he occupied a relatively protected position as an upper-class gay man. What makes a queer Nigerian story worth telling isn’t just the queerness but the interplay of overlapping identities. Yet, these identities are often ignored while the more obvious fact that these characters are gay in a homophobic society gets foregrounded. The richness of these stories lies in their intersections and the often-messy realities they generate, but critics frequently flatten them into a single category of LGBTIQ+ stories.
A story of a wealthy and fulfilled LGBTIQ+ Nigerian may appeal to both the country’s queer readers and straight allies. For queer readers, it represents an aspirational reality, and for the allies, it offers a more positive portrayal of the country. For Western audiences to take an interest, however, it must do more than depict happy queer lives existing in Nigeria. It must tell a compelling story, and it can’t be told without required conflicts, character development, and literary tension that make these lives worth reading about. While Adrian is meant to live a life similar to that of his siblings and work colleagues, one he has earned through hard work, his outing exposes a deep sense of lack. In order to find freedom, he must leave the country. Even as a financially stable queer person in Nigeria, there remains an urgent absence in personal fulfillment when one’s life is measured against heterosexual peers in the same social bracket.
Under the Udala Tree is a love story set in the late 1960s against the backdrop of the Nigerian Civil War, centered on two women in love. As the narrative unfolds, Okparanta takes readers from the end of the war into the longings and desires that follow. Through the lives of two young girls navigating their blossoming amorous relationship in Eastern Nigeria, readers are invited to explore identity. Ijeoma and Amina are both Nigerian, yet they come from different religions and ethnic groups. As expected, Amina marries immediately after secondary school and relocates to Northern Nigeria, leaving Ijeoma heartbroken. While Ijeoma fights to claim her identity and her right to love who she chooses, Amina never makes that effort. Though Amina grew up in the East, she was shaped by a culture that expects women to marry men upon coming of age. Her personal desires are secondary to cultural and religious expectations. Immediately after secondary school, she moved north with the man whom she would marry.
In Northern Nigeria, religion has largely replaced other core aspects of identity. While the Nigerian SSMPA governs the country as a whole, twelve northern states operate under Sharia Law. In these states, Sharia prescribes the death penalty for people who engage in same sex relations, particularly those who are married. Despite Amina being a same-gender-loving woman in the same country as Ijeoma, their lived realities are starkly different. A northern Muslim Nigerian woman is heavily pressured to marry, and, in the Northern region, polygamy is widely accepted both as culture and a religious practice. The expectation is that a woman must always be attached to a man.
Walking with Shadow is visibly set in the early 2000s and centers on an upper-middle-class man. Adrain has a good job, a nice car, owns an apartment, and is married to an equally successful woman. Together, they have a daughter. His outing exposes workplace politics in Nigeria and how queer people become targets because of identities they cannot control. This is why conversations around “lavender marriages” (wherein a man and woman marry one another to disguise their true queer identities) in Nigeria remain fraught. In a country like Nigeria, where one’s identity can easily be weaponized, such arrangements can quickly create toxic work and personal environments.
Adrian is outed by a colleague affected by an investigation into workplace fraud that Adrian led. This disgruntled colleague, believing Adrian was responsible for his termination, launched a campaign suggesting the investigation was tribally motivated. He had learnt about Adrian’s sexuality during their business trip to South Africa, where Adrian was inadvertently outed by someone he knew there. In South Africa, same-sex relations were never illegal for women, but officially became legal for men in 1998. Being a good ally and acknowledging privilege requires understanding the dynamics of same-sex relationships across different countries. In deeply homophobic societies, it’s crucial to exercise caution and ask questions before discussing another person’s sexuality.
In Walking with Shadows, Adrian is financially comfortable, yet deeply conflicted; he is a gay man married to a woman and publicly outed by a disgruntled colleague, who feels betrayed. Although Adrian occupies a high position in terms of economic security and workplace hierarchy, much like a small segment of queer people in corporate Nigeria. In the novel, his story reveals how privilege does not erase vulnerability, but reshapes it.
