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Niya’s father was away a lot, leaving her mother in charge of the family. Niya preferred friendships with boys but these never developed into crushes. Watching the YouTube videos had confirmed to Niya that she was not alone. But where were the other gay women in Burundi? We started talking at lunch,” says Niya. “Within that conversation, we knew that we were the same. There was a shorthand, a recognition.”
Buoyed by what she found, Nella began connecting with women online. Women like her. Women who soon became her closest friends. Leila, Niya - and later Nella - formed a community. Now there are dozens of women who see themselves as Burundi’s secret lesbian collective. Some have support from their families. A few are married with children. No-one is openly out. We started talking,” says Niya, “Then one day, in the middle of a deep conversation, she turned to me and said, ‘I like women’.” Nella is now divorced but others in the group remain married. Their husbands are not aware of their sexuality. An often-cited report by Human Rights Watch in 2009 spoke with only 10 members of the LGBT+ community and only one lesbian was interviewed. The BBC has spoken to dozens.
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Whenever Todd Haynes’ unspeakably beautiful Patricia Highsmith adaptation comes to mind, it brings some of the novel’s last words along with it: “It would be Carol, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they would go together, in heaven and hell.” In that light, a spot on a list of the decade’s best films hardly seems like much of a reach. US government records say that a lesbian couple was arrested in 2012 but released. Other than that, little else is documented. Many members of the group say they have experienced violence at the hands of family members who became suspicious about their sexuality.
Burundi is well known in the Great Lakes for its vibrant nightlife. Bujumbura has fewer than 500,000 inhabitants, but maintains a vivid youth culture. The woman, while being a lesbian, was not arrested for her sexuality - the authorities were unaware of it, she believes. It was because the woman had retaliated against domestic abuse in her family home, and lashed out against her abuser. After the birth of her youngest child, Nella says she began to feel like the most isolated woman in the world. She doesn't want to go into much detail about her marriage. She says it would compromise her children’s safety. There is little data, and there has been no large-scale collection of testimony, so it is almost impossible to get an accurate picture of their lives.When her parents died, Nella's brothers increased the pressure. There was no money for an education, they said, and besides they didn't believe a woman needed one. She and a few other women go out to speak to lesbian and bisexual women in the villages. They hear about them through loose local networks, both on and offline, and through friends of friends. After months of thinking about her continuously, she needed to share her feelings. Leila texted the friend. Growing up, I used to wish that I was ‘normal’,” says Leila. “Now we joke about how we’re not normal. We say we’re aliens and we have superpowers.” Initially her mother took it badly. But as the days passed she began to ask more questions. Leila’s father was more supportive than she expected.
Nella’s husband didn’t know about her sexual identity. It wasn’t a happy marriage. The couple barely communicated and she dreaded intimacy. They could be fined or imprisoned. But there is also the danger that people within their own communities may turn on them. They meet once a month, in different places. Sometimes in public but mostly behind closed doors. Most of them are wearing jeans and T-shirts in various colours, patterns and styles. The T-shirts are important because printed on each one is a discreet, matching symbol. It’s an in-joke – a sign of their identity and independence. Something only they understand. Then something happened that she didn’t anticipate. Leila’s brother went through her phone and found the text she had sent to her friend.
When she was a teenager, Nella dreamed of going to university. But her family were constantly urging her to get married. They would introduce her to members of the extended family, in the hope they could find a match. The city, with its colonial-era Art Deco buildings surrounding a market, a football stadium and places of worship, sits on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. At 22, she met a woman who was also in her early 20s, through mutual friends. Bonding over their love of music, they formed a fast friendship. It’s hard to describe how exactly gay people meet each other in Africa,” says Leila. “You don’t have a lesbian hotspot that you can Google - a known place we can meet up.
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