Women have a lot of interesting stories. So many cool, sad, sexy, funny and strange stories. Stories that inspire and stories that make you shake your head and roll your eyes. Stories that turn you on or make you want to turn away. The lives of women are an intricate tapestry of happenings that often does not properly get seen, and sometimes gets ignored. Which is such a waste because it is such a great, random and wild menagerie of existences.
The edition has stories of love, stories of heart ache. It tackles the political and also the passionate. This issue sought to scratch the surface of the infinite stories that queer African women have deep inside and draw them out for everyone to see. We wanted to give you a peep behind the curtain into the world of women from around the continent through their art, photos and writing.
We named it Emergence because this is our way of facilitating queer African women coming onto the world stage and saying ‘we are here and we are whole’. We are loving, fucking, working, crying, succeeding, failing, sometimes doing nothing but generally existing. This is the work done by HOLAA! curated and concentrated into an artistic journal and we could not be more excited to have stories from Zimbabwe to Kenya, Nigeria to Namibia.
When we did the call we were nervous, it took us back to those days when we would beg for contributions to the site and would get one pity poem. The days when would publish once a week and were lucky. A few years on we have the posts, we have (somewhat) of a plan and most importantly we found our people, the incredible African women that live this tapestry of an existence.
So we decide the time had come to archive this in style.
Working with Q-zine had been a long time dream of HOLAA!’s and when we suddenly had the ability to we jumped on it like a thirsty person on a glass of water. When they said yes we could do nothing but pop the champagne roll up our sleeves and get to work.
Now the edition is done so we raise a glass to the incredible women who lent us, and the world their existence.
Welcome to Emergence, come for the curiosity and stay for the stories.
Tiffany Mugo and Siphumeze Khundayi, curators of HOLAA!