Unrehearsed Futures (S4) #4: Performance (as) Activism: Creating queer communities & kinship in the face of neoconservative fascism

The day is 6 March 2020. It’s the day Ghana became independent in 1957. Celebrations are galore. A festival is going on inside the Baba Yara Sports Stadium, in Kumasi, a city of more than 3 million people that was once the capital of the Ashanti Empire. The president of Ghana also happens to visit.

Outside the stadium, Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi, a trans multidisciplinary “artivist”, curator, philanthropist and a mentor across several countries, is in the middle of her performance Oga LANDLORD: Permit me to March for my People. It is an intervention and a guerilla performance where Va-Bene questions the state of Ghana’s “independence, freedom, justice and equal rights as citizens of the country, citizens of Africa and natives of the earth”.

At the time of this Unrehearsed Futures conversation, Ghanian MPs had introduced a tough anti-LGBTQ bill, the harshest of its kind in Africa, which imposed a prison sentence of up to three years for anyone convicted of identifying as LGBTQ+ in the west African country. It also imposed a maximum five-year jail term for forming or funding LGBTQ+ groups. At present, the future of Va-Bene, and many others like her, is truly unrehearsed; she can’t predict what can happen in the next month with the new bill. In this atmosphere of anxiety and uncertainty, Va-Bene defines her performance as an act of radical resistance and radical solidarity.

When she heard that the president of Ghana was coming to the stadium on that day, she began thinking about how she could communicate her thoughts and feelings. While she doesn’t know “where we place ourselves as queer people when it comes to independence of Ghana”, Va-Bene is interested in understanding how one can queer their existence. “How do we actually reclaim the spaces that are systemically alienating and erasing us?” she asks.

As the president’s military convoy made its way to the stadium, Va-Bene went through military hassles to get to the main entrance, where the gates were locked. “I walked into the military with a Bible in my hand which I had painted in Ghana’s flag colours. At the same time, I tore the Bible apart (in front of them),” Va-Bene recalls. In a Christian majority country like Ghana, the act of tearing a Bible can be considered blasphemous. “I was holding the Bible and in Ghana, to even tear a Bible is a big taboo. That alone is overstepping boundaries. This image alone is a description of what I mean by performance as an act of radical resistance,” she says showing us an image of the performance. “It is the willingness to die for my activism, to die fighting for the air that I breathe. I always tell people that if you are in danger, and if you run, you die. If you sit, you die; you have to choose one. I choose to walk and fight until I die. I won’t remain silent to that.”

Ve-Bene aka crazinisT artist has had several brushes with death in her work. Apart from facing several instances of violence and death threats, in 2021, on Good Friday, she reenacted a crucifixion in the middle of the city “in remembrance of those Ghanaians, blacks and queers who suffered similar violence and death” to Jesus. The performance was called Holier Than Thou. It was an eight-minute walk from her studio where she runs her artist residency. She carried the huge wooden cross on her shoulders and installed herself at a busy intersection. It was a way for Va-Bene to see how the crowd would respond. After the first 30 minutes, she began “losing her life”. “Honestly, this was one of the performances where I was dying: I was losing my breath because my arms were tearing apart, and my lungs couldn’t function the way it’s supposed to. It was striking. Some of the audience was screaming and calling. I was so surprised that this happened, that the audience themselves, jumped on the cross, and brought me down from the cross.”

Why her choice of enacting the crucifixion is even more striking is that before Va-Bene came out, she was a Christian pastor till she renounced Christianity at the age of 33, incidentally the same age when Jesus died. In a sense, the work she does today is also a kind of evangelism. Art has become her new gospel.

In her early years, Va-Bene admits, “I was not only feeling intimidated and afraid to come out because it was made criminalized or illegal to be queer, but because I was growing up in the church with all these doctrines around me that said being queer was demonic and sinful.” It got her thinking about her own pronoun. She began by investigating the local African languages which don’t have a pronoun for a boy/girl. The only neutral pronoun available in a language from the Volta region, where Va-Bene was born in 1981, is sHit. “It is used for human beings, for animals. That was when I decided to use sHit as my pronoun.”

