Minority Africa

10/10/2025

In January 2014, the Nigerian government established the Same S*x Marriage Prohibition Act (SSMPA), one of the severe anti-q***r laws in the world. Since the introduction of the Act, LGBTQ+ individuals in the country have not only found it unsafe to live as regular persons; censorship and homophobia in art spaces across the country have also deepened.

Yet, many q***r artists are finding their feet in major cities like Ibadan, expressing themselves through various art forms despite pushback. In 2023, Ibadan Qu**rs (IQs), in collaboration with Tantdile Xperimenta Lab, organised Mas-Q-Raid, a successful arts festival aimed at celebrating the creative ways q***r writers and artists in Ibadan are living their truth. Several of these artists would go on to receive support and funding from local and international institutions.

Read more here: https://minorityafrica.org/they-stayed-in-a-communal-nigerian-city-and-built-a-home-for-q***r-art/

09/10/2025

In Northern Nigeria, religious beliefs have long shaped women’s access to reproductive health. But as our video contributor .yya finds through conversations with women at the Sarah’s Project, a quiet shift is underway - one where young women are beginning to choose knowledge and care over silence and stigma.

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07/10/2025

“I mostly use the nets to fish. But they are heavy. It will take about eight or ten of us by hand,  to pull from the sand into the water. We go thirty or forty feet deep with the nets. But then we have to split the catch between all of us. I don’t own a boat. 

Many fish here, not just from the villages. But the bigger boats, the haulers that come from other places. They take so much. No one here can compete with that, even with a canoe. They say the government is stopping this now, with a new fisheries act. Doubling the area where they cannot go, or overfish. I feel very hopeful about this.

The sea is steady. Even when there is no money, we can always eat. That is what keeps us going. We are proud of our fathers and grandfathers, but we do not want only this until we die. By being a fisherman you also have other work to live. I work construction and I’m a labourer. I would like to build a construction school.

I was building a raffia fence when I first met Jr and he asked if he could take my picture.”

We spent time with Mockeye and Kesse Yaki, two Gen Z fishermen in Beyin(Ghana), as they wrestle with wanting to honour fishing traditions, the promise of new protections, and the hope that one day the boats they fish on will be their own.

03/10/2025

02/10/2025

A chosen name is an identity, not a label.

In this video, our contributor explains why it matters and how using someone’s chosen name is one of the simplest ways to show respect.

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01/10/2025

“’Besse Beyin’ for us means “proudly and loudly celebrate Beyin”, and we do this through our community, lifestyle, and how we make a living. But we also need stable sources of income and choices too.

Everyone here fishes; everyone always has. The sea puts food on the table and connects us to the past, but it does not always give us a future. Still, we can’t turn away from it either—it is where we come from and who we are. But I don’t want to fish my whole life. I have done this since childhood, and so has most of the village. I’m proud of it, but it cannot be my only path. I want to own a boat and run a fishing business.

Now we either fish by hand with nets or go out in the canoes. We use bamboo to push out from the shore, then wooden oars to row. You have to be strong. The older men own the boats. For us, there is no security, no chance to own something of our own. So I am also a rapper and have a shop selling T-shirts as souvenirs to tourists. We cannot live off fishing alone.

Before, the government forced us to stop for whole seasons, and we would fish to eat, not to work. Now, they say we can keep fishing. If we could get our own canoe, a motor, or even satellite tracking, we could keep traditions alive and be updated. We don’t want to abandon what our ancestors gave us, but we also don’t want to die only splitting a catch ten ways. We want something that can last.”

We spent time with Mockeye and Kesse Yaki, two Gen Z fishermen in Beyin, as they wrestle with wanting to honour fishing traditions, the promise of new protections, and the hope that one day the boats they fish on will be their own.

25/09/2025

In rural parts of central Mozambique, the ghosts of a 15-year civil war have not yet vanished.

At 14, Beau Pinto’s father pulled her out of school in Chikwidzire, a remote district 100km from Manica, and forced her to become the fourth wife of a much older man. But the marriage was not for love — it was a kind of spiritual score-settling meant to appease the restless spirit of a young man her uncle had killed during the war decades earlier.

Among the Ndau ethnic group, the historically impoverished majority in Chikwidzire, so-called “appeasement marriages” are often still demanded of girls as compensation for wartime killings. The belief is that if a man is murdered, his spirit will return to torment the killer’s family with sickness, death, madness, or mysterious accidents. If the victim was unmarried, the spirit is said to require a “spiritual wife” from the offender’s family.

These practices are not unique to the Ndau: variations exist across Mozambique, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Malawi, reflecting the persistence of deep-rooted spiritual traditions. In Mozambique, such rituals were entangled with the country’s brutal 1977 – 1992 civil war, when the chaos of conflict often merged with personal vendettas and ritual obligations.

Read more here:

Forced into marriages to appease spirits of slain men, young girls in rural Mozambique still face a hidden cycle of trauma that persists decades after the 1977-1992 civil war.

11/09/2025

The research they conducted to support these theories involved measuring, body casting, and highly invasive examinations of people they considered to be on the lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder.

And at the bottom of that ladder, in their view, were the Aboriginal people of Australia and the Bushmen of the Kalahari. They measured people for hours, took photographs—often focusing especially on genitalia—and exhumed the graves of recently deceased individuals.

Read more on our website here: https://minorityafrica.org/the-scientist-who-robbed-the-kalahari-of-its-dead/

09/09/2025

Our Executive Editor, Okereke, has been named one of the International News Media Association’s ( ) 2025 “30 Under 30” awardees out of 238 applicants worldwide.

This award is a global recognition celebrating 30 outstanding young leaders from 16 countries who are reshaping the future of news media.

🔗 Learn more about the award and this year’s honorees here: (link in our bio)

05/09/2025

Did you know Germany committed its first genocide before the Holocaust, in Africa?

From 1904 to 1908, German troops killed tens of thousands of Herero and Nama people in Namibia through mass killings, desert death marches, and concentration camps.

Germany recognised it as genocide in 2021, but many say the €1.1B offered isn’t enough.

In this series, “History in 90 seconds”, we bring to light the histories you may have missed.

▶️ the video to watch more.

04/09/2025

Beyond increasing and emboldening Nigeria’s homophobia, the signing of the SSMPA affected q***r Nigerians in deep, personal ways. For many who are old enough to remember the shift—from ‘subtle homophobia’ that could still be legally contested to the state-backed variety that became the norm—the law left scars they are yet to overcome. For many of them, David’s words—“This isn’t home for me anymore”— are a sentiment they share and live with daily.

Read new story on our website here: https://minorityafrica.org/this-isnt-home-for-me-anymore-a-decade-under-nigerias-anti-gay-law/

30/08/2025

We spoke to students at Madonna University, a private Catholic school in Nigeria, who allege school officials searched their phones for gay-related messages and punished those they accused. Madonna University did not respond to our request for comment.

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