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The BBC messaged Niya to tell her that we would be using images of a violet to illustrate the memes. We chose the symbol - which differs vastly from the symbols the women use - because lesbian women in the 1900s were said to give violets to their girlfriends. Burundi is well known in the Great Lakes for its vibrant nightlife. Bujumbura has fewer than 500,000 inhabitants, but maintains a vivid youth culture. At 22, she met a woman who was also in her early 20s, through mutual friends. Bonding over their love of music, they formed a fast friendship. Her next step was to explain to her mother that it wasn’t a phase - a hetrosexual life was not for her. It largely relies on internet shorthand, obscure symbols used by lesbians around the world. Nella would send these images and emoticons to other women. Those in the know would respond.
Kelly’s enjoying her first year at college, and a big part of that is her beautiful roommate Tina. They love being friends, and they tell each other everything. Well…not everything. Kelly has a crush on a boy and keeps it to herself. That’s too bad because she comes home one night and accidentally walks in on Tina and the boy right in the middle of a b*****b! When she talks to Tina about it, her roommate decides to cheer Kelly up…with a scorching first lesbian sex experience! Initially her mother took it badly. But as the days passed she began to ask more questions. Leila’s father was more supportive than she expected. Many members of the group say they have experienced violence at the hands of family members who became suspicious about their sexuality.
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She had looked up YouTube videos of lesbian vloggers in other parts of the world. She watched films featuring same-sex couples and read a lot of reports on lesbian, bisexual and queer (LBQ) communities. She began to understand the language of the internet. After being hit, one woman went to the police station only to be told that “the man who hit you deserves a prize, he was right to beat you up”. Growing up, I used to wish that I was ‘normal’,” says Leila. “Now we joke about how we’re not normal. We say we’re aliens and we have superpowers.” In 2016, her husband found out about these conversations and her marriage broke down. He vowed to keep her sexuality a secret from the wider community for the sake of their children. We started talking at lunch,” says Niya. “Within that conversation, we knew that we were the same. There was a shorthand, a recognition.”
After the birth of her youngest child, Nella says she began to feel like the most isolated woman in the world. She doesn't want to go into much detail about her marriage. She says it would compromise her children’s safety.Whenever Todd Haynes’ unspeakably beautiful Patricia Highsmith adaptation comes to mind, it brings some of the novel’s last words along with it: “It would be Carol, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they would go together, in heaven and hell.” In that light, a spot on a list of the decade’s best films hardly seems like much of a reach. Nella’s husband didn’t know about her sexual identity. It wasn’t a happy marriage. The couple barely communicated and she dreaded intimacy. Then something happened that she didn’t anticipate. Leila’s brother went through her phone and found the text she had sent to her friend. But she still hoped there would be a way out of it. She prayed. She meditated. She became angry with herself. Nella is now divorced but others in the group remain married. Their husbands are not aware of their sexuality.
Relieved, Leila put her months of infatuation down to a phase. It had been a one-off crush, with one woman. Oh, great. Another queer period piece about white women in bonnets furtively holding hands at the beach,” I may or may not have grumbled to myself when I first saw the trailer for Ammonite, the recently released Francis Lee film starring Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan as star-crossed, fossil-hunting lovers. The woman, while being a lesbian, was not arrested for her sexuality - the authorities were unaware of it, she believes. It was because the woman had retaliated against domestic abuse in her family home, and lashed out against her abuser.
Leila had grown up in a loving, supportive middle-class family in Bujumbura city. She was popular. She had a boyfriend. But she needn’t have worried. Leila didn’t lose her friendship. The two agreed to draw a line under the embarrassing episode. Niya’s father was away a lot, leaving her mother in charge of the family. Niya preferred friendships with boys but these never developed into crushes. Nella says she heard of women being killed in rural Burundi for being gay. She also heard of a lesbian who was recently jailed in Bujumbura.
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