My early years in Nigeria were tough. Since childhood, I always knew I was different. At school, I suffered merciless bullying for being LGBT+. Where I grew up, there was no yearly celebration of difference – but I had been to Pride in London and the US, and knew how influential it could be to show young people that being LGBT+ is nothing to be ashamed of.
In 2019, I launched Nigeria’s first month-long Pride protest in Lagos and Abuja. But soon after, I realised I had been identified as a person of interest by the government. It was no longer safe for me to stay in Nigeria and in November 2019, I fled persecution to the UK.
I arrived just months before the first Covid lockdown, and was unaware how much life was about to change for me. I was taken to a detention centre where my phone was confiscated. For five days, I was held there without any meaningful contact with the outside world. I was bullied and sexually assaulted by other detainees. The Home Office gave me a dumb phone to make calls and texts. But I couldn’t access the internet with it – I was completely isolated.
I went from being a person of means in Nigeria to having nothing. I became homeless when I left the centre. I would access the internet wherever I could find it – at McDonald’s and in libraries. Obviously that wasn’t reliable, so there were whole periods when I would be cut off from sending emails to my solicitor or reaching out for help. I couldn’t afford to pay for a phone bill or broadband connection. And the phone I had at the time had a bad battery, so I was always out of juice.
During Covid, things got even worse. You couldn’t see anyone face to face. Everything had to be online. But whole subsets of society weren’t able to connect with anyone. Without a phone or internet, how do you call someone, or reach out to a charity? How do you join a support group on Zoom without digital access? At the time I was receiving £39 a week from the government and was prevented from working while my asylum claim was processed.
When you’re living in poverty you have to decide whether to feed yourself or pay for the internet. Getting online might sound like a luxury – but consider how anyone accesses GP services these days, how you report a crime, how you file your taxes. Everything is done digitally.
I thought England would be some kind of utopia, but that hasn’t been the case. There have been a lot of hoops to jump through since I first arrived, and I am still living in temporary accommodation. My asylum claim was granted in 2020, but my digital disfranchisement still follows me to this day. The charity Safe Passage has been arranging free sim cards for me and other Safe Passage young leaders for years now.
When I tried to register at a new GP practice last week, I was told to sign up online. It makes me angry for all those who have been in my shoes and who are shut out from services. It’s not even just us asylum seekers and refugees. British people who were born here are also facing the same problem. The digital divide is a real thing – affecting vast demographics of people. Poverty is its root cause.
Being a refugee does not solve all problems. I am still a person of colour and LGBT+. It’s sad to say I probably feel less safe here than when I was in Nigeria. At least there I was a person of means. But at the same time, I feel blessed that I’m still here. Things could have gone very differently for me. In the same detention centre where I was held, Oscar Okwurime, who was of Nigerian descent, died of a subarachnoid haemorrhage. An inquest jury found that neglect contributed to his death. I often think about how differently life turned out for both of us.
As told to Lucy Pasha-Robinson
Joel Mordi is an LGBTQ+ activist and contributor to the Guardian documentary The Digital Divide: could you live without the internet?
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