I have shown key ways by which the idea of a uniformly heterosexual African identity came into being, was debated and, while somewhat changed over time, still persists in major venues in the face of strong evidence against it. Originally it was European authors who sought to lump all of Africa together according to perceived or preconceived sexual practices and mores. They did so in often blatant language of racial prejudice, fear, or titillation—unspeakable tribal rituals, Black Peril, non-Sotadic zone, adult suckling, voodoo eros, and more. Often the sweeping generalizations were confidently asserted without the author ever having visited Africa, learning a language, or talking to more than a (male) missionary or colonial official or two. Indeed, they quite commonly were male missionaries and colonial officials and their intent was frequently hostile or proudly colonizing. The “African sexuality” that they asserted was central to their construction of an African, Native, or Bantu identity that justified a host of discriminatory laws, restrictions on mobility especially for African women, and racially segregated urban development. This African sexuality stood in stark contrast to and so helped define “European,” “white,” “modern,” “civilized,” “respectable,” “assimilé,” “evolué,” and many of the other identities that colonial rule and apartheid privileged. Exceptions or eccentricities when noted at all were commonly explained by reference to other Others, such as the Arabs, further justifying supposedly paternalistic colonial protection.
Despite such origins, elements of the idea of an African sexuality were picked up and adapted by people who were clearly sympathetic to African struggles against racism and colonialism. Henri Alexandre Junod, Max Gluckman, and Wulf Sachs, for example, put in significant effort and personal, lifelong commitments to understanding the subtleties of African cultures, histories, and the social stresses in rapidly changing environments. Such men were joined from the 1920s by African intellectuals such as S. M. Molema, Alfred Nzula, and Jomo Kenyatta. Over the decades of struggle for political independence, many other prominent African authors in professional fields and literature promulgated their own visions of an African sexuality as a counterweight to the old racist ones. From Communists to Presbyterians and from chiefs to womanists, the common denominator was the elevation of heterosexuality to a defining characteristic of Africanness, often exemplified in terms of virility, fecundity, and an organic confidence in the naturalness of sharply distinct yet smoothly complementary gender identities and sexual roles. Sometimes this African sexuality was framed in “respectable” terms of Christian monogamy. Often, however, particularly in literary representations through the 1960s and '70s, it asserted African men’s ostensible right or even obligation to multiple partners as a marker of mature masculinity. Homosexuality—rarely defined with any precision-emerged in the process as an insidious, corrupting antithesis of African identity, dignity, and independence.
Claims about so-called African sexuality swelled in volume after a flurry of overstated interventions by Western scientists, demographers, and activists in the first flush of anxiety at the onset of HIV/AIDS in the mid-1980s. These interventions rarely questioned the consensus on homosexuality. However, they did stir controversy by pathologizing the multiple-partner aspect of African sexuality in ways that were strongly reminiscent of the old colonial discourse. This in turn produced a defensive reaction by many African leaders and intellectuals. With some notable and largely discredited exceptions (J. Caldwell, Rushton), the most vocal proponents of a distinctive African sexuality from the mid-1990s are now African politicians and theologians who emphasize what they regard as its positive or moral elements in comparison to corrupting Western influences. Prominent among these positives is the supposed absence of homosexuality. As most dramatically illustrated in the case of threatened schism of the African Anglican churches from the world Anglican congregation, and in Nigeria’s 2006 prohibition of same-sex marriage bill, the issue has revealed a striking harmony of opinion between secular, traditionalist, Christian, and Islamic leaders. Defense of this idea has also resulted in some extraordinarily strange intellectual bedfellows. Supporters of the same-sex marriage prohibition bill reached as far back as Edward Gibbon, Richard Burton, and Jacobus X to justify their position, even as they excoriated the supposedly neocolonialist mentality of African intellectuals who favor human rights for sexual minorities.1
How could an idea that had its origins in racist, sexist, and homophobic understandings of human sexuality survive for two hundred years and across such radically different political and religious perspectives? The usual answer is that the absence of homosexuality in African societies is such a fundamental truth that not even racists, sexists, homophobes, and foreigners could get it wrong. African societies were and remain powerfully heteronormative, with little public social space or unambiguous vocabularies for people who openly did not conform to the virile and fecund marital ideals. “The sodomite,” “the lesbian,” “the homosexual,” “the bisexual,” or any other equivalently and self-consciously identified individuals did not exist among Africans until very recent times. To the extent that they exist today, their coming out has been self-evidently in response to debates and fashions largely originating in the West.
