HOLAAFRICA: Siphumeze Khundayi, Christel Antonites and Tiffany Kagure Mugo are three badass women making things happen in the African continent.
Together, they founded a pan-African queer collective dedicated to break taboos around erotica & sexuality.
In this interview, the HOLAAfrica founders talk to BERLINABLE about their dreams, and the goals of their ground-breaking initiative.
Who is behind HOLAAfrica? What is HOLAAfrica? What is your vision?
HOLAAfrica was started by Siphumeze Khundayi, Christel Antonites and Tiffany Kagure Mugo.
It is a pan African queer womanist platform that deals with all things sex and sexuality, focusing mostly on the gorgeous African continent.
The idea behind the platform was to create a space where queer womxn could tell their stories, share information and also engage with all things queer and sex positive.
It is something that is generally for everyone.
But it focuses mainly on providing fun and gorgeous, sensual vibes for the queer womxn and GNC (gender non conforming) folx around the African continent.
We also wanted to spread joy and happiness and information in a fun way that people found engaging.
What is it like to be a queer women in Africa?
There is no one type of experience as so many things come into play: the country, the socio-economic background, whether you are out or not, what your religion and culture is.
There are so many different ways in which the African experience plays out.
Thus it is difficult to say what ‘being a queer woman in Africa’ is like because my existence living in South Africa in Johannesburg will be very different from someone living in Mombasa in Kenya.
So although there might be some commonalities, the experiences tend to differ a great deal.
One could find themselves having more in common with someone in Berlin than someone in Kinshasa.
What are the struggles being a queer women?
The global struggle applies here: homophobia, fear of exclusion and violence and all those terrible things.
But from our work one of the greatest struggles is actually being able to find a close-knit circle, a partner or even someone’s face to sit on a Friday night.
It is a struggle of finding community that can hold and engage you, which is something that is not quintessentially African but the queer experience worldwide.
Trying to find people who are your ‘tribe’ can be very difficult. Only pockets of spaces globally actually have this extremely open engagement with queerness.
From Germany to the United States to Congo to Lesotho finding queer community is a universal struggle.
HOLAAfrica is located in South Africa, do you only represent South Africa or the whole African Continent?
We are here for the whole continent.
Even though we are based here one of our curators is Kenyan and our network of contributors comes from around the continent.
The work we do is done in multiple countries and the online space allows us to do that.
Our goal is to provide a space whereas many different people from around the continent can see themselves and learn about the things they want to learn.
What is special about African Erotica?
There isn’t anything special about African erotica – it is simply under represented.
But it is not fundamentally different.
It is just focusing on a different context than the erotica that is widely available globally.
It adds into a global sexual narrative and allows people on the continent to see themselves.
Why is liberated sexuality important for a human being?
It is important to be able to have autonomy over your body and a huge part of that is sexual liberation.
Not only that there is the issue of pleasure and enjoyment, and being sexually liberated adds to that.
It is about owning a very important and intimate part of your existence.
Sex positivity helps with that because you make decisions about your sex life.
Being sexually liberated goes well past trying out new things.
It’s about understanding where your wants and desires are.
About what your boundaries are and taking control of how you engage with sex.
What can we do outside of Africa to support you?
Like all of our social media pages and share all of our content.
And learn from it.
Because there is a wealth of knowledge on there that even those from outside the continent could draw from.
What do you think connects HOLAAfrica and BERLINABLE?
HOLAAfrica, like BERLINABLE, seeks to use the life experiences of others and story telling as an art to spread the message of sex positivity.
The two platforms seek to use the sexual and sensual to teach folks to own their bodies and in turn their existences.
That there is nothing wrong with loving sex, with wanting to be happy and comfortable in your body.
The use of art in general, and story telling in particular.
As a medium to have conversations about sex and sexuality is something that bonds the two platforms together.
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