Sokari Ekine

Sokari Ekine in 2010

Sokari Ekine is a Nigerian activist, blogger and author. She worked as a journalist at the Pambazuka News and has also written for Feminist Africa and New Internationalist. Ekine kept a blog between 2004 and 2014 in which she covered a number of topics including LGBTI rights, women's rights, and environmental issues. She has co-written or edited four books, and taught English to school children in Haiti.

Quotes

• I didn’t just want to document: I wanted to fully understand what I was documenting. I wanted to be very aware of how you take photographs in certain situations; not to expose people, and to try to present the narrative you want without making it into a spectacle of a human being in suffering. That is why I see myself as a visual scholar. I need to understand the aspects of what I am working with.
  • [1] Sokari Ekine speaks on Voudou and its impact on her work.

• The first thing I would say is to understand there is a history of activism, of the arts, and literature and to keep that in mind and not discard the past and what people did. It is important to learn about the past and build on it. That is quite important to understand. Ageism is still very prominent in how people speak, write, and create their ideas, particularly on social media. I would say the first thing is to look at the past and build on it and respect it, just as I respect what is happening now and what young people are doing.
  • [2] Sokari Ekine gives advice to young activists.

• You can’t change anything if you don’t have imagination... Don’t let the oppressor dictate the narrative. I think we have the tendency to react to the oppressors’ narrative and really we should be dictating our own narrative. That is something I learned: sometimes we focus on them rather than what we ought to change in ourselves. They are there to distract us from what we need to do.
  • [3]

• People need to understand we are invested in the future and how that future will be.
  • [4] From an interview with Black Women Radicals.

• Caught between Western imperialism, African patriarchy and religious fascism, the continent’s gay community needs a strong, articulate set of voices. This is a work of African resistance that boldly states: We are here, and we are many!
  • [5] Sokari Ekine explains the significance of a book on African queer group.

• I want to resist the “African homosexual” as an empirical figure waiting to be discovered or, through NGO and international interventions, to be created and saved
  • [6] Sokari Ekine speaks on the perception of homosexuals in Africa.