‘We decided to put together this collection of thirty narratives to correct the invisibility, the confusion, the caricaturising and the writing out of history.’

She Called Me Woman: Nigeria’s Queer Women Speak is a collection of first-hand accounts by a community telling their stories on their own terms.

This engaging and groundbreaking collection of queer women’s narratives includes stories of first time love and curiosity, navigating same-sex feelings and spirituality, growing up gender non-conforming and overcoming family and society’s expectations.

What does it means to be a queer Nigerian? How does one embrace the label of ‘woman’? While some tell of self-acceptance, others talk of friendship and building a home in the midst of the anti-same sex marriage law.

The narrators range from those who knew they were gay from a very early age to those who discovered their attraction to the same sex later in life. The stories challenge the stereotypes of what we assume is lesbian, bisexual, gay, and *trans in Nigeria and they offer us a raw, first-hand look into the lives and realities of our family, friends, neighbours and co-workers who are queer.

She Called Me Woman is out soon from Pan Macmillan in South Africa.

About the authors

Azeenarh Mohammed is a trained lawyer and a queer, feminist, holistic security trainer who spends her time training non-for-profit organisations on tools and tactics for digital and physical security and psycho-social well-being. Azeenarh is active in the queer women’s issues in Nigeria and has written on queerness and technology for publications like This is Africa, Perspectives, and Premium TimesNG.

Chitra Nagarajan is an activist, researcher and writer. She has spent the last 15 years working on human rights and peace building and is involved in feminist, anti-racist, anti-fundamentalist and queer movements. She currently lives and works in Maiduguri, Nigeria, focusing on conflict mitigation, civilian protection and women’s rights.

Rafeeat Aliyu is a writer and editor and content development consultant. She is also a documentary film producer, her first documentary Things We Carry was produced 2017 and centred on the impact of death, grieving and loss on young Nigerians. Rafeeat’s fiction has appeared in the AfroSF anthology of African science fiction, Expound magazine, Omenana and Queer Africa 2.

Categories Africa International Non-fiction

Tags Azeenarh Mohammed Chitra Nagarajan LGBTQI+ New books New releases Rafeeat Aliyu She Called Me Woman