Unwritten Lives

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."

A nihilistic political thriller about the obliteration of an American family when a new girlfriend’s authoritarian ideas rip them apart

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.