How 2 gay refugee soccer players are fighting for acceptance in the Horn of Africa

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How gay soccer players are fighting for legitimacy in the world’s third-largest refugee camp.

Tucked in the northwest corner of Kenya, Kakuma is a place of oppressed people living in oppressive conditions. Heat blankets the camp. It is heavy and hard and constant. Kakuma is supposed to be a refuge for people fleeing war and famine in places like South Sudan, Somalia, and Uganda. It largely is. Yet, the heat is a hard realization for the people who arrive there, a desolate and desperate place.

Kakuma is diverse, but not necessarily accepting. It was established in 1991 to accommodate the Lost Boys of Sudan, and has become a near-city of thatch and aluminum now counting 20 different countries of origin among nearly 180,000 people. Those people are often in conflict with each other: tribes fight with other tribes — the big dominating the little — and within those tribes are even more striations, by family, age, sex, and sexual orientation.

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Near the bottom are Thierry and his partner, Salum, two young soccer players who escaped Burundi after their lives were threatened. (They requested that their full names and pictures not be published in this piece.) They are part of an LGBT community in Kakuma that is gaining a voice, but is still one of the most ostracized groups among people who know as well as any what it feels to be cornered, targeted, and beaten.

“When there is increase in jobless people, there is increase in crime such that when people don’t have jobs, they maybe don’t have financial support, they come and maybe rob people,” Thierry says. He slips into a larger statement about the tyranny of status.

“And then when they are sick of robbing people, they go after weak people. If you are weak person and you are in a weak area, they can come and attack you so easy.”

Being an LGBT person in Kakuma is especially difficult. Thierry and Salum are a minority among what are often people from minority nations, all from socially conservative cultures, all of whom are dealing with that same pressure, that same heat. Kakuma is a place of layered ostracization, nearly 200,000 people absorbing and trickling down oppression, until it pools.

Thierry says that two months don’t go by without him and Salum experiencing physical violence.

“We’ve been attacked, we’ve been oppressed, and we’ve been signaling for help but we never got it,” Thierry says. He went to one of the NGOs in the camp for protection, and says he was told to stop being a homosexual. “It’s like telling you, ‘Can you stop living?’ Because you cannot stop it. You are who you are. You can never stop yourself from being who you are.”

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Every once in a while it rains in Kakuma, the dry Tarach river bed overflows, and many of the mud huts are swept away. The soccer pitches are entirely dirt. Players will stay on the field until the ground becomes unusable and their cleats have been made useless by the mud.

There is a rare sweet spot in the weather when there is just enough moisture to tamp down the dust and the heat before the ground becomes a swirly, pudding mess. As Thierry and Salum go through passing drills on a Thursday last May, the ground is tacky, and heavier rain looms in the distance.

They are out in the open air, something they normally try to avoid. Once, a small child spotted the two together in a room, and the truth of their relationship spread around the camp. Many had suspicions from rarely having seen them with women (there is very little privacy in place like Kakuma, where small compounds are separated only by thorns and sticks and sometimes aluminum slabs). When their story got out, that’s when the attacks started.

“Even at night, maybe today at night, they will come, we do not know,” Thierry says. “So what we just try to do, we just try to keep ourselves at home. But we do not know when they will come. But they normally come.”

Thierry and Salum play for a club within Kakuma called Great Lakes Association (GLA). The system of sports in Kakuma mirrors systems of sports anywhere else in the world. Soccer reigns, and the camp even has its own Premier League, with clubs based on countries and tribes of origins. Two of the biggest, for example, are Naath FC, which is made up primarily of Nuer tribe people from South Sudan, and Okapi FC, made up primarily of Congolese people.

GLA isn’t part of the premier league yet, but it is a strong club. It is multinational — hence, the reference to the geographic region of Africa roughly made up of Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda — and was founded by a Burundian pastor named Williams Kwizera in large part to give LGBT people a safe space within Kakuma. Though the soccer team is a focal point of the association, it also includes a basketball team, cultural dance groups, and organized English and French courses. Last May, “Pastor Willy,” as Kwizera prefers to be called, counted eight LGBT players on GLA’s soccer team out of 25.

