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Across Africa, if you hate gay people, you get votes.Īs a Nigerian gay man, these myths about homosexuality create a dark cloud over my head. Reinforcing this is the fact that populist homophobia has kept many politicians in power. This shows there is real confusion about Africa’s past. But the Bible is not our historical culture. However, when you probe further, they argue that homosexuality is not in the Bible. When I have challenged people who are anti-gay, many have said that it is not our culture. While Africans argued that homosexuality was a western import, they in turn used a western religion as the basis for their argument.
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One factor is the increased popularity of fundamental Christianity, by way of American televangelists, since the 1980s. So what accounts for the current dismissal of homosexuality on the continent? There have been other indicators that the transition from boyhood to adulthood within many African ethnic groups involved same-sex sexual activities. In Boy-Wives and Female Husbands, a book examining homosexuality and feminism in Africa, the researchers found ‘‘explicit” Bushman artwork that depicts men engaging in same-sex sexual activity. Though King Mwanga is the most prominent African recorded as being openly gay, he was not alone. In the Buganda Kingdom, part of modern-day Uganda, King Mwanga II was openly gay and faced no hate from his subjects until white men brought the Christian church and its condemnation. These words are neutral they are not infused with hate or disgust. It is not an identity you can just carry. You have to look and act like a yan daudu to be called one. While the Yoruba word might be more about behaviour than identity, this Hausa term is more about identity. In the northern part of Nigeria, yan daudu is a Hausa term to described effeminate men who are considered to be wives to men. Moreover, this is not a new word it is as old as the Yoruba culture itself.
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It might sound insulting and derogatory, however, the point is there is a word for the behaviour. In digging up facts I found that, while many Africans say that homosexuality is un-African, African culture is no stranger to homosexual behaviours and acts.įor example, in my local language (Yoruba), the word for “homosexual” is adofuro, a colloquialism for someone who has anal sex. I had to teach students about a history that is mostly unwritten. When I was appointed by Berlin’s Humboldt University this year to teach the course “Pre- and post-colonial sexual orientation and sexual identity in Africa”, I knew I had a huge task before me. This year Gambia’s president Yahya Jammeh called for gay people’s throats to be slit. This is the same argument that Robert Mugabe used to suppress the human rights of LGBT people in Zimbabwe that the former president of Nigeria, Goodluck Jonathan, used when he signed the most dangerous law against LGBT people in the modern world and that President Yoweri Museveni used in a ceremonial signing of the anti-gay bill in Uganda. As I dug deep, I realised that African culture is no stranger to homosexual behaviours and acts