More than 20,000 people marched through Johannesburg on Saturday to celebrate Pride, singing, dancing and making their support clear for LGBTQ+ communities across Africa who cannot be open safely and whose relationships are criminalised. At the front of a parade that organisers estimated was 24,000-strong was Mandela Swali, a 25-year-old Ugandan gay man who was attending his first Pride, having been in South Africa just a month-and-a-half. Swali, face coated in glitter, draped in a Ugandan flag, recounted how he had fled his country in 2021 while on bail, having been arrested when his landlady caught him having sex with his boyfriend.