Ireland’s Black Gay Population Finds A Voice

It’s not difficult to spot Zainab Boladale across the hotel lobby. The journalist, TV presenter and now author – best known for her work on the RTÉ show Nationwide – is radiant in a long purple dress, yellow triangular earrings and large red-framed glasses. And then there are the braids – each one beautifully, carefully and intricately formed.

Boladale’s hairstyle is part of the reason we’re meeting in Dublin today. The Nigerian-born, Clare-raised woman has already hit several impressive career milestones in her 27 years, but her first young adult novel will be published this month. Braids Take a Day follows the story of Abidemi Benson, a black Irish woman on the verge of adulthood who embarks upon a summer of self-discovery after completing her Leaving Certificate. The novel weaves themes of friendship, romance and independence together with strands of African and Irish culture.

Considering her high-achieving attributes – she has always been “annoyingly persistent” when it comes to making things happen for herself, she says – it was only a matter of time before she added “novelist” to her CV.

“I don’t think I had a lot of friends as a kid,” she says. “I loved books so deeply: Roald Dahl, Lemony Snicket, Jacqueline Wilson. And I hate to admit it, but I was obsessed with anything to do with vampires; Twilight, that was a bit of me,” she laughs, hiding her face in her hands. “My mum would catch me reading under the covers late at night. Books were always an escape into somebody else’s world.”

Boladale, the eldest of three children, does not remember much about the move from the Nigerian city of Lagos to Ennis, Co Clare, at the age of four. She last visited her country of birth in 2018 – her father remains there and did not make the move to Ireland with the family – but recalls feeling like a bit of an outsider.

“It was interesting, because obviously I’ve grown and changed,” she says. “Even though I feel very Nigerian in my essence and culture, I stick out like a sore thumb because my mannerisms aren’t so Nigerian. Even the way I speak; I speak Yoruba, but it’s Anglicised Yoruba, if that makes sense. I love Nigeria so much, and I’m planning on going back again – but I recognise that I’m different. It’s like being an American in Ireland – you love it so much, but you definitely stick out.”

She never had a sense of not fitting in as a young child, she says, but her secondary school years proved more difficult. She attended a Gaelcholáiste at the urging of a teacher who had noticed her flair for languages, and “struggled” to find her feet among her Gaeilgeoirí schoolmates.

“I really loved primary school growing up,” she says. “I never felt strange in my school, or at odds with anything. Clare also had a huge Nigerian population at that time as well, so there were always Nigerian kids around me and my mum didn’t lack Nigerian friends, either. But I also had a lot of Irish friends and a lot of friends from the Travelling community, so it was a very multicultural experience. But the first three years of secondary school was the time that I realised ‘Oh, okay. There can be a difference in how people treat you.’”

After school, she studied journalism at DCU, despite her parents’ initial resistance. “My mum comes from a nursing background, so she was all, ‘You’re going to be a nurse, obviously’. I was like, ‘That literally doesn’t make sense because I hate the sight of blood.’ My dad wanted me to do law because he’s really into business and politics, but I have a terrible poker face. So there was a lot of back-and-forth, and trying to convince them that journalism is the right path. And when I went to DCU, I was like: This has to work, there’s no alternative – because there’s no way that I’m going to be a nurse.”

She quickly made things happen for herself, hounding newspapers and media outlets for internships before “serendipitously” winning a presenting job on News2Day, RTÉ’s news programme for kids and young people. Even then, she says, there was “a lot of self-doubt in the first six months. I think for the first year, I was really trying to fit in – and I think there’s only so much you can try to mould yourself into something that’s just not working. I remember I even bought this bob wig to wear in that first year, because I thought ‘Okay, I see that bobs are really trendy for news presenters right now’. I wanted people to take me seriously and was trying to pretend I was not 20.”

The book also celebrates her African background and emphasises the importance of hair in African culture. It is a topic that has previously been explored by Emma Dabiri in her essay collection Don’t Touch My Hair, and one passage in Braids Take a Day gently tackles the issue of cultural appropriation after Abidemi explains to her (white) best friend why it would not be appropriate for her to wear braids.

“It’s funny, because when I was younger even if we couldn’t get the latest things, our mum would make sure our hair was done,” she says. “And even though my mum covers her head, her hair would be done underneath her scarves. It didn’t make any sense to me as a kid, but I realised that it was somehow really important. When I first started working in RTÉ, and I was wearing wigs, I was just trying to conform. [But] when I started to get a bit more confident, I thought, you know what? I’m just going to start wearing my braids, because that’s what’s more comfortable to me and that’s how I want to present myself. The way you style your hair is so important to your identity, your confidence. So I wanted to make that a big part of the story.”

There are both parallels and differences between Boladale’s childhood and Abidemi’s. She is much bolder and louder than her fictional creation. She grew up in Ennis, Abi in Ennistymon, while the local teenage disco was the centre of the universe for both.

One real-life experience that did not filter into the book, however, is the racist abuse that Boladale received when she became a regular on Irish TV screens.

[ â€˜It’s very clear what’s racist,’ says RTÉ presenter after online abuseOpens in new window ]

“I didn’t want it to be a book where the main character experiences racism, because racism is tiring,” she says. “It’s exhausting, and I wanted to give readers a break about things just being about race. So while there are so many things that Abi goes through in her own experience of her race, it’s not an effect of how other people treat her. There are microaggressions here and there, but it’s not just all about racism; this is a full character who has a full life. She’s still a teenager, she’s experiencing self-identity, love, wanting her parents to be proud of her and not disappointing them – all of those things. I wanted her to be a person, as opposed to just a character who experiences racism.”

