What if your name carried not just your ancestry, but your survival strategy?
In this episode of Embracing All of Me, host Ross Victory sits down with South African scholar-activist Mpumelelo Zamokuhle Zulu to explore how names, identities, and histories shape—and sometimes fracture—who we’re allowed to be. For many bi+ people across the African diaspora, identity isn’t simply about self-discovery. It’s about negotiation: with culture, community, safety, and silence.
Zamo shares a deeply personal truth: growing up, he split himself in two. One name became “consumable”—the version that fit the heteronormative, masculine ideal demanded by township life. The other held his queerness, his curiosity, his softness—a self that felt too risky to show, even to himself. This fragmentation wasn’t confusion. It was protection. Like so many bisexual people, especially Black bisexual men, Zamo learned early that being whole could be dangerous.
That split followed him until he moved to Cape Town—often called the “queer capital” of Africa—where he finally found space to begin reuniting those parts of himself. But the episode doesn’t romanticize South Africa as a utopia. Zamo names the tension clearly: while the country’s constitution is among the first in the world to protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination, lived realities are still shaped by class, race, geography, and gender-based violence. Legal protection doesn’t always equal safety.
One of the episode’s most powerful moments comes when Zamo challenges the myth that queerness—or bisexuality specifically—is “un-African.” Drawing from precolonial history, he reminds us that gender and sexual diversity existed long before colonial laws tried to erase them. What changed wasn’t desire, but duty: heterosexuality became a communal obligation tied to lineage and survival, not evidence of the absence of same-sex love.
At the heart of this conversation is healing. Zamo describes resilience not as toughness, but as unlearning the voices that taught him to shrink—and relearning how to listen to himself. Joy, he says, is his quiet form of activism. In a world that insists Black bisexual happiness is impossible, simply existing with softness, color, and ease becomes an act of resistance.
This episode is an invitation to reflect: What parts of yourself did you split off to survive? What name—given, chosen, or still forming—are you ready to reclaim? Zamo’s story reminds us that wholeness isn’t about becoming someone new. It’s about finally allowing all of who you are to belong.