I have not significantly disputed this argument, nor that broad commonalities can be observed in respect to gender and sexuality ideals across the continent. Those commonalities were often deepened as common political and economic structures emerged over vast areas and across historical borders in the period of colonial rule (male migrant labor, for example, demographically skewed urbanization, and the spread of “respectable” values for men and women associated with progress or modernization). But we now know that heteronormativity and “African family values” are not the whole story. Subtle or unacknowledged spaces and vocabularies did exist for individual variation from the ideals, including for msm and wsw. These changed over time in response to many factors, including debates and fashions coming from the West but also, indisputably, from African men and women who for their own diverse reasons constantly pushed the limits of the meanings of tradition and normal. Very few people acknowledged the practices as homosexuality or bisexuality although, in physical and emotional terms, they involved activities that could often very reasonably be described in those terms.
Commonalities regarding heteronormativity in African societies are thus neither so different from other parts of the world nor have they have remained sufficiently constant and coherent over time to warrant loyalty to even an implicit African sexuality. The fact that this complicating knowledge is still not incorporated into so much of the scholarship and education about HIV/AIDS and gender in Africa thus represents a remarkable ongoing intellectual achievement.
How then to explain the durability of the no-homosexuality stereotype? I have argued that it was overdetermined, and that actually existing homosexualities and bisexualities were “invisibilized” by a wide range of overlapping factors and by diverse authors with disparate agendas over many decades. This invisibilization may in some cases have been the outcome of straightforwardly masculinist or even racist sentiments by its proponents such as those influentially articulated by Sir Richard Burton. In other cases, including some of the more outlandish claims of African politicians and church leaders in recent years, denial was the intention of unambiguously homophobic rhetoric. Yet in most cases, I have argued, this invisibility reflected a profound blind spot or cultural intimacy that was much more nuanced. For example, since the early days of crudely racist imagery, there has been an incremental shift in the dominant discourse over time—a move from explicit to implicit language in which the central organizing concept was so taken for granted that it did not need to be said. Bald and easily refutable generalizations couched in moralistic or normative language gave way to more subtle euphemisms (“the African mind,” “culture,” “African values,” and so forth). These often employed scientific terminology that created an appearance of intellectual sophistication, discipline, progress, and change—even revolutionary change. Key elements of stereotyping or essentialism in the analysis went unnoticed and unchallenged in this process.
Over the course of the twentieth century there was also a move away from the kind of anecdote and presumption that were the staples of the early writing to far more rigorous research methodologies and theorized analyses. The new approaches pointedly recognized and often celebrated Africa’s hugeness and cultural diversity. They denied singularity and called attention to the importance of specific historical experiences in shaping ideas and practices regarding sexuality and gender relations. Some early, high-profile publications aside, this quickly became the norm in the bulk of the scholarship on HIV/AIDS. Mainstream discourse about the disease has by now for the most part strongly repudiated the initial notion of “African AIDS,” in distinction to elsewhere in the world. Yet at the same time, the newer and more sophisticated discourse has tended to quietly reiterate the same old homogenizing theme as a hidden subtext: real Africans can be known by the absence of homosexualities in their traditional cultures and by their disinclination or intolerance toward homosexualities in contemporary settings. Akin to the “race-evasive” or “power-evasive” language that Frankenberg (1993) and Carter (2007) described as central to the construction of hegemonic American whiteness, “homosexuality-evasive” discourse in Africa helped reinvent the hegemonic ideology of Africanness over the decades.
In retrospect there are obvious fundamental methodological errors in even the more sophisticated research that established and clings to this aspect of a singular African sexuality. How could men who could not even agree among themselves what sodomy, bisexuality, or even sex meant have expected consistent responses from their African informants and translators on questions pertaining to those activities, particularly as those activities were for the most part illegal or held in severe disdain under the colonial dispensation? Indeed, profound, unrecognized cultural dissonances over the meaning of sex and its relationship to individual identity clearly skewed the research. Of course it would not be fair to judge the Burtons, Cureaus, and Kenyattas by today’s standards of critical enquiry. It is fair, however, to note that as early as the 1970s Africanist scholars already had doubts about their methodology and their bigger claims by the standards of professionalism that they expected of themselves. The failure of researchers to investigate hidden same-sex practices or subcultures with due rigor in the 1980s thus comprised a major lapse when judged by the reasonable expectations of good social science research current at that time. This failure translated into the development of self-described comprehensive HIV/AIDS strategies that somehow neglected to address msm even in glaringly obvious contained spaces like prisons. That lapse continues, often unthinkingly, even in countries like South Africa, with its highly respected and well-funded research tradition and where African lgbti are visible and vocal.
