A Senegalese American journalist, filmmaker, and producer, Selly Thiam is an #AfricaNoFilter fellow, working as part of the Ford-created initiative to shift outdated narratives about Africa. She also founded None on Record, a digital media organization dedicated to amplifying the voices and visibility of African LGBTQ people.

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What was the inspiration for None on Record?

I started it in 2006, two years after the murder of activist FannyAnn Eddy, a lesbian rights activist known across Africa. She was the founder of the Sierra Leone Lesbian and Gay Association and was murdered in her offices in Freetown. When that happened, I was in my early 20s and I realized that there was so much silence around African LGBT experiences so I began to travel to document people’s stories.

Today, we produce a lot of documentaries about the African LGBT experience and distribute them in as many places as possible. We train LGBT activists from across the continent on how to tell their own stories using digital tools, and then we produce festivals and try to bring people together to have conversations about African LGBT experiences.

In your opinion, why is storytelling from this particular community so critical today?

There’s a level of silence around African LGBT experiences. There’s this idea that we are un-African, that we don’t exist. So when we started this project, it was very difficult to find queer stories, and we don’t want that to continue to happen. If communities are documented—even through oral histories, audio-based oral histories, small documentaries that they’re making—then there becomes a record, a record of our existence, and that’s why it’s really important to empower communities to basically tell their stories.

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What are some misconceptions about Africa that you seek to challenge?

We are not just a continent of conflicts, poverty, and famine. That’s the hardest part about shifting the way Africa is seen by the world.

Within Africa ourselves, what we need to learn about each other, I think, is the deep level of diversity that we have, particularly when it comes to things that may seemingly be outside the norm. Queer people have existed in Africa since the beginning of time, and this is something we as Africans need to understand. We’re trying to shift the narrative by creating as much content that just tells our stories and gets them out into the world.

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Can you point to specific industries or spaces that you would want to disrupt?

I think that in the foreign press we need to have more African editors, media practitioners, and content creators in those rooms. It doesn’t usually happen. I know because I used to be in those rooms. Oftentimes, these media organizations parachute people into Africa to tell our stories and they want to tell them from specific angles. I think we can tell our stories better. Locally speaking, we need more robust journalism practices. We need a media that can actually be funded and operate separately from governments. We need journalists to be trained to actually write the stories properly.

In a lot of places, we just need a more democratic society. If we’re able to have conversations, if we’re able to produce content and share different stories, then we can change the narrative. But as long as we don’t have access to that, it’s very difficult to change the dominant narrative.

In the coming decade, what changes would indicate to you that Africa is making progress toward greater equality?

I’d like to see homosexuality decriminalized everywhere. I’d like to see the ability for us to produce content and have support from our governments because, as a filmmaker, it’s difficult when we exist in a space that doesn’t support our industry. So I’d love to see more support for creative economies in Africa.