The Hidden Struggle for LGBTQI+ Refugees in East Africa and Beyond
I never imagined that fleeing my own country would not free me from fear. When I left Uganda the place of my birth, my memories, and the source of both joy and pain, I believed the hardest part of my journey was behind me. I was wrong.
In Uganda, I lived under the weight of persecution where being queer was not only condemned but criminalized. Every glance, every whispered insult, every sermon, reminded me that the very core of who I am was treated as a threat. When survival demands silence, authenticity becomes rebellion. In the end, I had no choice but to flee.
I arrived at Kakuma Refugee Camp in northern Kenya with hope in my heart, imagining that safety awaited me. Kakuma is one of Africa’s largest camps, home to hundreds of thousands of people displaced by conflict across the region. But what I found was a different kind of confinement – a cage of silence. The fear I carried from Uganda followed me, threading itself into my movements, my conversations, even my breath.
“You cannot say who you are,” a fellow refugee whispered one night as we huddled together. “Even the walls have ears.”
The Cage of Silence
For LGBTQI+ refugees across East Africa, silence often becomes our only shield against violence. Yet silence is also a heavy burden. In Kakuma, Malawi’s Dzaleka Camp, and Zambia’s Meheba settlement, we live in constant negotiation between visibility and survival, between authenticity and safety. The promise of freedom is fragile. The moment you speak your truth, the risk of reprisal becomes real – from fellow refugees, from camp authorities, and from the very systems that are meant to protect us.
Freedom of speech is not just the right to debate politics. It is the right to exist openly, to seek help when we are attacked, and to be acknowledged as human. But in places where same-sex relations remain criminalized, even reporting a threat can become an act of danger. Arrest. Deportation. Beatings. For daring to ask for safety.
And so silence becomes both our protection and our punishment.
Survival and Authenticity
In Kakuma, I have seen friends beaten for holding hands, harassed for how they dress, denied aid because their identities were deemed “illegitimate”. We are told to hide, to blend in, to survive in shadows. But survival without authenticity is a slow erasure. Every day we live a half-truth, our existence negotiated through fear.
The tension between hope and hostility is unrelenting. Humanitarian organizations like UNHCR, ORAM, and Rainbow Railroad offer crucial support, yet safe spaces remain few and fragile. Even interpreters meant to help us navigate the bureaucracy of aid can “out” us unintentionally, placing our lives at risk. When we attempt peaceful advocacy, we are met with hostility, detention, or silence.
Malawi and Zambia: Silence in Law and Practice
Malawi and Zambia reflect the same story in different shades. In Dzaleka Camp, queer refugees live largely underground, avoiding clinics or aid offices for fear of exposure. Formal protections often exist only on paper, overridden by national laws and social norms that criminalize who we are.
In Zambia’s Meheba and Mantapala settlements, restrictive legal frameworks and public hostility leave many LGBTQI+ refugees invisible and isolated. The message is clear: you can flee persecution, but you cannot flee silence.
The Cost of Silence
Silence carries a cost that goes beyond fear of violence. It isolates. It erodes dignity. It feeds depression and despair. It silences truth itself. When we cannot speak openly, misinformation thrives. The systems meant to protect us – camps, NGOs, and legal frameworks – fail to bridge the gap between policy and practice.
Without freedom of speech, LGBTQI+ refugees face:
Barriers to justice: Reporting assaults or discrimination can invite further harm
Isolation: Invisibility breeds depression, anxiety, and suicide risk
Misinformation: Stigma festers in silence
Limited advocacy: Refugee-led LGBTQI+ groups operate in secrecy, limiting their reach and power.
When silence becomes the condition for safety, humanity itself becomes conditional.
Resilience in the Shadows
Yet even within these constraints, resilience blooms. I have witnessed extraordinary courage. Small networks of queer refugees forming discreet support groups, encrypted online communities that allow us to share information safely, and local NGOs quietly offering legal aid and mental health care.
Technology has become our lifeline. Even if we cannot speak loudly in our physical spaces, our voices travel digitally crossing borders, connecting us to allies, and reminding us we are not alone. “Even if we can’t speak loudly here,” said Musa, a bisexual refugee from the DRC, “we can be heard somewhere.” Our whispers travel farther than the walls that confine us.
A Call to Action
International organizations are beginning to recognize these realities. UNHCR’s 2024 Global Appeal emphasizes the need for safe spaces, community outreach, and equitable access to protection for LGBTQI+ refugees. But progress is uneven, and promises without practice mean little.
Governments and donors must move beyond statements to tangible change:
Establish confidential reporting channels for abuse in camps.
Train asylum officers, interpreters, and judges on SOGIESC-sensitive procedures.
Fund refugee-led initiatives and mental health support programs.
Reform laws that criminalize same-sex relations, especially for refugees under international protection.
Freedom of speech for LGBTQI+ refugees is not a luxury it is a lifeline.
The Courage to Speak
Writing this from Gorom Refugee Settlement in South Sudan, I reflect on the long road behind me from Uganda’s shadows of persecution to Kakuma’s labyrinth of fear, to this fragile space of relative safety. I still carry the echoes of silence, the whispers of caution, the weight of invisibility. Yet I also carry hope, solidarity, and the quiet conviction that words – even whispered ones – can change worlds.
I write not just for myself, but for every queer refugee silenced by fear. For every friend who cannot report an assault, who cannot access care, who cannot simply say: “I am here. I am human. I exist.” I did not come here to be a hero. I came to survive. And in surviving, I write in shadows, in whispers, and now, in a voice that reaches beyond the walls of fear.
One day, I hope, we will no longer have to whisper. We will speak freely, openly, and safely. Until then, every word I write is an act of defiance, a declaration of existence, a reminder that legal protection means little without the freedom to claim it.
By Abraham K. Jnr