South Africa celebrates pride month throughout October, in honor of the first pride march in the country organised by the Gay and Lesbian Organisation of the Witwatersrand [GLOW]. At that time, it was still illegal to be anything other than cis-gendered and heterosexual, and Simon Nkoli, a key figure in Africa’s queer history, said:
“I am black and I am gay. I cannot separate the two parts of me into secondary and primary struggles. In South Africa, I am oppressed as a black person. And I am oppressed because I am gay. So when I fight for my freedom, I must fight for both oppressions. All intolerance. All injustice.”
The #VisibleWikiWomen campaign is an embodiment of our aspirations to organize in collaboration and in solidarity with our feminist partners, movements and friends looks like; from gathering African feminists at our first photobooth in Lusaka, in 2022, to speaking up in solidarity with African feminists and queer activists who were arrested in Zambia last year. Partnering with the incredible people at the Forum for the Empowerment of Women (FEW) to document Soweto Pride last September, was a continuation of this solidarity.
Initiated by the FEW in 2004, Soweto Pride is described as a political project whose aim is to create and make political and social space for black lesbian women to create visibility and amplify their voices, as well as to engage with community organizations and the broader local community people in Soweto. The march is utilized as a political vehicle to confront homophobia and discrimination experiences by LGBTIQA+ folks, especially those living in townships in South Africa.
Queer organizing has always been at the center of feminist and anti-colonial liberations. In the case of Soweto Pride, it was born out of anti-apartheid organizing in South Africa, the township – Soweto itself was an epicenter of radical community organizing against the racist apartheid South African government. Its pride march also exists as an alternative to the apolitical, mostly white pride parades in South Africa.
Jade Madingwane, from the Forum for the Empowerment of Women, describes it as follows:
“Soweto Pride is not a parade, it is a march. It is a political event because we are always putting our bodies on the line as black LGBTQI+ people in and around Soweto… it is about the politics of bodies, politics of sexuality, politics of sexual orientation and gender identity.”
Through the lens of queer non-binary Johannesburg photographer Ayanda Msiza, so many beautiful images were taken and shared with us. We wanted to save them for a special occasion, or at least hoped the right moment would find us. We could not think of a better time than the year when our #VisibleWikiWomen campaign theme is feminist solidarity, liberation, and peace. The interconnected struggles highlighted through the Soweto Pride re-echo that our resistance is plural.
Further, LGBTQ+ initiatives on the African continent often struggle with permanence, as most of our governments are hostile to queer communities. The threat of archives of queer life being destroyed is ever-present. Record-keeping can be difficult and is often done in secret, with great personal risk taken by curators. We understand that open knowledge spaces offer safeguards in the face of impermanence. For some time, we have been in conversations about a feminist wiki-editing club as an extension of our work on decolonizing Wikipedia, aware of its potential to hold some of the narratives, stories, and experiences of queer Africans. We envisioned it as a space to learn about editing and bring feminist narratives to Wikimedia projects.
Our first session for the editing club was bringing Soweto Pride to Wikipedia and creating its English Wikipedia article. Later, in collaboration with some of our friends, we uploaded the images from the march for the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign on Wikimedia Commons.
The next step in queering Wikipedia will take place in South Africa itself. In the lead up to WikiIndaba — Africa’s annual gathering of Wikipedians — we’ll join our partners from HOLAAfrica! and GALA Queer Archive and gather fellow activists, wiki enthusiasts, and feminists from the continent to bring queer African LGBTQ+ narratives to open knowledge and the global discourse.
This collaboration will utilize the fact that Wikipedia is a “permanent”, open-source, and decentralized digital space, to ensure that African queer stories, experiences, and knowledges exist in the world’s largest online knowledge repository in an accessible way.
Co-holding this edit-a-thon in Johannesburg, the home of Soweto Pride, in collaboration with queer African Wikimedians, artists, and archivists, we aim to create a space to learn and edit different aspects of wikiprojects (Wikipedia articles, images on Commons, and structured data on Wikidata), curate a conversation on what it means to be queer and visible on the continent and why survival sometimes looks like anonymity, and document in real-time the experience of queer editing and archiving — and all the joy in between.
