‘Queer people were living, loving, suffering, surviving – but invisible’: west Africa’s groundbreaking gay novel 20 years on

Jude Dibia’s Walking With Shadows has a gay character at its heart – a radical act that continues to influence the region’s literary sceneWhen Jude Dibia first tried to sell the manuscript of his groundbreaking novel Walking With Shadows 20 years ago, he was aware of the silence around queerness in West African literature. While there had been books with gay themes, his is widely recognised as the first novel in the region to put a gay character at the heart of the story.“The absence wasn’t just literary; it was societal,” Dibia says. “Queer people were living, loving, suffering, surviving – but largely rendered invisible or spoken of in hushed tones, if at all. That silence felt violent. It felt like erasure. Continue reading...

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