Ani Kayode Somtochukwu is a writer and queer liberation activist whose work is a luminous refusal of silence. His debut novel, And Then He Sang a Lullaby, dares to imagine queer love in a world structured to erase it. With a Marxist-Leninist grounding and an eye trained on history, Ani writes at the intersections of memory, resistance, and possibility. In this fifth edition of A Short Talk, Ani talks to Yvonne Wabai, a 2025 Rajat Neogy editorial fellow at A Long House, about the personal costs of truth-telling, the colonial roots of queerphobia, the radical potential of queer friendship, and the clarity that comes from choosing courage over conformity. What emerges is a writer deeply attuned to the urgencies of now, and one committed to imagining and fighting for freer futures.
A LONG HOUSE
Your debut novel, And Then He Sang a Lullaby, offers a powerful portrayal of queer love in the face of state violence. Before August and Segun came to life on the page, what were the personal or political questions you were wrestling with that led you to write this story? How did those early questions evolve as you got deeper into the story?
ANI KAYODE SOMTOCHUKWU
By the time I started working on And Then He Sang a Lullaby in August 2018, I had already been a queer activist for about three years and had suffered a lot of repercussions for it. The Same-Sex Prohibition Act was signed into law just as I was gearing up to write my secondary school certificate exams. I started at the Enugu State University of Science and Technology the year after. As a child, I endured a lot of bullying for being effeminate. This went on through primary school at Command Children’s School Awkunanaw, and later at Union Secondary School, which was a boys’ school. I did not think it could possibly get worse, but how wrong I was! In my first semester at university, I was doxxed after publishing my first queer-themed short story and then mobbed. I was not an activist yet, just a writer. I had not yet given much thought to whether there was a difference between the two. I stopped writing but kept growing increasingly unsatisfied with the world around me. I started writing posts on Facebook. My second attack would be more severe, leaving me with a scar on my right side. The more I insisted on keeping on, the clearer it became to me that insisting on the right to be queer without problematising my queerness, without being in search of a remedy, was a much bigger sin than being different itself. From cradle to grave, we are all taught to fear this difference, to understand it as a threat to society, and to desire its elimination as though that itself were an act of moral good. Because of this, even Nigerians who, for one reason or the other, don’t believe that all queer people should be jailed or killed, still buy wholesale into queerphobia as the moral structure upon which society must run. They quite literally cannot imagine our society any other way, and this informs who they place the onus of queerphobic violence on.
“Why would you endanger yourself by being out in a society that you know would kill you for being out?” The more I insisted on being queer in view of my society, the more inculpatory that question got—not just from foes and allies, but from family and friends as well. I wanted to explore how this sort of ‘love’ was responsible for producing queer people who themselves were not politically aligned with queer liberation. That’s how August came to be. Of course, there are people who have no say in being perceived as queer. And the calculations become different when there is no hiding place. Many queer people with markedly non-conforming gender expressions, unfortunately, throw their energies into trying to conform, because it’s easier than fighting back. But what exactly does ‘easier’ entail? What options for happiness, fulfilment, love, and self-actualisation does it leave us? Trying to grapple with that question is how Segun came about later on in the book. Then they met.
A LONG HOUSE
Your writing often explores the colonial continuities in anti-queer legislation, linking queer struggle to broader systems of oppression—colonialism, capitalism, and religious nationalism. How do you see the threads between Nigeria’s past and present shaping queer futures on the continent?
ANI KAYODE SOMTOCHUKWU
I always tell people that queer liberation politics saved my life. It taught me how to love my people, and that wasn’t easy given just how much rejection I’ve faced from them. I think that if in my search for meaning, my politics had not deepened into a commitment to queer liberation, I might not have become a Marxist. I have queer liberation organisations like Al Qaws to thank for it. I know now that culture is not this permanent, natural fact of life, but rather a result of all that has been. In Nigeria’s case, the wounds of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and British colonisation did not just heal after 1st October 1960. As a people, we were altered in a way that goes far beyond the economic, because subjugation can never be just economic. To subdue a people economically requires and ensures their subjugation in everything else. Understanding that queerness was already criminalised in Nigeria before the SSMPA became law raised two pertinent questions for me. The first was, why then was that law enacted? And the second was historical: what is the origin of queerphobic laws in my society? The first question led me to a critique of our ruling class. And the second, to a critique of the colonial system that brought them to, and maintains them in power. Not only was it the British who first criminalised queerness in Nigeria, but it was they who also established the police, the prison system, and the legal framework that Nigeria operates on to this day. They set up a formal education system to wipe away our memories of a more loving, less absolutist way of life, and taught us to see difference as a threat to the collective. Christianity and Islam are in themselves not sufficient to ensure queer oppression. There are many Christian-majority and Muslim-majority societies where queerness isn’t criminalised. That led me to one conclusion: there was no path to queer liberation that did not lead through decolonisation, and no way to decolonise without a fundamental change to the very logic on which Nigeria currently runs. While this does not mean that socialism would automatically bring about queer freedom, it does mean that queer liberation is impossible under capitalism. Our local capitalist class will always need a scapegoat because they are overseeing a system set up to keep us in subjugation. Regardless of how much consensus or momentum we can build for legal reforms, to truly transform society, we must look further towards decolonisation to win a society that needs no scapegoats.
