LGBTQI+ study support – please assist

My name is Hassan Shaibu and I want you to know my story.

I was born in 1980, in an extremely conservative and predominantly Muslim part of Nigeria where religious extremism continues to dominate daily life even today. My family had converted from Islam to Christianity and as a result was a target for sectarian hatred and violence. But whether Christian or Muslim, we were told on every street corner that hell awaits the sinner and death was the reward.

This was the environment I grew up in, knowing that I was different – that I was not like the other boys. I eventually came to understand that I’m gay but I had to live my life in hiding. Like most gay men in West Africa, I hid in order not to be bullied, shamed, or attacked. Yet I still lived in constant fear of being killed just for being gay.

My name is Hassan Shaibu and I want you to know my story.

I survived school, bullied but alive, rejected by my younger brother who called me a dirty faggot and told me that nothing good would ever come of me. When I was thirty years old and still not married, my brother and sister-in-law rejected me and threatened to out me to my mother and the community, threatened to poison and kill me.

I was depressed, and I considered taking my own life in order to spare my beloved mother the shame and pain of knowing the truth about her son.

I wanted to leave my home town. But getting a job as a cultural officer, which my university studies qualified me for, was impossible because the government required me to provide proof of marriage or relationship, and a certificate that I didn’t have HIV.

So I was forced to leave Nigeria. I moved to Cameroon when an online friend asked me to help him out in his business and with the promise to support me in getting to Europe for graduate studies and a new life.But that dream died when he betrayed me after three years of working for him, living in an increasingly conflict-ridden part of Cameroon.

So again, I ran. I managed to get to Accra, Ghana, where I got a job in a hostel as a receptionist, bar man, tour guide, and trained dancer. But again this new start ended abruptly because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the sudden collapse of tourism to Ghana.

My name is Hassan Shaibu and I want you to know my story.

Friends have looked after me, kept me with a roof over my head and food to eat, and so I was able to enroll in a post graduate diploma and to volunteer raising funds for a school for street kids. I worked with the West Africa AIDS Foundation as a peer educator, teaching other gay African men about safer sex, the importance of HIV testing, PrEP, and taking their medication if living with HIV. And here I found my community and my mission. Here I finally found others who were proud and openly gay, men who were able to live their true lives. I found my future path.

I want to contribute to improving the lives of queer Africans. I think my personal experiences, and the challenges I had to overcome, are an invaluable foundation for the work I want to do. I want to turn the pain, the shame, and the hardship I was able to overcome into a gift. I want to be a social worker, an educator, and an inspiration for those who are suffering in hiding, in the margins of society, whether in African cities or as African migrants in cities across the world.

To make this my future, I need to first improve my education. I want to pursue further studies in queer social work, and complete a Master’s Degree in Europe, the UK, New Zealand or Australia. I need to be able to study in an environment that offers safe space for me to learn, to live, and to flourish. And this is why I humbly ask for your help.

Please contribute whatever small amount you can spare so that I can complete my studies and contribute to the African LGBTQI community, help our sisters and brothers achieve equality and equity and their rights. We lose too many of our own to the hatred, to the fear, to the pain and suffering for just being themselves.

My name is Hassan Shaibu and I want you to help me turn my story into a better future.