If this sounds like a pan-African conspiracy of thousands of people over many decades and different contexts, it is not. The people who first actively propagated these ideas in the colonial and early apartheid eras were relatively few, had often been to university together or knew each other socially, and moved around the continent to apply the same analysis to different peoples. Hence, while there were huge differences in types of colonial administration and dissenting voices within the different professional disciplines, on this topic the sharing of knowledge (or rather, prejudice and assumption) was profound. That prejudice accorded with what most people believed from elsewhere, what they wanted to believe about Africa, and what they were flattered to believe about themselves in Africa, and so it grew stronger. It included the notion that homosexuality was a sign of decadence that could be controlled by strength of will or moral character, that Africans were primitive (hence had no “civilized vice”), and that colonial rule and Christianity as conceived by northern Europeans were particularly well suited to protecting Africans from moral decay. The majority of Africans (and Europeans with a close ear to the ground) who knew or suspected that the truth was more complicated had little incentive to speak out against the emerging consensus and in fact had many positive incentives to keep their mouths shut and pens still. Exceptions like Henri Junod, Günther Tessman, Monica Wilson, and Pierre Hanry were easily overlooked. This became particularly true as a new generation of African novelists and rhetoricians in the late colonial and early postcolonial eras promoted a powerful anticolonial African identity, sometimes with explicitly homophobic and xenophobic undertones.
Yet a small number of African artists began to raise doubts about the uniformity of African heterosexuality from at least the 1950s in works published in English (e.g., Mopeli-Paulus). The challenge gathered self-confidence in the 1960s and '70s with works by Malinwa, Aidoo, Njau, Ouologuem, and Maddy, among others. Around this time Western researchers influenced by feminist and queer critiques of language and the production of knowledge about Africa also began to question silences concerning same-sex sexuality. The emergence of African lgbti groups in the 1980s and '90s, plus the urgent pressures to deal with the HIV/AIDS pandemic, raised interest even further. Long-standing secrets began to come out through the efforts of Moodie with Ndatshe, Harries, Nkoli, Gevisser and Cameron, GALZ, Brooks and Bocahut, Colman, Murray and Roscoe, and many others. By the late 1990s it had grown increasingly difficult simply to ignore the existence of lgbti, msm, and wsw in Africa, or the pertinence of homophobia and heterosexism to understanding the social context of sexually transmitted infection and gender-based violence. Sensitive readings of the latest generation of antihomophobic and antipatriarchal novels such as by Dangarembga, Duiker, Beyala, and Dibia can only cause presumptions about a timeless and uniform African sexuality to founder.
Opponents of the existence of homosexualities in Africa reacted to the gathering visibility of African lgbti, msm, and wsw in different ways. Many of these upset by public gay personas turned to strident denial and coercive strategies to make them go away or get back to the closet. This included a number of high-profile African scholars who sought to browbeat or shame Western researchers and activists away from the topic (Ifi Amadiume, notably, but from my personal experience I could name at least two white Zimbabwean historians as well). The browbeating was somewhat effective in stalling new research, given the political sensitivity of white, foreign, gay, or otherwise “outsider” authors presuming to challenge the right of “insiders” to set the research agenda. Nonetheless, antihomophobia scholarship progressively gained credibility and assertiveness over the 1990s. It did so in part by employing relatively conservative methodologies and uncontroversial sources (ethnographic research with traditional healers, government enquiries, court documents, and oral history, for example). A small number of African intellectuals also sometimes used tried-and-true methods and logic judiciously borrowed from the civil rights movement in the West in order to promote nonideological research into sexuality. Nigerian philosophers Douglas Anele (2006) and Leo Igwe (2006), for example, made hard-hitting attacks on the enemies of homosexuality and other “hypocrites” by employing arguments ranging all the way from genetic science to the Marquis de Sade. Kwame Anthony Appiah (2006) made a gentler appeal for tolerance with reference to a wide range of both Western intellectuals and Asante traditions.
