Aweng and Alexus Ade-Chuol cover the January 2021 issue of British ELLE, speaking about their December 2019 marriage at City Hall in Manhattan. Aurelia Donaldson styles the duo in ‘A Modern Fairytale’, lensed by Meinke Klein./ Makeup by Bea Sweet

Aweng’s father was a child soldier in the First Sudanese Civil War, lasting from 1955-1972, between north and south Sudan. It began a year before Sudan was declared independent from Great Britain. The Second Sudanese Civil War was an intense 22-year conflict between the central government in Khartoum and the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA). It ran from 1983-2005.

Aweng’s family fled the Second Sudanese Civil War when her mother was pregnant with her. Like Adut Akech and Halima Aden, Ade-Chuol was born in Kakuma, northwestern Kenya’s UN-run refugee camp, as the eldest of 12 children.

Aweng has never been able to visit war-torn South Sudan. At the age of seven, she moved with her family from Kenya to Australia, leaving her father behind fighting on South Sudan’s war-torn battlefields. Aweng’s father passed in 2012, due to complications from a war wound.

Until she was 19 and discovered working at a McDonald’s in Sydney, Aweng stayed in Sydney with her mother and siblings. Always filled with big ambitions and goals for her future, the rising talent found herself in Paris, booked as a worldwide exclusive for Vetements.

With COVID-19 on the horizon in 2020, Aweng experienced a sharp rebuke from her South Sudanese community over her gay marriage. This is not stage one of her British ELLE Hannah Nathanson interview, however.

“It’s such a nerd thing to say but he’s always been my favourite poet,’ Aweng says about First World War poet Wilfred Owen. ”His poetry is just phenomenal to me. It’s all about war and my father was a soldier… Maybe that’s why I love him so much.”

After awhile Ade-Chuol speaks to her attempted suicide a few months after her December 2020 wedding. She did not reveal her stay of three days in ICU and six more in the hospital until mid-summer. For Lexy, this was not her first brush with the attempted suicide of a loved one, further complicated with Aweng by Lexy’s inability to visit her love in the hospital.

“ I didn’t sleep for three days, I didn’t eat for three days, I was just waiting and praying a lot. It’s a very tough situation to find yourself in, but it’s really not in your control,” Lexy tells Nathanson.

The good news is that Aweng’s family in Australia are very positive about her marriage. This is not the case of her South Sudanese community, which must be heartbreaking for a young woman who has never been able to visit her war-torn community.

In South Sudan, same-sex marriage has been constitutionally banned since 2011, and it would be a mistake to blame this reality solely on local customs. In the opinion of AOC, American evangelicals bear huge responsibility for wreaking Godly havoc and anti-gay, anti-women sentiments throughout Africa.

As The Guardian so correctly points out in a 2015 article on missionaries in the continent: “Africa is by and large conservative, and many poor countries are susceptible to charity with a socially conservative agenda. It’s within this context that many US evangelical churches go to Africa to win the battles that are being lost at home. Many of them subscribe to the dominionist movement, which supports turning secular governments into Christian theocracies.”

AOC doesn’t know how else to put it: US Donald Trump may call Africa a bunch of s#ithole countries, but his evangelical voters are running far and wide across the continent, creating raging anti-gay sentiments, refusing birth control that is legal in most countries (forget abortion) and often educating boys with little concern for girls.

For Aweng and Lexy, how excruciating it must be to be judged in this way by “her people”.

AOC was early to promote Aweng Choul, and I am concerned about her generally-speaking after reading this interview. My intense, multi-year involvement in Sudan’s women’s rights politics gives me just the tiniest glimmer of the backlash against her marriage to Lexy.

Aweng says she is in therapy twice a week. I adore her ambition and she has so many important goals, it’s dizzying. Still . . . I feel her fragility and Aweng will be in my thoughts for months to come. ~ Anne