‘I didn’t want to be a mother’

Trifonia Melibea Obono is a writer, academic and activist from Equatorial Guinea. An award-winning author of three published novels and one short-story collection, she has now written her first work of non-fiction – a j’accuse about the reality of LGBT+ lives in Equatorial Guinea today.

Yo no quería ser madre (‘I didn’t want to be a mother’) is a collection of testimonies by 30 lesbian and bisexual Equatoguinean women about their experiences of forced pregnancy.

These stories come from women across Guinean society, but they all chronicle betrayals by their families and their communities, when their same-sex activity is suspected or discovered, leading to violence, both physical and psychological, to try to ‘correct’ forcibly these ‘deviant’ behaviours.

Girls and women have been beaten by their families, starved, locked up, sold off in marriages, and treated by traditional healers, Catholic priests and other religious figures. They have been tortured by the military or police, drugged and subjected to ‘corrective’ rapes, sometimes by family members. Many are pimped by their families or turn to prostitution themselves as their only means of support outside of the traditional family structures from which they are ejected because of their sexuality.

While homosexuality is not illegal in Equatorial Guinea, neither is homophobia, creating a legal vacuum.

The institutions – police, courts, educational establishments – do not protect queer Equatorial Guineans from their families and communities. The institutions themselves often inflict homophobic violence.

The alarming truth, revealed in these testimonies, is that these homophobic punishments, performed in the name of preserving tradition and traditional family values, usually begin at an early age.

This collection of testimonies serves as an educational tool, for people inside and outside the country.

It is a denouncement that, hopefully, will raise awareness and exert social and legal pressure for change.

Here follow two testimonies, as spoken to Trifonia Melibea Obono, and translated from Spanish into English by myself.

Content warning: the following accounts contain references to sexual violence.

‘I cost four million francs’

In my ethnic groups – I’m part Ndowé, part Bisio, part Fang – a woman is not considered to be one until she has given birth. If I belonged to just one Equatorial Guinean ethnic group, maybe the pressure would come from just one group. But I come from three of them.

My mother and grandmother have reminded me, since I was little, that I was born to maintain the family economically. That rich men would love me and that we’d live off them because ‘you are the prettiest of all my daughters. You have the biggest heart, the heart of a good person. You are the family’. My mama and grandma said this all the time.

When I was 16 my family started to complain about my companions: all girls of my own age, and no boy. Mama berated me for not looking at the boys with admiration, just at the girls. My female friends who also made love with other girls advised me to bring home a male friend. My mama and grandma liked him. But soon another complaint arrived: the boy didn’t sleep here.

The boy and I came to an agreement: that he would come and sleep with me from time to time. We were friends;