Pastor Willy was chased out of Burundi in 2011 after an escalation of political violence in the country. He lost much of his family to massacres — his father was killed in 1993 during the genocide of Tutsis in 1993, and a younger brother and sister died in the 2004 massacre in a Burundi refugee camp near the border of the DRC.

A tall, round-faced, easy-smiling man, he explains he rarely spends time remembering a past of which not much is left. One day his wife called him and said, “Don’t come home, when you get here, you’ll be killed,” so he immediately fled to Kenya. After he left, he says the government destroyed his mechanic’s garage and kidnapped one of his daughters to entice him back to the country (he says she was released).

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Burundi is also one of 34 African states where homosexuality is illegal. Roughly 75 miles north of the Burundi border, Uganda made international headlines in 2014 when it passed its own anti-homosexuality law and sparked a wave of violence and arrests that pushed hundreds to flee the country.

Many of those LGBT-identifying Ugandans landed in Kakuma, according to Pastor Willy, and at that time he says many religious leaders in the camp shunned them. Pastor Willy did not, inviting hate at a time when he could have, at the very least, stayed quiet and allowed himself, his wife, and four children in Kakuma some reprieve from chaos. Instead, he faced the conservative religious leaders in Kakuma directly.

“When people see them, they chase away those people: ‘Don’t come inside the church, you are outcast,’” Pastor Willy says. “When I see that, I tell them, ‘Don’t shut them. These are human beings. They need love.’

“In this world, anything you do, you’ll get some people they’ll criticize you. It doesn’t matter what people call me. Some people say, ‘Oh you, you are gay.’ No problem. It was posted, big posters saying that. My picture and body.”

With the help of a worker and resources from Church World Service, Pastor Willy began organizing groups of LGBT refugees to discuss sexuality and issues they faced in the camp. They would make arrangements surreptitiously over the internet — Kakuma receives good data reception — moving each subsequent meeting to different spots within one of Kakuma’s four zones.

Kakuma is shaped like a hatchet and stretches approximately 5 miles between its farthest ends. You might walk an hour to get where you’re going within the camp, a long time exacerbated by the weight of the heat and a threat of violence that applies to everyone, though some more than others. Yet despite those limitations, the meetings grew, and outreach within Kakuma taught many in the camp to become more accepting of LGBT people. When support hit a critical mass, Pastor Willy started GLA, which includes more heterosexual and cisgender people than not, but all united by a shared belief in tolerance, and able to come together to, say, practice soccer on a humid day, exactly as long as the downpours hold off.

Pastor Willy says almost 150 people gathered for a meeting once. Those who showed up risked their bodies, but found comfort just by being able to tell their experience out loud.

“We had four who committed suicide, because we did not know. Like a balloon, it kept on blowing, and it became too much and it bust. It ended,” Pastor Willy says. “You’re sitting in the group, connecting to other people, you tell these problems, then you see, ‘Ah!’ at least for me it’s a little better. You think to yourself, ‘A-ha!’“

GLA players run through passing drills in quick, tight, conveyor-like motions. As we stand and watch, Pastor Willy points out Salum to me, the most fluid of the players. He is slight with serious eyes, and Pastor Willy tells me he was the team’s leading scorer last season.

“When I move around [the pitch during a match], you can see the face of people, if they are happy, if they are not happy.” Pastor Willy says that whenever Salum scores, the crowd calls him by his nickname. “‘Neymar, Neymar.’ So you can tell people are happy. They forget about that issue of LGBT. They know only he’s a good player. LGBT is the lifestyle he lives.”

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The day after their practice, I speak to Thierry and Salum together in the cafeteria of the fortified compound built for the UNHCR, the United Nations agency that oversees Kakuma and is the largest benefactor of refugees in the world, across the road from the entrance to the camp. It is ostensibly a safe place — the UNHCR is largely in charge of protection in Kakuma — but they don’t look entirely comfortable at our table at the far end of the room. It is after breakfast, but there is still one other person near us, a man wiping down tables and resetting chairs.