Foucault has been important to this project, as he was in the West, but often only indirectly. Far more commonly, scholars and activists in Africa have turned to the ethnography to buttress the argument against African sexuality. Unfortunately, the ethnography has not always been a reliable ally. On the contrary, one of the lessons of this book is that there are clear dangers in turning to the ethnography and other purportedly scientific research for material that actually helps in the struggle against homophobia. Digging out select indigenous African words for “homosexuality” that purportedly predate European colonialism, notably, has been a deeply problematic project from the beginning for several reasons. The terms, where they exist at all, are often quite specific to an ethnic group or region. Invoking them stands to evoke ethnic or sectarian tension (Nigeria and Kenya are prime examples). The highly uneven distribution of ethnographic studies of same-sex sexuality can also create a wrong impression with consequences for ethnic stereotyping, at least for readers who are unfamiliar with local histories and historiographies. The relative wealth of research on the topic from Lesotho (Chevrier, Gay, Kendall, Coplan, Epprecht), for instance, almost certainly has more to do with that country’s agreeable climate for North American researchers than radically different or queer notions about sexual propriety among the Basotho. Moreover, the behaviors and roles that indigenous terms described in their original cultural context are often very far from those that gay rights and human rights activists today could ethically support. In many cases they border on what a modern eye would more likely see as child abuse, rape, or prostitution rather than an innate gay or lesbian sexual orientation or consenting adult decision.
Antihomophobia scholarship was also not immune to the same homogenizing (or dichotomizing: either/or) tendencies as its main target. Early attempts to challenge the dominant narrative often clutched at straws of highly dubious evidence from disparate corners of the continent to make huge, ahistorical claims. The intention may have been honorable, if not perfectly in keeping with African governments’ own stated goals of expanding the protection of human rights and challenging oppressive customs and gender roles. However the means (words) sometimes unintentionally contradicted the ends. As Vangroenweghe put it about “homosexuals”: “Il y a encore un long chemin a parcourir afin de modifier la mentalité des Africains a l’égard de ce groupe” (2000, 408). The attitude? All Africans? This group of homosexuals as defined by whom?
The situation is in fact far more complex and fluid than acknowledged in such statements. Not all African religious leaders, for example, have aligned themselves with the homophobic extreme and, on the contrary, have taken big risks to denounce that extreme in unambiguous language (Desmond Tutu, Allan Boesak, and Njongonkulu Ngungane, for example, along with a scattering of gay-friendly local churches around the continent). During the height of state homophobic rhetoric in Zimbabwe in the mid-1990s, meanwhile, GALZ continued to hold its annual Jacaranda Queen Drag Pageant, open to the public, and steadily to expand its membership in the historically black townships and small cities outside the capital. Even more confusingly, traditional and modern have by now become so jumbled that appeals to one or the other easily wander from the empirical path. A leading African medical scientist, for instance, has suggested that male-male sexuality among Africans is likely underestimated in the literature and needs to be a research and education priority. Malegapuru William Makgoba, former president of the Medical Research Council of South Africa, is absolutely correct in this view. But the proof he offers—“the ancient sePedi word matanyola”—is neither originally sePedi nor even all that old. It can be positively traced back to Malawian migrant laborers in Zimbabwe during the 1920s, whence it migrated to South Africa to be picked up by the Pedi (as well as the Tswana and Basotho and Zulu . . . ). The meaning of the word has meanwhile changed radically over the decades from being absolutely pejorative (with ethnic connotations) to contested respectability (Epprecht 2004, 160).2
The implications of such semantic fineries may not at first be apparent or seem relevant to the burning development problems of the day in so much of Africa—water shortages, economic disparities, war, pollution, and such. My conviction, however, is that carefully unraveling some of the strands in the history of ideas about same-sex sexuality can help us move forward from an obvious impasse on very important issues, namely, sexual health, human rights, and the empowerment of women and youth. Much more is at stake than to score debating points about the meaning of obscure texts or the unity of the world Anglican community. Indeed, if African sexuality is a misleading concept, it is also a deeply harmful concept. The harm is not just to those individuals whose existence is directly denied. It extends to the majority of African citizens and, I would argue, to people in the West as well. That is, the concept of an African sexuality—even when deployed to argue against colonial stereotypes and even when qualified by nods toward the diversity of African cultures—denies real diversity, nuance, imagination, creativity, and change over time. It fosters complacency and condescension in the West about Africa and, by extension, people of African descent. It tacitly condones or actively demands denial and stigma against anomalies from the ideal such as same-sex sexuality and sensual desire. Denial and stigma in turn tend to reinforce gender inequality, injustice, and violence including, importantly, violence done by people to themselves and their personal integrity through internalized homophobia and internalized misogyny.
