He lay on his bed, unable to move. The photos were ready. Production shots from Kinky Boots, the musical he’d just finished, in which he’d played Lola, a drag queen. All he had to do was post them. “I remember I lay on my bed… I was like, ‘Oh my god, what are people going to think?'” A friend called. “I told him, ‘I’m not doing okay. I am literally shaking. I have goosebumps.’” A few minutes later, his fear hadn’t gone away. He posted the photos anyway.
Oma “Buwa” Dede is a queer, Nigerian–Canadian R&B singer and, by day, a bank manager in Nanaimo, British Columbia. He is a man who has spent his life learning which versions of himself are safe to show and to whom. The photographs on his phone didn’t follow those strict rules. They showed it all.
This was in 2025, and Buwa says that a few years earlier, he wouldn’t have managed to be in that performance at all, let alone post the pictures. “Now, I don’t really care,” he says. Then the bravado softens. “It’s still very hard. It still makes me, like, quake in my bones a little bit. I know that some people would never understand, and I’ll probably lose a bunch of people in my life who I truly love.” He pauses. “But yeah, the older I’m getting, the more I’m confident to stand in my shoes.”
His anthology began in Warri, Nigeria, where his father played two cassettes each morning after prayers: Whitney Houston and Celine Dion. “Celine Dion and Houston were the two go-tos in my house over and over and over and over again,” Buwa says.
It was in church choirs that Buwa first found his own voice. He was a part of them from his youngest childhood right up to university. “I can’t remember when I started singing, but it’s the only thing that truly gives me joy. Like, my heart is full. I’m in my safe space when I’m singing.”
Singer performing with a microphone on stage
He found an echo of Whitney’s vocal runs in the call-and-response songs of Nigerian churches, where a leader sings out and the congregation sings back. Both musical styles taught him something about his own power. “I’ve noticed that when I sing, people listen,” he says. “I’m very intentional about what I sing and what I do because for some reason I’m able to cut across many people.”
But his growing voice, his simmering power, came with danger. Buwa realized that he loved men in ways that were outlawed by Nigeria’s 2014 Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act, which made same-sex relationships punishable by up to fourteen years in prison. The voice trained in church could never sing about the love he felt.
This was one of the reasons that motivated Buwa to pursue his graduate studies in Canada. He arrived in Nanaimo in 2016, a city he describes as having a “lack of chaos.” He took a job in banking. It offered camouflage. For years, the songs stopped, as Buwa faced “the hard lesson of accepting where [he] was in life.” “As soon as I started coming to terms with it, I began to hear melodies again,” he adds.
I learned the hard lesson of accepting where I was in life and living in the present instead of some future I had dreamed of for myself.
In 2019, he released “Olu,” which means king in Itsekiri. “‘Olu’ is about me finally being confident to express myself.” Six tracks introduced what would become his signature, pop-soul voice, with big, old-fashioned vocals and warm production, closer to Jill Scott and India Arie than to anything on today’s charts.
Dark stage lit by pink spotlight
Writer’s block hit until 2022, when a melody struck again. He called his friend: “I have an idea, and it’s here now. I need to do it now before it leaves.” Seven songs came; five became the album Just Call Me Buwa. He took real risks this time, expressing his truth through songs, but also through his makeup and costumes, taking a step away from banker-chic to embrace his queerness.
In 2025, he took the even riskier move of playing drag queen Lola in Kinky Boots. “I left that show with a new, firm respect for women,” he says. “To do this in heels is not a joke.” The humor gives way quickly. “That story in many ways mirrors my life… Lola allowed me to do everything that I did in my house when no one was seeing me.”
Portrait of person holding a microphone
Processing took time. “It took me about a month and a half to really sort of let go… I think I’m back to being me.” When he describes what shifted, his voice changes. “It helped me heal in many ways. It helped me confront many things that I probably never had the chance to confront.” He says, simply, “It healed me because it happened and I was okay.”
When Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie spoke about the danger of the single story, Buwa was thirteen or fourteen. The danger, she argued, is when we hear one thing about someone and decide that it contains everything.
Those single stories are everywhere. Western surveys consistently reduce Africa to poverty and wildlife. “Immigrant” has become a racial category. The word “African” arrives pre-packaged.
Framed art print with two connected maps
And so did the idea of African music. For two centuries, European colonizers heard African polyrhythm as noise. Around 2010, “Afrobeats” found its way onto the international stage through Burna Boy, Wizkid, and Tiwa Savage, but victory created its own flattening. Afrobeats ironically became a new single story.
Buwa refuses this, building on Jill Scott’s spoken-word layering, India Arie’s insistence that soul carries sensuality and spirituality, Brenda Fassie’s open performance of queerness under apartheid, Kirk Franklin’s demonstration that gospel doesn’t require erasing complexity, and Billy Porter’s teaching that queerness and church can inhabit the same moment.
Buwa left a performance in Port Alberni, a coastal city on Vancouver Island in Canada, where he had performed gospel and soul in heels, and found a stranger who had been waiting for him backstage long after everyone had gone. “I’m going to protect everybody I know who is Black and who is gay,” the stranger told him.
Sunny aerial view of bustling city market
What moved him to wait until everyone left and then promise protection wasn’t pity. It was recognition that Buwa had spent one hour dismantling every single story about what Black means, what African means, what queer means, what immigrant means, what banker means—not by arguing against them but by living every contradiction simultaneously until the categories themselves became useless. And the stranger understood that this kind of visibility, this refusal to let anyone file you under one familiar narrative that lets them stop looking, this insistence that people witness your full complexity or admit they’re choosing not to see—this remains dangerous, which is exactly why it requires protection.
By clicking “submit,” you agree to receive emails from TrooRa and accept our web terms of use and privacy and cookie policy. *Terms apply.
©2018 -2026 – TrooRa is a registered trademark of Rare Luxury Living LLC TrooRa Magazine, A Fortunest Group and is registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
By clicking “submit,” you agree to receive emails from TrooRa and accept our web terms of use and privacy and cookie policy. *Terms apply.
©2018 -2025 – TrooRa is a registered trademark of Rare Luxury Living LLC TrooRa Magazine, A Fortunest Group and is registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Explore diverse creators, authentic stories, and bold ideas. Login to access TrooRa’s vibrant world of inspiration.
Not a member yet? Register Now
Tier-3 User Trying to View Tier 4 Content
Tier-2 User Trying to View Tier 3 + 4 Content
Tier-1 “Free Member Limit Reached”
Free Member Trying to View Paid (Tier 2+) Content
Guest Trying to View Premium (Tier 1+) Content
Tier-0 “Free View Limit Reached”