Together, the two novels illustrate intersectionality in a country where queerness is criminalized, and gender equality remains largely mythical through the lives of Adrian, Ijeoma, and Amina. After being outed, Adrian finally embraces his sexuality and, in seeking answers to understand what he has been missing, recognizes that he lacks an environment willing to accept him. He no longer wants to perform heterosexuality, and accepting himself becomes necessary. He needed to leverage his professional standing to leave the country as the best option.
Every day, queer Nigerians leave the country in search of better lives in the United States, Canada, or Western Europe, where they can exist more fully. Queer experience is not monolithic. It spans across different thematic structures, ranging from class to education, and multiple intersecting identities. In Nigeria, there is often a refusal to acknowledge the existence of poor people or non-educated LGB people (framed here as criminalized by law). Queerness is frequently framed as something exclusive to the elite or as a product of Western influence, erasing the diversity of queer Nigerian lives.
In Nigeria, socio-political spaces often claimed that queerness is a Western invention rooted in imported ideals. Set in the late 1960s, in Under the Udala Tree, Ijeoma’s mother chastises her daughter for her same-gender attraction, almost exclusively through religion, with no reference to culture. When Ijeoma and Amina are caught together, the village teacher responds similarly, invoking religion and noting Islam also condemns lesbianism. There are no cultural or societal arguments presented against queerness as an identity, other than religion and modern social expectations that assume people exist solely to court and marry the opposite sex. This erasure is striking, especially given that many Nigerian cultures have long acknowledged diverse gender identities and oral Nigerian histories are well-documented.
Chinelo Okparanta does not follow Amina’s life in detail after she moves north, betrothed to a man she believes she loves, but her trajectory is easy to infer. Amina wants to live a life she has been taught to see as normal. In a conversation with Ijeoma while they sit under the udala tree (African star apple), it becomes clear that Amina desires marriage to a man because she believes it’s the correct and acceptable path. For someone attracted to the same gender, marriage becomes a way to feel normal, perhaps the only opportunity she believes she will ever have to access the normalcy she craves. Intersectionality, in this case, also involves modes of thinking shaped by environment and by levels of education, both formal schooling and self-education. As a gay man, I have always understood the danger of marrying the opposite sex, not just for myself but also for the other person involved. Ijeoma, however, needed to marry a man and live within that arrangement to realize fully that it was not a life meant for her.
Ijeoma marries a man who appears to understand equality on the surface level and does not leave all domestic responsibilities to his wife. Even so, she does not find fulfillment because she knows that to find true freedom requires leaving the marriage, and her best option becomes single motherhood. In Nigerian society, women who have been married and return to their father’s house with a child are often afforded more respect than women who have never been married at all. Amina, Ijeoma’s first love, marries and returns to the North to secure the social legitimacy she needs to exist. Adrian leaves Nigeria through the opportunities afforded by his job in search of a society that can acknowledge him. Ijeoma, by contrast, returns to her mother’s house.
In a society shaped by the early 80s, Ijeoma could leave her marriage, but Adrian may not have been able to do the same. This is because, in a patriarchal Nigerian society influenced by Abrahamic religion and Protestant Christianity, Adrian would lose a form of his manhood sustained by toxic masculinity. A gay person, regardless of status, remains at the lower end of the social hierarchy once their sexuality is known, because to be gay is to be perceived as a betrayal of masculinity. If the cloak unmasks, the privilege collapses. In The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, lesbians are described as gender traitors. Similarly, gay men in a patriarchal society are treated as gender traitors, stripped of power and rendered lesser by a social order that has been reshaped and rigidly enforced through Abrahamic religions frameworks in Nigeria.
Fictional and nonfiction works clearly illustrate why understanding intersectionality is important. It allows us to reflect on people’s lived experiences and how different aspects of our lives shape who we are. Queer literature, particularly Nigerian and African queer literature, goes beyond the criminalization of identities or the savior complex often imposed on Western readers. It should be examined more deeply, focusing on how intersections influence these experiences and existences. When reviewing and rating queer Nigerian literature, it’s important to recognize its non-monolithic nature and to acknowledge the deeper facets that go beyond homophobia.
Obinna Tony-Francis Ochem is a freelance writer from Nigeria who navigates topics such as gender, class, sexuality, climate change, and the shapeshifting monsters that inhabit them. His extensive freelance work can be found here: https://linktr.ee/obynofranc.