They don’t go to the NGOs for help very often any more. When they have, they say they have been afforded only little protection, and experienced at times both intuited and explicit homophobia.

Thierry is of similar build to Salum, but lighter-skinned and with bigger, brighter eyes. He is the better English speaker of the two, so he speaks for both himself and as Salum’s translator. He explains an instance when Salum was relocated within Kakuma due to violence, only to be told shortly thereafter that he had to move back within the community that had been beating him.

“And he says that is ironical, because there is no way you can go back to a community where you have been attacked,” Thierry says. “So we have been complaining, only that we have never got any positive answer. I don’t know whether they are helpless, I don’t know whether they just neglect us, or I don’t know whether they just want us to live like that. But we’ve been complaining through police, we’ve been complaining through NGOs.”

Salum looks into the middle distance as Thierry speaks, though not detached from the conversation. They’re weary of running and complaining. They have talked to reporters in the past. It has never done them much good.

Soccer has. Soccer is a means of conveying worth that, for those who play it well, can blur race and sex and all the other ways we differentiate people. Thierry says whenever he is in a team, “it’s like I am in a family.” Through Thierry, Salum says that soccer helps him feel “that he is in another world.” A game like soccer uses lines and scores and an exact number of players that even a layman can regard and know who truly belongs.

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“There’s no way you can convince people other than your work,” Thierry says. “Once you show people your work, what you can do, what you are able to do, now they can trust your work and not who you are.”

Soccer is a vacuum in which prejudice is, if not extinguished, at least deprived of oxygen. The captain of the GLA soccer team is a 35-year-old man named Omar. He left South Africa to escape xenophobia in 2008 and went straight to Kakuma, where, he says, “we were only like 10 Burundians.”

“I just feared even to stay in part of South Africa,” Omar says. “I was just feeling painful to see how our fellow black people killing others, think we are taking their jobs, and their properties.”

Omar felt like an outcast in Kakuma then, his people dwarfed by the larger populations of Somali and Sudanese people. The irony isn’t lost on him that he, a heterosexual man, used to regard the LGBT community in South Africa as “evil people.” But in time his contact with Pastor Willy and seeing the LGBT talent involved with GLA changed that.

“Since I moved here and lived some three years, I set out to see some of the LGBTI coming,” Omar says. “So now I do understand the LGBT, that they are people who are supposed to live as I live. Because they have their own feelings as I have my own feelings. And I cannot judge them. I’m not a creator. It’s God who created them. He’s the only one to judge them if whatever they’re doing is wrong or right.”

God is a complicated presence in a place like Kakuma. God is important as a manifestation of hope and love that many need to survive in a place where they are ostracized and hungry, but also something many of those who need God would argue is exclusive of certain people.

“God, what means of God?” Pastor Willy says. “God is love. If God is love, we must love one another. I think I got this idea when I was lost everything, since 1983 my mother and my family, our feelings of revenge towards the death of my mother. But somebody told me, ’Don’t revenge, love people, love your enemy.’”

After our interview, I walk Thierry and Salum back to the front gate of the UNHCR compound in near silence. One of the last things they explain is that despite Pastor Willy and a growing community of LGBT supporters, and despite their success as soccer players, things are getting worse for them in Kakuma. Salum says he cannot get a job in the camp, not even at the NGOs he has approached for help, because during interviews, “they take him as evil, as a devil.” Thierry says the pace of those becoming tolerant of diverse sexuality in Kakuma is still outstripped by the pace of those discovering their sexuality and reacting violently.

I ask the two of them what they’d like people to know about Kakuma. Thierry says Kakuma is full of different countries, and many traditions, and many customs, so many that “it’s like your culture is gone.” And he says that is a good thing. Problems start, Thierry says, when others realize your identity, when “they see you doing other things which are not related to your culture.”