A LONG HOUSE
What do you think queer liberation looks like in this moment—in Nigeria, on the continent, in the world?
ANI KAYODE SOMTOCHUKWU
I don’t think I can say. After all, it is still an objective. What I can speak to with clarity is what I know the struggle is shaping up to be. With the shuttering of liberal and social democracies in the imperialist West, the mask is falling. Queer people of the global majority who have for so long been propagandised into looking up to legal reforms in the West as the bar of our social progress are watching them rolled back before our eyes. We have watched as Western governments that parade themselves as arbiters of morality fund, arm, and deny the existence of a genocide we can all see unfold. We have watched our own governments demonstrate apparent powerlessness to do anything to come to the defence of the Palestinian people. Even the international system, in its impotence to restrain the zionist regime, is making one thing concrete: we live in a global colonial system. This is accelerating the slow but steady death of the American (Western) dream in the consciousness of queer Africans, and in turn, strengthening the impulse to claim space in every facet of social life here in our own home. I believe we are in a renaissance of African thought. A different, more formidable Pan-Africanist movement is pulling itself into life. When you look at the ideological earthquakes that have occurred in Africa’s youth, feminist, and socialist movements, you see that a realisation is beginning to dawn on us as a people. The queer liberation struggle is forcing a new political imagination that is making decolonisation more pressing. By telling the real story of our otherisation, it is fighting to decolonise the African mind. And the more anti-imperialist the struggle becomes, the bolder it gets in telling that story.
A LONG HOUSE
As a writer with a decolonial, Marxist-Leninist perspective, how does that political grounding influence your approach to craft and storytelling?
ANI KAYODE SOMTOCHUKWU
A dialectical materialist analysis makes it easier to see beneath the surface, even when thinking of fictive narratives. I have a better understanding of myself and the yearnings of my artistic soul. There is something Thomas Sankara said that I keep close to heart: “We know that when the people understand, they cannot help but follow us.” Fiction is one of the most underrated tools for deepening that understanding. All writers are explaining something with every story they tell. Whether they know exactly what their story explains is another matter. It is always political; the only question is how much deviation from the zeitgeist the political stance achieves. There is a dire need for wider political imagination. For queer Africans to see our mantle in the struggle for continental liberation, we must fall in love with queerness itself. Queer African writers are doing that explanation at a scale and depth never seen before. My politics have grounded me in a practice of political action. Marxism demands that we intervene in history in an intentionally collective manner. To adequately imagine a liberated future for ourselves, we must engage in political and direct action that tries to write it.
A LONG HOUSE
Of all the pieces you’ve written so far – fiction, essay, or otherwise – which one feels closest to you right now, and why? What did writing that piece teach you about the world or about yourself? Did it shift anything in how you see your work or your place in it?
ANI KAYODE SOMTOCHUKWU
I have two. My yet unpublished essay, where I revisit the time my father taught me to read Igbo, and The Gift of Being Seen. They taught me, in different ways, to read a historical task into the way queerness cannot be incorporated into the neocolonial state. It is too disruptive, an argument against hegemony that capitalism cannot grapple with in the African context. But we have to realise that first so that it becomes a weapon for us, not against us—“I cannot win the fight of my life if I am running, if I am always conceding space.”
These essays helped me gain the clarity of purpose that gives me the courage of my convictions. A lack of imagination is the biggest weapon they can have over us. That is why all avenues of our socialisation are mobilised to demonise the very queerness it claims does not exist. We who know for a fact that it does, must think and live by that knowledge. I think Sankara put it succinctly: “You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, and the courage to invent the future. Besides, it took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future.”
As I see it, my place is within the wider struggle to re-queer the way we Africans think of freedom.
A LONG HOUSE
What does your creative process look like these days? Do you write towards clarity, catharsis, or something else entirely?
ANI KAYODE SOMTOCHUKWU
I write when the spirit moves me. I’ve never been able to keep to a writing schedule. Some days, I write. Most days I don’t. It’s easiest when I’m feeling it, when I have something to pour onto the page from my heart. So I may not write anything for weeks and then write a short story or a chapter start-to-finish in one afternoon because I heard a song that sparked an emotion. So both clarity and catharsis, because I rarely know where a story is going at the time I start writing it.
A LONG HOUSE
What are you currently reading, watching, or listening to that’s feeding your work and/or spirit?
ANI KAYODE SOMTOCHUKWU
I am reading Night Dancer by Chika Unigwe. I love how reflective the pacing is; it’s a gentle way to approach a traumatised childhood. I’m currently dealing with a parent-child story myself, and it fascinates me that not only do both parent and child see it in different ways, but also that only one party has the power to enforce their version of reality on the other. How different would the world be if parents set out from the get-go believing they had things to learn from their children’s perspective?
A LONG HOUSE
Looking ahead, which stories are you most drawn to exploring next, and why? What themes or questions do you feel calling to you?
ANI KAYODE SOMTOCHUKWU
I’m trying to write more queer friendships. I think those relationships need to be explored more for how much they enrich our lives. From a story standpoint, there is more drama there, more mutual understanding, more patience and grace, and more joy.
