Toghu, 2023

Cameroon is one of the last 67 countries in the world to still criminalise homosexuality; LGBTQIA+ Cameroonians are therefore made extremely vulnerable to physical, verbal, and sexual abuse, extortion, homelessness, and arrest. 2023 saw increased instances of Cameroonian queer people lured through hookup adpps like Grindr to receive violent ‘jungle justice’, aka homophobic vigilante justice.

Many Cameroonians see queerness as an unfavourable foreign import. As a queer Cameroonian myself, I have been galvanised to archive the intersection of Cameroonian identity and queer identity, to challenge the harmful narrative that the two do not occur naturally, regularly, and beautifully.

Since 2022, I have been recording interviews between myself and various Cameroonian people across the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, both native and of the Cameroonian diaspora. As an ongoing project, I am turning them into embroidered animated short films, using the embroidery style of Toghu cloth, which is the unofficial national textile of Cameroon. It originates from the North West Grasslands region of Cameroon and is traditionally made of black velvet, which is richly embroidered with red, gold, and white chain stitch. However, I am using pink thread instead, as an immediate visual cue for queerness, defiantly embroidering queerness into the fabric of Cameroon.

Toghu is an ongoing, self-initiated project with interviews, embroidery, and editing by Kialy Tihngang, additional embroidery by Elise Prentice, and music by Not Sarah