Unwritten Lives

The UK and EU countries who abstained when Ghana’s UN resolution was adopted may soon find it harder to sustain the same old script on reparations

It has been one year today since the world’s first openly gay imam, Muhsin Hendricks, was murdered in South Africa on 15 February 2025. To date, there have been no arrests, demonstrating once more the impunity with which hatred and violence against members of the LGBTQI+ community in South Africa are met. To mark the first anniversary of Hendricks’ murder, Unwritten Lives is today reposting Muriithi Kariuki's seminal essay on the routine silence and everyday erasure that underpin homophobic violence. "The destruction of queer lives does not begin with a hammer, a bullet, or a judge’s gavel … It begins with silence. With isolation. With erasure."

While South Africa’s historic categorisation of Gender-Based Violence and Femicide as a national disaster has intensified the spotlight on the country’s appalling statistics of violence against women and girls, the perpetrators remain mostly unmentioned. A society that cannot speak about its male perpetrators can never understand its female victims and survivors.

For a snapshot of the authoritarian era to which today’s launch of Unwritten Lives is a response, we don’t have to rewind too far, just to the recent past, to moments that still reside fresh in recent memory.

Khayam Turki is not merely a political prisoner. He is a turning point, demonstrating how President Kaïs Saïed’s authoritarian rule has transformed Tunisia from the beacon of the Arab Spring to the laboratory of democratic disillusionment ignored by Europe.

When a DNA test revealed the author’s Roma heritage, he travelled to one of Europe’s largest Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller (GRT) gatherings—Appleby Horse Fair in Cumbria—to learn more about this unique historic event.