Denial and stigma are to HIV/AIDS as oxygen is to flame. I want to conclude the book, therefore, by making a case for further efforts both to reveal and to contest not just overt expressions of homophobia but also the subtle or unintentional reiterations of an exclusively heterosexual African sexuality such as commonly found in material that glosses over the possibility or relevance of lgbti, msm, and wsw in the fight against HIV/AIDS in Africa.
Let me put it this way. Same-sex sexuality matters in Africa.
Same-sex sexuality matters, in fact, in two ways. Same-sex sexuality matters (the noun) means those wide-ranging issues, personalities, practices, discourses, and anything else that stands as testament against the assumption or claim that Africans are preternaturally and exclusively heterosexual. Same-sex sexuality matters cover a far wider swathe than the (so far) tiny numbers of out, self-identified African queers suggests. Figures don’t lie, they say, but liars figure, and I am therefore wary of bringing numbers into the debate. At this point, however, it is sobering to recall that at the time of writing there are an estimated 27 million Africans with HIV or AIDS. Taking the lowest reasonable estimations of male-male transmission of HIV, and disregarding all the indirect effects of homophobia or male-male transmission of other sexually transmitted infections or issues arising from female-female sexual relationships, this still means the blind spot toward same-sex sexuality in Africa is costing a lot of lives. Even if only 2 percent of infections can in any way be attributed to msm, that translates into over a half a million people who are already sick and dying from an easily preventable disease. That number is roughly the same as the entire number of people living with HIV and AIDS in Western Europe. Why is one population of that size accorded significance yet not the other?
From the evidence of cross-cultural research gaffes or purposeful self-censorship in the ethnography that understated msm, moreover, and from recent studies that are sensitive to the question, there is good reason to suspect that the percentage, and the lives at risk, is significantly higher than 2 percent. The discrepancy in concern, let alone public acknowledgment, is that much more disturbing.
But same-sex sexuality matters that invite investigation and action also extend to the close critical evaluation of how the hegemonic culture of heteronormativity actually works and sustains itself, including:
• how African cultures explained, “cured,” honored, harnessed, stigmatized, or averted their eyes from nonnormative sexuality
• how exogenous philosophies such as evangelical Christianity and, to some extent, Islam challenged (or not) those normative traditions
• how colonialism and capitalist enterprise introduced new institutions, laws, and labor regimes that sought to define, control, and channel African sexualities so as to maximize their ability to exploit African labor
• how professional scholarly discourses reinforced homophobic and heterosexist preconceptions about African sexualities
• how African intellectuals and political leaders adapted and deployed those discourses to advance their own distinct agendas
• how African artists subtly queried or challenged the cultural intimacy so created
• how African lgbti are coming out and expressing their sense of selfhood and political activism in new ways in alliance with (and in the process “queering”) other civil society groups
• how the majority population is denied safer-sex education because of misguided homophobic fears or heterosexist blindness
Each country, “tribe,” or city in Africa could benefit from close empirical studies of each these same-sex sexuality matters. The last point, however, cries out for immediate attention. For example, we now know that HIV is extremely inefficient in comparison to other infectious agents, and that men may have high-risk sex with men and not get infected with HIV. But men who have sex with men can fairly easily pick up other sexually transmitted infections. By passing them on to their female partners, msm then hugely increase the female partners’ susceptibility to HIV infection. Indeed, female sex workers with syphilis have been shown to be many times as vulnerable to HIV as uninfected women. In other words, even if we accept that direct male-male transmission of HIV is insignificant, the indirect consequences of unsafe sex among msm who also have sex with women could be much greater.
The hidden risks, it must be stressed, are taking place in the context of deteriorating social safety nets over the past two or more decades. Notably, while the number of male street children in Africa is unknown, it is certainly in the millions and guaranteed to grow as the pandemic progresses. We know that mutual, albeit sometimes violent, same-sex relations take place among these children. There is also an element of male prostitution for survival sex by street children (and other young men) that needs investigation and targeting. These children and sex workers, like the hundreds of thousands of African men in prison, are not only at heightened risk of violent and unprotected sex; the fact that most will go on to marry or have girlfriends makes them a potentially significant bridge for disease from men to women. Women’s vulnerability in the context of economic structural adjustment makes it unlikely for the foreseeable future that they will generally feel empowered to ask their male partners about high-risk male-male sex.
