Voices for Change – The Wins They Can’t Legislate

Written by: Elle Khaoma

Have you ever wondered what survival looks like in a country that insists upon your demise while simultaneously refusing to acknowledge your existence? Well, if you haven’t, I am here to tell you there is something to be said about the cognitive dissonance brought about by being constantly berated for supposedly adopting an “imported” identity, even as they name it in a language that sounds just like home. If I did not exist back then and I am denied the right to exist now, where else can I carve out space for myself, except in the future?

Queer Joy and the Art of Being Free

The Kenyan queer liberation movement was founded through imagining the future — a refusal to accept the conditions previously hailed as set in stone. The first formal LGBTIQ+ rights organising in the country began from addressing lack; a lack of access to healthcare, a lack of spaces for queer joy and more broadly, a lack of meaningful inclusion and acknowledgement in mainstream culture and society. Even as the echoes of a western-funded anti-rights movement on the continent began to hit a crescendo, the Kenyan queers had already figured something powerful out: Not all our battles needed to be (nor could they be) won within the court systems.

This was not about rejection of the formal NGO-and-Advocacy/Activism route towards liberation; it was about finding ways to sow seeds of existence, recognition and long-term survival in places beyond the state mechanisms built on colonial foundations. It meant looking at yourself and your community, then asking “what am I already doing well and how can I leverage on it?”. So, we took it, not (just) to the streets, but to the theatre, the art rooms, the dance and recording studios, the makeup and beauty industries, and most recently, to the various glowing, rectangular boxes that digitally shape social norms, culture, entertainment and discourse.

A Pride event in the heart of Siaya. A gender-non-conforming fashion show in Kisumu. An organised hike for 200 queers in Kiambu County. A series of balls in Nairobi, packed wall-to-wall with elaborately adorned queers and vogue femme performers. Queer beauty influencers, turning mainstream makeup counters and runways into spaces of reinvention. Against the backdrop of growing legislative threats, we are in a renaissance of queer Africans reclaiming their right to exist, publicly.

Home wasn’t given to us. Pride helped us build it.

For the longest time, whenever I pictured my first Pride event, I imagined a street littered with rainbows somewhere far away from home, Europe maybe. And yet, this was not the case. My first Pride event was in 2019, a Pride month “thrift-swap” in the middle of Nairobi, in an event space I had been to a million times before, with performing drag kings and familiar, friendly faces. In that moment (and ever since then), I understood that for me, queer joy will always be at the centre of liberation. It does not exist only as a reward for survival; it is the fuel behind it.

Queer Kenyans have always understood that our liberation would not simply be handed from the courts; it is intentionally carved out in the (sometimes) quiet defiance of showing up authentically for yourself. It may not always be within the confines of the places we first considered home, but it allows us to expand our definitions of where “home” is. That is a truth that belongs to all queer persons fighting to carve out spaces for themselves across the globe. We are here. We are growing. And despite how it may sometimes feel, we are NOT going anywhere.

This blog was written by Elle Khaoma. Elle is a queer African content creator and digital communications strategist, working at the intersection of storytelling, community, and liberation. They work as the Social Media Associate/Comms Lead at KIOS grantee The National Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (NGLHRC).

The text continues our blog series Voices for Change, amplifying the voices of human rights defenders from the Global South.