Ani Kayode Somtochukwu

“By the time I started working on And Then He Sang a Lullaby in August 2018, I had already been a queer activist for about three years and had suffered a lot of repercussions for it.”

“Queer liberation is the only sustainable solution.”

“One feedback that I enjoyed though found surprising was that And Then He Sang a Lullaby was so Nigerian. So 'unapologetically Nigerian' one reviewer put it. That is the biggest compliment I could get.”

“My queer activism in university came with a steeper cost than I had stopped to take account of. I was mocked openly, mobbed twice by cultists and threatened too many times to count.”

“I wrote And Then He Sang a Lullaby while doing an internship. I was working for a hospital in Port Harcourt as a laboratory assistant.”

“I like to think of my writing as an expression of love for the African people, a commitment to our capacity for justice and liberty, an insistence on dreaming our freedom as an inevitable eventuality. I want to be an incendiary bomb. And I know that stories have that power.”