Boladale is speaking from first-hand experience. She found herself an inadvertent representative for the African community in Ireland after becoming the first black person to work in the RTÉ newsroom. The flipside of such an honour was the horrendous online racist abuse that she was exposed to.

“You know what? I think the naivety of youth really helped, because I was 20 at the time,” she says. “When I was in college going into spaces, I was aware of being the only black person here and there, but I thought ‘Maybe it’ll be different when I actually work in the industry – maybe this is just the college scene.’ But then when I officially started working in RTÉ, it was a bigger deal than just the confinement of my workspace. It was a lot, because you feel all these pressures and expectations.

[ â€˜I don’t see myself as a Nigerian woman who landed a job in RTÉ’Opens in new window ]

“I was really lucky to have editors who were really mindful of me, because they also realised that I was young and it was all very new to me. But it took a lot of time for me to separate myself from ‘This is what people see you as.’ That definitely wasn’t easy, because I felt like I had to represent a community while I was still learning to do my job. And I understand the need for representation – don’t get me wrong, it’s important – but it was a lot of pressure back then, and I had to find ways of minding myself.”

For a long time, she says, she didn’t mind herself. She initially kept the abuse to herself, until one day it ‘blew up’ on Twitter in 2019 after she realised that a troll had compiled videos of her work and was uploading them to YouTube, inviting hateful commentary by bigots.

“I didn’t say it to anybody, because I didn’t want to be ‘The black presenter having issues’, or ‘The black presenter who’s dealing with racism’,” she says. “I know it’s weird to say it that way, but that’s just how I felt. I didn’t want that to be my narrative. But then I saw an article on Twitter about Ireland being so open and welcoming, and I was like ‘That’s not true, because I’m experiencing this’. Then [the reaction to her speaking out] did the rounds: ‘RTÉ presenter experiences racism online.’”

Her employers were supportive and had the YouTube channel removed, but she was shaken by the experience. She recalls being worried that the trolls would also make her sexuality – she is proudly gay – a focal point for their hatred. “I remember going into work on Monday, thinking ‘I am so getting fired. I am in so much trouble.’ But the first thing they said to me was ‘Why didn’t you say anything? We can do something about this.’ So it was only after that that I realised: Okay, I can’t hold on to these things. These things are happening and it’s okay to be vocal about it.”

Growing up gay in Ennis brought its own challenges, she says, but one of the biggest she faced was at home. “Coming from a religious Nigerian background and talking about sexuality – it does not even exist, whatsoever,” she says. “But I’ve been socially out since I was 13, so it’s never been a case of ‘Am I, or am I not?’ I always knew that I fell somewhere in the umbrella of queerness. And people did give me stick about it in a jokey manner, but I was like, ‘and what?’ But I think that was because I knew that what I was dealing with at home was much worse – knowing that no matter what, my family would never accept it. So it was like ‘Your jokes don’t bother me, because at home I know it’s much worse.’ And I don’t mean that to discredit my mum, or anything like that – it’s just [her] beliefs. I love my mum to bits and we’re actually very close, but this is the one thing that we can never see eye to eye on.”

Despite the difficulty with finding acceptance within her family, it has also spurred her on to making a successful life for herself. “I think in some ways, it’s motivated me to be very self-sufficient because I know this is the one contention in our relationship,” she says. “It’s something I don’t really talk about.” She has always been “very confident in [her] queerness” and how the marriage equality referendum in 2015 was a huge deal for her. “I know it sounds a bit strange,” she says, “but I felt ‘Okay, if this passes, it’s another thing that makes me feel socially accepted. Regardless of how things are at home, if this passes, it makes me feel a bit more validated.”

She has been with her partner, Bisi, who regularly features on her social media, for more than two years. “She is funny as hell,” she says. “She has the biggest personality and she’s so loveable. To me, it’s very important that whoever I’m with, I can be 100 per cent myself with: be a bit weird, a bit silly – and that’s something I really value about our relationship, because we’re both just big goofballs. It’s a part of me also that a lot of people don’t get, because I keep to myself a lot. But if you know me, you know that I’m super-silly – and she’s even sillier than me, which is why I think she’s absolutely amazing.”

She notes how her country of birth remains a hostile environment for queer people.

“When it comes to friends, I’ve always been very accepted; I always made sure I’ve had a community of queer people who understood me, and never made me feel ‘less than’,” she says. “And I think that definitely comes from the fact that I know how Nigerian society can be. It’s 14 years in jail if you’re out or even ‘thought to be’ queer in Nigeria. Funnily enough, my partner is Nigerian and was out in Nigeria, but she says if you have money, people will turn a blind eye. If you don’t have money, you’re going to live the worst experience of your life.”

She shakes her head, heavy with the mere thought of not being true to yourself. It’s a theme that she explored in Worthy, the short film that she wrote and directed on a shoestring budget. The process was more of a learning experience than anything else, she admits, but it was important to see people like herself portrayed on screen.

“It came about because I was questioning what it means to value yourself in a relationship,” she says. “I hadn’t seen anything black and queer in that format in Ireland. I know all of these black gay people, but I don’t see them in things. I think sometimes on the Irish queer scene, you forget that there are other, smaller pockets within it, and I just wanted to give voice to those pockets. It’s not about race, but I just wanted it to reflect the people that I’m seeing.”

Boladale throws her head back, laughing loudly. In the future, she says, she sees more books, perhaps more films and more travelling alongside her burgeoning journalistic career. She would like to make documentaries about different communities and different people, inspired in part by her travels around Ireland with Nationwide.

“The book was my first dream, though,” she says. “I took a bit of a reroute because when I was younger, my mom was like, ‘You need to find a career! You can’t just be writing books’.” She laughs loudly. “Well, here I am. I made it … eventually.”

Braids Take a Day is published by The O’Brien Press on August 10th