Tanlume Enyatseng

Tanlume Enyatseng is a journalist, cultural producer, and curator based in Botswana. Quotes A lot of my work is about giving a platform to the voiceless. To create the space for others, including myself, to tell their stories – to be heard. I put out an open invitation to anyone interested in speaking about subject matter to do with queer lives in Botswana. Those who feel confident enough to show up reach out and then I share the venue and time. It’s never more than 25 people. You get to speak your mind, and if you don’t want to speak your mind you get to sit back and listen to what other people think. The beauty of what I’ve seen in the sessions we’ve had so far is that the crowd has changed. It’s been a diverse crowd in terms of age and sometimes it includes allies. There’s this way people view gay people in Botswana, like we’re some kind of fantasy. It’s the gay best friend, the stylist, the funniest person on reality TV, or the idea that when ‘the gay guys’ turn up to the party it’s going to be a good time. The only time we’re really in the media it’s in the lifestyle sections. They don’t always understand that we’re also people going through things, because they see an aesthetic. We have queer people who are nurses, doctors, paying tax like everyone else. It’s only fair that the people and government of Botswana support us. Issues of representation are not just queer people’s issues. They are connected to women’s issues, to economic issues, to mental health issues and more. We need more queer spaces. We need more affirming spaces. And not limiting to it to queer individuals. We needed to talk about mental health, safe sex, representation of queer artists, how affirming our workspaces are. I’m trying to tell stories about the queer community to show that we are so much more than our traumas. We are just like everybody else, too. Some of us just want to have the freedom to have families, to pick our careers without having to be put in a box just because we are queer. Botswana’s Banana Club and the role of the artist, May 18 2021 It was a dark, dark night. Did you see the one with the giant penis. They must have stuck [the penis collage] at the furthest corner of the exhibition because it was so big. I feel like it was my dad’s way of establishing the fact that he’d had his first son … and then I turned out to be the complete opposite of a macho type of man. That was my obsession … I was so obsessed with Scream I even wrote my own version of the film. It was really bad. That time as a teenager I watched too much of The O.C. And wrote an entire erotic novel. Storyteller began his journey on a ‘dark, dark night’, Mail&Guardian, November 29 2018 Over the years, the LGBTQIA+ community has often been sidelined, faced extreme marginalisation and exclusion. Thus, there is a wide socioeconomic variation among queer  persons that has been overlooked by previous research, even though socioeconomic status is deeply intertwined with sexual minority status and union status. Banana Club is not only driven to continue to explore and advance the work of marginalised artists and artisans but promote the visual arts as a tool for social change. The residency welcomes visual artists across all disciplines to apply for the transformative opportunity to receive support in making and exhibiting new work. Call for Botswana based queer creatives to apply to the Banana Club Artist Fund 2023.June 5 2023 Category:Journalists Category:Producers Category:Living people