The costs of hidden emotional trauma in some of these relationships can only be imagined. From studies in Tanzania, South Africa, and elsewhere in the world, however, we know that intense homophobia is a common result of male-male rape. There are as well significant distinct forms of violence perpetrated against lesbians or suspected lesbians, and in wsw relationships in prisons and other female-only institutions, which can have a similar traumatizing impact or feed into internalized homophobia. Internalized homophobia in turn ramifies throughout society, imbuing with violence a whole range of other discriminatory attitudes, including xenophobia and misogyny. These feed back once again to the disempowerment of minorities and women that fuels the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
Homophobia, heterosexism, and other related stigmatizing attitudes are thus not just the narrow concern of direct victims of hate crime and speech. They have a rippling effect that endangers the majority population.
Homosexuality, homophobia, heterosexism, and other related stigmatizing attitudes, in short, comprise a critical missing piece to the puzzle of HIV/AIDS in Africa south of the Sahara. To repeat, it is not that there are that many people who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex, or queer. Nor does transmission of HIV through male-male sexual intercourse or female-female genital contact even remotely approach its transmission through male-female sexual intercourse. The presence of msm and wsw is large enough, however, to warrant more attention than it has earned so far. The fact that lgbti, msm, and wsw are largely written out of even scientific scholarship even after more than a decade of serious social scientific and humanities research on the issue is therefore highly significant. In Oliver Phillips’s memorable phrase, “the invisible presence of homosexuality” in mainstream HIV/AIDS discourse in and about Africa is an integral part of an arguably racist construction of African AIDS that increases risks for the entire population.
Same-sex sexuality matters (verb), therefore, in the sense that research into seemingly marginal issues can shed light on and hence contribute constructively to addressing the broader issues, struggles, and other same-sex sexuality matters (noun) just noted. Queer theory may be helpful in this, but can equally contribute to the problem. Queer theory arose out of the gay rights movement in the West and the main reference points in the scholarship, in style, and in sense of priorities in the literature still reflect predominantly Western concerns. As such, queer theory could unwittingly deny or submerge African perspectives within a falsely homogenizing or “homonormative” paradigm, and indeed, in practice it has resulted in some decidedly weak scholarship. As such, queer theory awaits a rigorously theorized indigenous term or terms grounded in African culture and contemporary struggles, sensitive to lessons learned through decades of Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial critiques of power and the sociology of science. Same-sex sexuality research so informed would be, I argue, completely compatible with pan-African resistance to or reimagining of the dominant globalization paradigm.
At the moment, outside of South Africa, the political landscape may not seem very promising for indigenizing queer theory. That may change, however, and in fact even now the situation is not as dismal as many people suppose. Close histories of the tangle of secrets and speculations about same-sex sexuality have begun to appear from around the continent. They make it clearer than ever how lgbti, msm, and wsw are not as new and exotic to Africa as commonly assumed, and are decidedly not the invention of Western “gay imperialists.” Such histories might help calm populist fears that demanding attention to lgbti rights will somehow destabilize civilization or nature as we know it. History may also help forge stronger coalitions between scholars, civil society groups, and nonliteralist religious leaders. Such coalitions have already begun to form. African activists and scholars are picking up these themes in their work, even in places where civil war, economic crisis, and crudely homophobic politics would seem to make it impossible (Somalia, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Cameroun, and more). Such coalitions have begun to have an impact on human and sexual rights discourse, as witnessed by the wide respect and success garnered by the Treatment Action Campaign, by the African Union’s Commission on Human Rights’ acceptance in principle of sexual orientation as a category worthy of protection, and by the involvement of nongay activists in the opposition to Nigeria’s same-sex marriage prohibition act in 2007.
The obvious good news in all this is that if a harmful construction of African sexuality were made in the first place, then it can be unmade in the second. This is definitely not to promote queer theory as the only way to do so. On the contrary, I have disassociated the present study from a strand of obtuse and unwittingly colonial queer practice that queer theory seems incapable of expunging and that brings the term into discredit. I nevertheless acknowledge a rich body of scholarship, art, and activist writing in Africa that uses (or tacitly borrows or intuits) queer theory to destabilize an oppressive and stigmatizing ideology. Recalling the African Union’s protocol on the rights of women (July 2003), Article 2 is an apposite way to conclude in that respect. Without mentioning homosexuality, this document opens the door to the requisite research, activism, and reformulation of laws and policies that deny the diversity of human sexuality in Africa:
States Parties shall commit themselves to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of women and men through public education, information, education and communication strategies, with a view to achieving the elimination of harmful cultural and traditional practices and all other practices which are based on the idea of the inferiority or the superiority of either of the sexes, or on stereotyped roles for women and men.3
I hope this book has been a contribution to that goal.