In 2023, Va-Bene is living through a very dangerous time. Under the new LGBTQ+ bill, being queer would become criminal. Under the influence of Christianity, many Ghanian people view LGBTQ+ people as ‘evil’. Since its introduction, the bill has encouraged people to take matter into their own hands, seeing an increase in the violence against queer people.

It is crucial to note that homosexuality is not a European import to countries in the Global South, as many conversative communities may believe, nor is homophobia present only in African nations, as many in the Global North may think. The Euro-American ideology, says Va-Bene, has summarised, over simplified and singularised Africa. “I tell people that the power of Africans is our diversity. It’s what they (colonisers) could not overcome. You come to Ghana, you have over 100 different ethnic groups, each with very dynamic spiritualities and cultural aesthetics. This is what we are dealing with when it comes to homosexuality and homophobia when they say homosexuality is non-African, or un-African.”

As much as there is a need for transcontinental solidarity, what Africa needs more of is transnational solidarity on the continent to fight the internalised oppression. “If we can begin to talk about this, even among ourselves,” asserts Va-Bene, “the so-called Africans, where a Ugandan, South African, Zimbabwean, Togolese, and Nigerian come together, we can start understanding and learning and unlearning from each other. Which kind of Africa was defined to us by the Europeans? Because the Africa we know, is the Africa we were taught by Europeans, not the Africa that we are.”

One of the ways in which Va-Bene hopes to do this is through the artist residency she runs called perfocraZe International Artist Residency, or pIAR. Founded in 2017, each month eight new artists from different parts of the world, especially Africa, come to an old, abandoned home rented with money Va-Bene earns from her performances and lectures around the world. While she has been trying to apply for funding, the way the residency is structured doesn’t often fit into the Euro-American funding criteria. One of Va-Bene’s biggest worries is that if the anti-LBTGQ+ bill is passed, it is likely that their landlord will ask them to leave for fear of incarceration. “We will be managing until we are able to get resources to build. Till it becomes our property. This is how I have been running it so far. This is also why I’m busy travelling. I’m going to UK, I’m coming to Frankfurt, I need to do all these little things to get the monies that my ancestors created outside of our continent. I need to get them to invest them back here,” she shares. Va-Bene has is running a crowdfunding campaign to purchase a more permanent property to create a safe sanctuary for artists.

Va-Bene literally places her body on the line to confront issues such as disenfranchisement, social justice, violence, objectification, internalized oppression, anti-blackness, systemic indoctrination and many more. Much of her work is grounded in ethics of care for other, often done at a great expense to herself. So, how does Va-Bene show up for herself? Who does she speak to when she feels depressed? “I don’t. I’m just surviving,” she confesses. “I understand that I need to take care of myself. I need to be alive to be able to do the things that I have to do. But at the same time, I feel I’m in an urgency where there is no need to even look at my wound, until I am unable to walk and then I realize that I have been wounded too. Sometimes, I have phases and episodes of depression that hit me hard. And then I lock myself up for a while. And then I bounce back. I don’t know how I am doing this.”

Even in the midst of all the anxiety and hatred she encounters, the one thing Va-Bene is sure of is her ability to love herself, an equally radical act of resistance as any other. “The only thing I am sure of is that my heart is too big for the world. My heart is too big for everything,” she states as the conversation comes to a close. “One thing I’m sure of is that I love myself. I am in love with myself. I have fallen in love with myself so much and so deeply that when everything else fails me, I know I am there for myself. I am the only person who cannot disappoint myself. I’m only the only person who cannot fail me when everybody fails me. Everybody leaves me, everybody rejects me. The only person I know that is still with me is Va-Bene. And maybe this is what is keeping me going.”

Note: On 28 February 2024, Ghana’s parliament passed the new Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill that imposes a prison sentence of up to three years for anyone convicted of identifying as LGBTQ+.