On Culture and the Right to Sex(uality)

“Homosexuality is un-African” has been the ringing mantra of ongoing state campaigns against LGBTQ+ individuals across the continent. In its worst outcomes, it has become the excuse for some of the most gruesome instances of the denial of the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals not just to sex but to being. From Zimbabwe to Nigeria, this mantra has inserted queer sexualities into a vexed cultural debate. Yet, compelling as the anxieties performed in apparent despair over the loss of culture may be for many, the waters remain murky as to what cues these ideologies draw on to make the claims they do about queer sexuality being anathema to African culture. To respond, it is important that we not only point to their inconsistencies but also ask what the cultural concept must be capable of to be true to the rich diversity that African societies offer and have always offered.

While this made for a compelling nationalist statement in certain quarters, for many others who disagree, it was a curious thing that a broker of one of the biggest cultural imports in modern Africa – Christianity – was claiming to be speaking in defense of African cultures. Marriage, the specific instance of culture he alluded to, has been less tied to traditional African values than modern religion and values in recent times.

In a letter congratulating former president Goodluck Jonathan, who had signed the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Bill into law in 2014, a representative of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria (CBCN) commended him for his courage in refusing the pressures of the international community on same-sex practices and called his position “a clear indication of the ability of our great country to stand shoulders high in the protection of Nigerian and African most valued cultures of the institution of marriage” (quoted in Oguntola Laguda and Adriaan van Klinken’s “Uniting a Divided Nation”). While this made for a compelling nationalist statement in certain quarters, for many others who disagree, it was a curious thing that a broker of one of the biggest cultural imports in modern Africa – Christianity – was claiming to be speaking in defense of African cultures. Marriage, the specific instance of culture he alluded to, has been less tied to traditional African values than modern religion and values in recent times. 

In the practice of marriage itself, we must ask ourselves, is the increasingly atomized nuclear family of one man and one wife a reflection of African culture or Judeo-Christian modernity?

While the representative of the CBCN was right about the value the institution of marriage held for many traditional African societies, we also need to account for how marriage, as we know it today, has been transformed by colonial imaginaries of what ideal family life should mean. The symbolisms of colonial washing are rife in many facets of the modern/Christian marriage ceremony – from the down-on-one-knee proposal to the catholic pronouncements to the white veil and all its connotations. In the practice of marriage itself, we must ask ourselves, is the increasingly atomized nuclear family of one man and one wife a reflection of African culture or Judeo-Christian modernity?

A key challenge in some of the current tensions over sexuality in Africa is the tendency to over-eroticize the queer body. While sex could be a powerful domain of identity and social life, it sometimes distracts from other facets of being – belonging, aspirations, relationships, family – that mark queer life. By highlighting these aspects, the queer affordances in many African societies, past and present, become more evidently apparent. When we turn attention to the family in traditional (precolonial) societies in Nigeria, for instance, we find that family was not necessarily tied to the modern couple unit but the convergence of actors playing different roles for the collective good of a “family”. In Ifi Amadiume’s work on the role of women in Igbo pre-colonial societies, she argues that Igbo women played prominent roles in family and society and sometimes assumed the roles traditionally assigned to men like that of “male daughters” and “female husbands”. Similarly, Oyewumi Oyeronke describes the flexible roles of Yoruba women in the context of extended family homes, where sons could be referred to as mothers, wives as fathers, daughters as husbands, and so on. Unlike the model that centers family around a heterosexual couple unit, precolonial accounts of family life emphasize more collective possibilities of family, and more importantly for our queer realities today, the transience of gender roles. The affordances of extended family and flexible gender roles, as studies have shown, also enabled intimate ties that did not necessarily fit into a heterosexual norm.

Olofintuade highlights how the different deities combine what are considered today to be masculine and feminine energies and styles in one body (consider for instance, how a deity like Ogun, who is known to be a male god, wears a skirt made of palm fronds).

To return to the body, traditional spiritual practices have also offered bodily models that are resonant with queer ideals of fluidity. As Yoruba queer thinkers like Ayodele Olofintuade have shown, the essence of Yoruba deities and the practice of worship in Isese practice, prioritize existence over categorizable bodily form. What this means is that this spiritual practice pays less attention to fixed gender identities than we are trained to in the world today. Olofintuade highlights how the different deities combine what are considered today to be masculine and feminine energies and styles in one body (consider for instance, how a deity like Ogun, who is known to be a male god, wears a skirt made of palm fronds). The very bodily indeterminacy in these practices invites forms of spiritual participation that are not tied to the rigidly gendered categorizations that have become so pervasive in our world today.

Implicit in the argument that queerness is un-African is that culture is static, and African culture is an immutable monolith.

While the examples above show that culture (defined as an African traditional past) is rife with examples that are in tune with queer presenting life, pointing them out is not the only way to respond to the queerness-as-anathema-to-culture claim. Implicit in the argument that queerness is un-African is that culture is static, and African culture is an immutable monolith. Thus, perhaps a more pertinent response is, what really is culture? 

Unlike these anti-queer ideologies suggest, there is no sanctimonious undiluted African cultural past that exists in some isolated bubble away from the everyday struggles of the people. African leaders, hands muddied in the excesses of compromise, know this too well as evidenced by their grabs for capital and advancement by Western values in an increasingly globalized world. Their fictions of a monolithic African culture are only distractions from the real and ongoing global transformations, they are not only participating in but actively profiteering from. The cultural concept is not a useless one, but for it to matter in a way that truly accounts for African, and indeed human diversities in the present, it must be re-calibrated from such rigid illustrations of a pristine African past. In the chapter on national culture in his classic work, Wretched of the Earth, Fanon long commented on the pursuit of culture thus: “it is not enough to try to get back to the people in that past out of which they have already emerged; rather we must join them in that fluctuating movement which they are just giving a shape… it is to this zone of occult instability where the people dwell that we must come.” 

As the culture wars rage today in relation to sexuality, we needn’t even rush to exhume stories and speculations of the past to present evidence of queer life. Rather, the more urgent task is to insist on highlighting the struggles of everyday Africans in all their differences and including queer Africans who are an important part of the societal fabric. What is culture, you ask me? It is in the spiritualities of the queer people who have found a home in Isese practice, the skating sessions of the young queer women at Dencity rolling on skateboards and embodying a critique of the cis-gendered male bias of public spaces in Lagos, the raving of electronic dance music (EDM) lovers and nightcrawlers, the drag shows of the area mamas in congested and neglected neighborhoods. Vibrant, ongoing, contested – that is our culture. 

Written by Diekara Oloruntoba-Oju.