The Nigerian-American scholar and researcher Dr Uju Anya, who is in her late 40s, has lived in the US since age 10 but considers herself culturally Nigerian. She is a popular figure on Nigerian Twitter (now X), where she speaks to her large following about the plight of minority groups. Anya has always thought visibility important for members of minority groups, religious or otherwise. She herself has been publicly visible and publicly available. She has had members of the same minority groups as her—women, queers, atheists—reach out to her: for advice, for support, for money, for anything. ‘Visibility is my ministry, my calling, my vocation,’ she told me.
In May 2021, a Nigerian atheist who was dating a Christian woman messaged Anya on Twitter seeking relationship advice. The young man was facing pressure to attend church and, if they later married and had children, to raise the children as Christians.
Anya wrote him back, saying:
“I understand what it is you’re going through. A lot of nonbelievers, you know, have social pressure [in] relationships. But do understand that the [more] serious you get with the woman the more somebody is gonna resent somebody, because she’s not gonna change you and make you a believer, and you’re not gonna change her and make her stop believing, and, as the relationship gets more serious and even children coming into it, somebody is gonna make somebody…resent somebody and hate somebody, because it’s the person that has to bend that will resent and hate the other person for forcing them into this situation.”
She told the young man that, from all he had told her, he would be the one to bend. She told him he would have to make peace with this if he continued dating the woman.
Later, Anya posted her conversation with the young man on Twitter, both to let young nonbelievers in relationships with devout believers know what their future might look like and to give them her honest advice. In response, Anya was asked by a follower to make a post or thread to match Nigerian freethinkers because they were so isolated and didn’t know where to find each other to date. Anya was uncertain, but when, later, a friend challenged her to do it, she started Auntie Uju Anya’s Matchmaking Threads.
Before then, while she was still single, Anya used to watch out for Cherrell Brown’s Twinder on Black Twitter. Twinder is a portmanteau of Twitter and Tinder and functions as both. People shared their pictures and captioned them with their details and dating preferences under the hashtag #Twinder, and anyone who was interested could then comment or message the author. Or, if they didn’t want to call attention to themselves, they could simply like multiple pictures of the post author, and the author, if they reciprocated, could message a liker. Frequently, Brown, who had a large following, would step in and repost Twinder posts that caught her eye. Anya was inspired by this:
“So, somebody was telling me I should be matchmaking atheists, and then I remembered Twinder, and I used to think it was so much fun. [It] was such an effective way of doing matchmaking, especially on Twitter, because when you’re on Tinder, all you really see is people’s pictures and whatever they say about themself. If you’re matchmaking on Twitter, you get to look through that person’s profile and you get a lot of information about, you know, their politics, their history, things like that. And you get to know a lot more about people than just on Tinder.”
Twinder provided a model for Anya in creating her Auntie Uju Anya’s Matchmaking Threads. ‘That was what I did: a Twinder for atheists,’ she said.
Soon, Anya started creating matchmaking threads under which Nigerian atheists posted their pictures, details, and preferences. Anya would then step in to respond and gas up post authors. She also encouraged people who could not openly identify as atheists to like posts in case this elicited a response from the post author. She was also putting up anonymous posts on behalf of people who could not openly identify as atheists, especially apostates from the north who risked death for leaving Islam. The anonymous atheists could then slide into the direct messages of anyone they were interested in who had liked Anya’s post on their behalf.
About a year or two later, Anya got a response from the young guy who had sought her advice about his relationship with a Christian woman. He told Anya that he had broken up with her and that he was now in a relationship with a nonbeliever like himself, which was much better for him. ‘It was so good to get that follow-up and [that] at least in that particular relationship he found a better way, I believe,’ Anya said. ‘Because it’s really [difficult] and I’ve only seen it work on one occasion, I’ve only seen one couple of an atheist woman and a Christian man [turn out right].’
She also posted his follow-up. ‘I think this also puts me in the public as somebody who cares about atheists and agnostics finding each other, especially those who live in places where it’s dangerous [to be a disbeliever],’ she said.
In like manner, she encouraged others to send in their follow-ups.
Soon, the matchmaking threads began to expand. Queer people wanted in just as straight people wanted in. And so Anya expanded the threads to include everybody: atheists, queers, ‘fine aunties’, straight people. ‘I can also tell you that the atheist, agnostic, and queer communities overlap a lot,’ Anya told me. ‘So, when I was doing it for queer people, I believed I was also doing it for the atheist market as well.’
There were no metrics to judge how successful the threads were or how many people participated, since some people slid secretly into the DMs of those who had liked their posts. But some of the threads racked up thousands of likes and hundreds of replies and reposts. And it is possible people still go through the threads and make connections to this day. Says Anya:
“I cannot also tell you how many people, after the threads were over, went there, years after, months after, to look through and just make connections with people who were interacting with those threads. So [the threads] just live there and is [sic] sort of a permanent archive for people to access when they need to.”
The matchmaking stopped in mid-2023. It was not always going to be sustainable for Anya. ‘A lot of people forget I have a full-time job,’ she joked. Seeing a single thread through required, by her account, three or four hours of full-time engagement. She could only manage this workload for a while.
Besides this, Anya says, Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, now X, changed the atmosphere:
“Twitter is not fun anymore. I used to do the matchmaking thing and it was just a lot of fun. I had a great time. But Twitter became a non-fun place. Twitter is now overrun with bots. It’s just a lot of hateful elements. Twitter was always difficult. You know, you always had to fight and be aggressive to survive on Twitter. But just the way it turned into a hate site is ugly. So, I don’t do fun things on Twitter anymore, and matchmaking was a fun thing.”
And being able to see who had liked a post, which was necessary for the matchmaking, is a feature that was disabled under Musk, meaning those who couldn’t publicly post and call attention to themselves were deprived of a way to meet new people.
By Adesomola Adedayo