There is Nothing African about Homophobia

At the same time that King Henry VIII of England signed the Buggery Act in 1533, criminalizing sex between two males, “men in women’s apparel” were living amongst the Imbangala people of Angola, sleeping with other men.

As Kamau Muiga writes, “Like other peoples anywhere in the world, pre-colonial African communities generally placed paramount importance on heterosexual marriage as the basis of family life. But African social lives were also characterized by a diversity of sexual expression that found outlets outside the institution of heterosexual marriage.”

Similarly, Africa has a rich past of gender fluidity which is deeply embedded within various ethnic groups across the continent, for example in Ethiopia, some of Sudan’s Nuba, or within the Dagaaba of Ghana, Burkina Faso, and the Ivory Coast. Some groups assign gender after puberty, some view it as a form of energy, rather than marking it based on genitalia.

Same-sex and gender-nonconforming practices became illegalized and shamed during colonial occupation. Sexual norms and normalities were misconstrued by colonialists, ethnographers and missionaries whose observational abilities were biased. First, they wrote about same-sex practices in derogatory ways, then they erased them completely. Somewhere along the way, the myth was born that queerness, in its many expressions across time and space, is un-African.

Muiga explains the process of eradicating sexual and gender diversity: colonizers created tribalization, meaning they forced various peoples into one tribe similar to how they later grouped different peoples into often arbitrary countries. They reorganized alleged African customs and claimed them to be the ultimate norms which they turned into laws that happened to be in line with European binaries and sexual conservatism.

For these laws to be written, which predominantly happened in British colonies, homophobic terms were oftentimes introduced through English vocabulary, because many African languages did not have homophobic terms as part of their lexicon. Decades after formal decolonization, these laws remain intact as part of Europe’s violent colonial legacy.

Queerness is criminalized in 31 of Africa’s 54 countries, based on the by now well-established, but false claim that homophobia is an integral part of so-called African culture (alternatively, Islamic or Christian culture). Meanwhile, the West (specifically the U.K.), creator of this narrative and the resulting laws, continues to frame Africans as backward and barbaric — in the past for their histories of same-sex practices, like in Siwa, and now for their draconic anti-LGBTQ+ laws.

The point of recounting these histories, then, is not to force our ancestors into a queer identity, or to create a mythical image of a perfect Africa before colonialism — Siwan men were allowed to marry four wives, but only one boy who they had strong obligations toward. The sexism and age gap being far from a situation most would aspire to decolonize towards.

Rather, it is to prove that existences outside contemporary norms, in which only cis-men and cis-women are allowed to love each other and in which only two cis-genders are granted humanity, can be found across African societies, past and present. And that it was the colonizer who codified hate against these practices and people, not the colonized.

While Siwan men were splashing around in the oasis ponds of the Western Desert, women in Lesotho, on the other side of the continent, were turning their adolescent girlfriends into life-long lovers who co-existed alongside their conventional heterosexual marriages. A century later, Africans in Egypt, Tunisia or Nigeria still live their queer lives, but they often must do so in the shadows through gay subcultures.

Homophobia, not homosexuality, is the Western import. It rests upon the myth that Africa is a timeless place, inhabited by traditional people who hold onto their customs at the cost of so-called progress.

The fact that African countries were colonized by (sometimes several) colonizers, drawn and redrawn onto maps, housing as many as 100 languages and parallel realities at the same time, should prove that the opposite is true: African lives and customs have been in constant change as much, if not more, than in other places in the world. There is no such thing as an un-African identity or love.