Katlego Kai Kolanyane-Kesupile

Katlego Kai Kolanyane-Kesupile

Katlego Kai Kolanyane-Kesupile (born January 1988, also known as Kat Kai Kol-Kes) is a performance artist, musician, writer and LGBT activist from Botswana. She is known for being the first public figure from the country to openly identify as a transgender person. She is also the first person from Botswana to be named a TED Fellow.

Quotes

• If there is any place I don't belong, it's in a mind where the story of me starts with the branch of me being queer and not with my rural roots.
  • Katlego K Kolanyane-Kesupile (2020) Retrieved 26/07/2022

• To truly understand that attaining accessible education, accessible healthcare, and ending poverty, means ensuring that we are cognizant of the voices and lives of people like me; whether it's people who are brown skinned, African, Indigenous, Queer identifying, disabled
  • #TurnItAround UN SDG Action Campaign | Katlego K Kolanyane-Kesupile (Botswana) (September 2020) Retrieved 26/07/2022

• One thing you will learn from a lifetime of biting your tongue; memories lose their flavors.
  • Developing the nerve to possess yourself | Katlego K Kolanyane-Kesupile | TEDxGoodenoughCollege (August 2017) by TEDx Talks, Retrieved 26/07/2022

• Freedom will come when all Batswana can assume and inhabit whatever gender and other identities they are comfortable with.
  • Kat’s Nine Lives: Performing Trans Identity/ies in Botswana (June 2017) Retrieved 26/07/2022

• I understand that it both is and is not my duty to deconstruct and then reconstruct my government’s views on the validity of citizens like me whom colonial constitutions factored out and vilified.
  • Being trans* is becoming a black woman of complications (February 2017) by Kat Kai Kol-Kes, Retrieved 26/07/2022

• The core behind my work is to ensure that as Batswana we start discovering and learning from what we experience.
• The world we live in is created and it’s been being created and it is still being created. So why can’t we take things that we assume are the building blocks of what we know about our lives, about every single thing that we trust, and turn them upside down just to be a bit more accommodating.
  • Queer Literature and Culture: A Dialogue with Katlego Kai Kolanyane-Kesupile (November 2016) by Africa in dialogue, Retrieved 26/07/2022

External References

• Katlego K Kolanyane-Kesupile (2020)
• #TurnItAround UN SDG Action Campaign | Katlego K Kolanyane-Kesupile (Botswana) (September 2020)
• Developing the nerve to possess yourself | Katlego K Kolanyane-Kesupile | TEDxGoodenoughCollege (August 2017)
• Kat’s Nine Lives: Performing Trans Identity/ies in Botswana (June 2017)
• Being trans* is becoming a black woman of complications (February 2017)
• Queer Literature and Culture: A Dialogue with Katlego Kai Kolanyane-Kesupile (November 2016)