Blog post by Laura Lambert*

Queer refugees are often imagined as fleeing hostility in Africa and finding safe haven in the liberal Global North. These colonial tropes of ‘homophobic Africa’ and Western saviorism have been challenged in important research on queer South-South mobilities. Queer refugees carve out their lives in contexts often shaped by both discrimination and protection. A recent survey showed that African civil servants can have utterly different views on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, and Queer (LGBTIQ*) clients. But how do they deal with these clients, for instance asylum seekers?

A short answer is that bureaucratic responses to queer asylum seekers may be complex and they are shaped by the way asylum is organized. How African asylum bureaucracies deal with LGBTIQ* refugees is more heterogeneous than the trope of ‘homophobic Africa’ allows. More people are involved in negotiating their protection than the lonely asylum decision-maker we imagine based on many European asylum models. Based on my ethnographic research in Niger in 2018-2019, I elaborate these points in an article I recently published in a Special Issue on moral economies of knowledge production on migration in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. This blog post gives a short overview of my findings.

Niger as a Queer Refuge?

Like in Kenya and in contrast to Morocco, LGBTIQ* people are not legally criminalized in Niger, but are discriminated against. Formal legality and everyday discrimination provide a contentious context for the processing of queer asylum seekers.

Societies in present-day Niger have historically known queer identities, homosexual practices, and sexual fluidity. In contrast to many Anglophone African countries, homosexuality is not criminalized in Niger. Its former colonial power France may have never enforced its laws against same-sex sexual activity in Niger and abolished them in 1900. Niger’s 1997 refugee law and other human rights law should grant them protection.

However, this open legal framework clashes with public sentiments. Even discussing queer topics with my rather liberal university-educated friends in Niger’s capital Niamey was impossible. It would elicit a whole register of rejection: silence, anger and even disgust. Since the 1990s, Muslim-majority Niger has turned increasingly conservative in the wake of Salafi and Sunni reinterpretations of Islam.

Euro-African Borders and the Lesser Evil

When we talked about this, my Nigerien research partners in the asylum administration often wondered: why would queer people come to Niger? More liberal places were only a bus ride away. Refugees told me there was no choice for them. European-supported border controls blocked them on their journeys to North Africa. In turn, North Africa pushed them south to Niger in illicit mass deportations. In 2018, the first openly queer migrants applied for asylum in Niger when they did not know where else to go. This was another of the many unintended consequences of externalization policies.

In Niger, the queer asylum seekers I spoke with were struggling with stereotypes and outright violence in the street. Some went on with living their love lives, while others remained in the closet even privately. This choice was a hard one and could shift over time: remaining invisible could mean safety, but it risked weakening the asylum claim and future chances for resettlement. Visibility, on the other hand, was dangerous, but could lead to resettlement. Queer refugees felt trapped in Niger and its contentious constellation of societal heteronormativity and outright anti-queer violence and legal protection.

The banks of the Niger river could be fleeting spaces of desire, eroticism and joy. Niamey, 2019

Organization Matters: A Multi-Actor Asylum Decision

In this harsh conflict between morality and the law, the organizational design of the asylum procedure helped to integrate different perspectives and, potentially, balance them. In contrast to many Western models, Niger’s asylum procedure involves multiple actors from the state administration, civil society and UNHCR. As I detail in a report on Niger’s asylum procedure, it consists of a National Eligibility Commission (Commission Nationale d’Éligibilité au Statut des Réfugiés) with 17 members from state and non-state institutions for decision-making on asylum claims. A permanent office, the Refugee Directorate, processes the applications and prepares the cases. UNHCR provides guidance and funding. And ordinary citizens (citoyens lambda) and the police are involved to assess an applicant’s morality.

This model of an inter-ministerial committee has been introduced by UNHCR in many countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.  However, there has been relatively little research into the workings of these commissions. Most of the prolific research on Refugee Status Determination has focused on the Global North where asylum decisions are often in the hands of a single caseworker or a small board. This tendency has favored an individualistic bent in analyses of how conflicts between local concepts of morality and the law are resolved. In the case of queer applicants, this was an issue of mediation and deliberation between different actors in Niger.

During my research in 2018-2019, the first queer asylum seekers were frequently bounced between UNHCR and state asylum officials. When the first applicants claimed persecution on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity, asylum officials at the Refugee Directorate hesitated to register them. Their supervisors informally sought guidance from UNHCR and other legal experts from their networks who convinced them to respect the law and admit these cases. Yet some queer asylum seekers reported they felt stigmatized in the asylum interviews which followed.

A particular challenge for queer applicants was the so-called “morality check” (Enquête Administrative de Moralité). In this procedure, an intelligence unit from the police went to the applicant’s vicinity. They interviewed neighbors about the applicant’s “morality” and fed their accounts into a classified report. That way, neighbors could forcibly out queer migrants against their will and attest to their “bad morality” as “gays”. Thereby, anonymized citizens and their ideas of what was good moral behavior could shape asylum decisions for queer applicants.

In the next step, the complete asylum files were sent to the National Eligibility Commission for adjudication. Its 17 members discussed each file individually and then took a majority vote. This instance of deliberation could weigh items of “morally” loaded evidence against each other. A negative morality check did not automatically mean a rejection. These decisions were taken on a case-by-case basis. Some queer migrants indeed received refugee status from the state. Others were rejected or were recognized as refugees by UNHCR and resettled.  

Volatile Constellations

Ethnographic insights into the concrete workings of Niger’s asylum administration portray it as a complex site of negotiation and emergence, of protection and discrimination. Such insights can provide more ‘more nuanced theorizations’ of queer South-South mobilities and thus challenge the trope of ‘homophobic Africa’.

Nevertheless, since the end of my research, the situation for queer refugees has exacerbated in Niger. In 2022, queer people were made hypervisible by conservative Muslim actors. In response, the then-president Bazoum reportedly announced draconian anti-LGBT laws in a move of ‘decolonizing’ the law. In 2023, the Bazoum government was ousted by a military coup. This departure from constitutional democracy has made human rights-based approaches to the protection of LGBTIQ* people ever more uncertain.

Critical researchers stress that most queer refugees live in the Global South. Their partly deteriorating (in-)formal protection requires further critical attention by pro-queer activists, human rights advocates and academia.

References

Awondo, Patrick, Peter Geschiere, and Graeme Reid. 2012. “Homophobic Africa? Toward a more nuanced view.” African Studies Review 55 (3): 145–168. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0002020600007241.

Camminga, B., and John Marnell (eds.). 2022. Queer and trans African mobilities: migration, asylum and diaspora. London, New York: Zed.

Lambert, Laura. 2025. Between morality and the law: negotiating protection for queer asylum seekers in Niger’s asylum administration. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 51(10), 2529–2546. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2025.2461342

*Laura Lambert is a political anthropologist working on asylum, migration and citizenship in West Africa. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the European Research Council project Doing Digital Identities at Leuphana University where she focuses on digital identification in Sierra Leone. Her prior research addressed the everyday externalization of refugee protection to Niger.

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