Tinashe Wakapila is a poet and writer from Zimbabwe. She was born in Zimbabwe in September 1992 (Inkanyiso) and later settled in Durban, South Africa. Her face is part of the photographic record of Black lesbian life in the region. Zanele Muholi photographed her in Harare in 2011 (Stevenson) and in Durban in 2018 for Faces and Phases, Muholi’s long-running portrait series. The Durban portrait was acquired for Nottingham Castle Museum through the Contemporary Art Society, and her portrait has been exhibited by Stevenson in South Africa and Yancey Richardson in New York.
Her best-known work is a poem. “Because I Am” was written in response to anti-gay speeches by Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, and in 2016 it became the basis of a short film of the same name (Kuchu Times). Director Lawrence Zidyana shot the film with a cast of six women from several African countries, five of them LGBT asylum claimants in the United Kingdom (Hona Africa). The film deals with the rejection and violence lesbians face in Zimbabwe, where same-sex relations are criminalized (Kuchu Times). It screened in New York and London in 2016 and reached the semi-finals of the Los Angeles Cinefest in 2017 (Hona Africa).
Wakapila has told her own story in essays for Inkanyiso, the media platform Muholi founded. In a 2015 essay on coming out, she wrote: “Being a Christian and lesbian has always been a thorn in my life.” (Inkanyiso) She described being outed at school at 14 and, in a later essay, the acceptance she eventually found at home, where her mother and father came to accept her (Inkanyiso). She covered Durban Pride in 2015 (Inkanyiso) and reported on the Faces and Phases book launch in 2019 (Inkanyiso), and that year she also wrote on Christianity and LGBTI people in South Africa (Inkanyiso).
She founded the Wakapila Arts Foundation. She contributed poetry to All Hail The Queers, a photography magazine assembled by Zawadi The Art in response to Ghana’s proposed anti-LGBT law. Minority Africa, covering the magazine in 2023, reported that her work in it defines beauty as the courage to be your true self in the face of violence. In 2021 she released a spoken word recording, “The Mystery of Life,” on her podcast, Tinashe.Wakapila The Writer (Spotify for Creators). Openly lesbian writing from Zimbabwe circulates mostly online and outside the country, and Wakapila’s work has reached its audience the same way, through essays, recordings, and a film.
Carolyn Satchell