Salum says there is a river in Kakuma, that “there are some rivers which can be dry, and then after some time they’ll be flowing.”

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Thierry is living in Kampala, Uganda, now, studying at Kampala International University for a certificate in public administration with the help of private sponsorship from a UNHCR worker. It isn’t hard to leave Kakuma if you’d like. There are no gates to the camp, nothing keeping refugees in, physically.

But you can’t escape being a refugee. There are plenty of earnest benefactors in the world, but they can only do so much. Other African nations are loathe to host refugees, and Kenya has threatened to shut down Kakuma for years, though without much luck. Outside of Africa, developed nations have largely tightened the number of refugees they accept in recent years, and perhaps none more blatantly than the United States under President Donald Trump. Ultimately, Thierry is still a refugee. He still calls Kakuma his home.

Salum and Thierry are still together, though they are physically separated at the moment. Salum struggled with traditional schooling, so he is training to be a barber now. Both are still playing soccer, though only Salum still holds on to the hope that his athletic ability might earn a professional contract to an African football club.

“Football here, you can’t say that you are going to be helped, because there is nothing, there is not any door which is going to be doing something for you. And I can’t see it,” Thierry says. “That is one of the things that is different with Salum. He keeps saying that football is meant to help him in the future.”

Thierry doesn’t say that to admonish Salum.

“We don’t disagree. Somebody has got his own choices,” Thierry says. “You know, you need to be doing your own choices depending on what you can see and what you can desire.”

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The truth is, there is no good way to escape Kakuma for anyone, of any striation. When I speak to Thierry again in March, Kakuma is in the midst of protests over the introduction of student fees. Thirty South Sudanese students were reportedly detained in the camp, and the protests had turned violent. Thierry explains many used the protests as an excuse to hurt people — teachers and students, but also anyone — indiscriminately.

“Those students who could not afford to pay, they came and fight with those students who could afford to pay,” Thierry says. “So those students who could not study, they came from the community, they are stoning students, they are beating teachers, it was terrible.”

After the protests, secondary schools were closed for more than two weeks before being reopened with the fees intact. The roughly 3,000 Kenyan shillings per year it now costs to go to school in Kakuma amounts to roughly just 30 US dollars, but that is a high price to pay for refugees whose labor is valued at a small fraction as that of Kenyan workers, whatever their qualifications.

The lack of employment and education in places like Kakuma leads to desperate acts. Refugees often flee camps to war zones, or if they stay put, turn their frustrations on those weaker than them, knowing how futile it is to try to hurt something bigger than yourself. Soon, safe spaces shrink. Independent refugee journalists in Kakuma reported two people died after fighting broke out between two groups of Nuer people at a soccer match in late May.

Thierry was able to go back to Burundi before beginning school, and stay with the family that adopted him. They disapproved of his sexuality when they found out he was gay, and attempted to change him.

Thierry convinced them to accept him through his academic success — “I used to perform better, better than their children” — and it was Thierry’s decision to leave the country, in part to protect them from repercussions from the government and from police.

“I had to tell them, I had to tell them everything, but when I told them it wasn’t easy, it wasn’t easy for me, it wasn’t easy for them,” Thierry says. “But I had to. I had to. Because I couldn’t survive. So when I left Burundi I saved myself. I saved the family.”

Thierry never found escape through soccer, but at least he found respite. A feeling like he is in a family, in his family. He found something legitimizing. He found Pastor Willy, and he found Salum.

“I try to tell people, ‘Football is not for one people, or for one nation, or for one tribe,’” he says. “‘Football is for all people.’“

Escape may be a mirage, something fleeting before the realization that there is no such thing as safety, either in place or occupation; there is always something bigger, looming like the sun.

“You go and kick the ball and that ball does not go far, or that ball does not go in a direction that you are directing, you know some people will say, ‘Oh, this is because he’s this one, this is because he’s this one, that’s why he did that.’” Thierry says. “You can’t prepare yourself to live in Kakuma. You know Kakuma is not our place.“