“Africa is big: 54 countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book.”
Recently, I revisited Kenyan author and LGBTQ+ activist Binyavanga Wainana’s “How to Write About Africa,” admiring both its wit and timeless accuracy. In the letter, Wainana illustrates how Westerners “treat Africa as if it were one country” and comedically validates writers’ tendency to use vague descriptions when discussing the continent.
Beyond its significance as a scathingly satirical analysis of Western works and their depictions of Africa, Wainana’s letter holds special relevance during Pride Month, a period during which Westerners discuss the state of global gay liberation. Often, I encounter news articles and Twitter threads — written by North American and Western European authors and activists — devoted to broadly detailing the conditions faced by queer Africans and incorrectly characterizing an unrelentingly oppressive atmosphere within their home countries. Although these posts may be well-intentioned, the assertion that life on the continent can be defined by violence and oppression is dangerous as it strengthens the misguided notion that African societies are both backward and barbaric.
I am not a defender of or apologist for homophobia in Africa. The targeted violence and oppression recurrently initiated by both the state and society deserves global condemnation. However, I believe that the way the Western gaze perceives and therefore portrays homophobia in Africa resembles and reinforces White supremacy and Western hegemony. Simply put, homophobia is barbaric, but African countries are not.
While homosexuality remains illegal in 32 African nations, their histories and current patterns of homophobia are rarely addressed with the nuance they demand. The exclusion of contemporary African narratives from the Western education system — coupled with the absence of extensive analysis on the complicated, colonial roots of African anti-gay sentiments — leads to media depictions that present African countries as inherently uncivilized. Westerners without a personal connection to or formal education on life in Africa consequently believe these fallacies to be facts.
I have observed classroom discussions during which my peers positioned the United States as progressive in its growing culture of LGBTQ+ acceptance. At the same time, however, they characterized African countries as regressive, forging a dichotomy between a depraved East and an educated West. The presentation of a modern LGBTQ-friendly “us” and antimodern homophobic “them” is an expression of homonationalism — which, as defined by philosopher Jasbir Puar, refers to the reframing of LGBTQ+ activism to rationalize racist, Islamophobic, and xenophobic perspectives.
Yes, the anti-gay laws governing several African countries are devastating and discriminative. But the way in which Westerners vilify religions practiced on the continent — especially Islam — and attribute homophobic governence to the inherently “savage” nature of Africans is equally terrifying. If my peers and educators hold these views and no one is correcting them, I wonder: How can we change the way the West perceives African societies?
I believe that what must come first is a firm understanding of the developed nature of African societies; life in Africa should not be reduced to offensive and oftentimes inaccurate stereotypes and simplifications. As Wainaina argued in “How to Write About Africa,” the world must revisit and revise its perceptions of life on the continent.
An increasing number of Africans have attended national universities and built prosperous multinational companies. There are beautiful indigenous communities throughout the continent that hunt for their food and create electricity. None of these groups — the city dwellers, land-dependent indigenous people, and everyone in-between — should ever be painted as uncivilized.
Development and modernity are multidimensional — success, progress, and civility cannot be quantified by Western metrics. Professor Johannes Fabian coined the term “denial of coevalness:” The conflation of development and Westernization. Denial of coevalness centers on the conception that non-European communities, particularly those in Africa, live in a different historical epoch and are “broken down” on the path to the progress pioneered by Europe. The belief that African societies are located in different temporalities because they deviate from Western manifestations of development is rooted in White supremacy.
To change the way the West perceives African societies, I believe that what must come second is an acknowledgement of the fact that homophobia is a colonial import. Before European colonialism, several African cultures embraced different sexualities and gender relations. For instance, in my mother’s tribe, the Kikuyu — Kenya’s largest ethnic group — male priests dressed as women and were occasionally formally married to other men. However, during Britain’s colonial rule from 1895 to 1963, anti-sodomy laws were spread by Christian missionaries and established by the East Africa Protectorate’s government. The anti-sodomy laws were kept by the post-independence government under Kenya’s first president Jomo Kenyatta.
Connections between British colonial rule and LGBTQ+ criminalization are widespread and evident throughout ex-Commonwealth Africa. In 2018, South African lawyer and human rights professor Wendy Isaack cited the British origin of Ghana’s anti-homosexuality penal codes in a report for Human Rights Watch. Of the 72 countries in the world that categorize same-sex intimacy as a criminal offense, 36 of them are members or ex-member states of the Commonwealth — exposing a direct link between British colonialism and anti-gay governance.
By studying homophobia in Africa through the lens of colonialism and coevalness, the discussion surrounding this issue can be productive instead of reductive. Many of us hold the privilege to meaningfully and legally advocate alongside Africa’s LGBTQ+ communities. When choosing to act on this privilege and speak about the conditions faced by these communities, please remember that in Africa there is also joy, kindness, peace, and prosperity.
I do not aim to invalidate or exclude Africans facing targeted atrocities and experiencing immense agony. From the government-organized ethnic cleansing in Tigray and terrorization by Boko Haram in Nigeria to the civil war in Cameroon and militia attacks in the Democratic Republic of Congo, conflicts on the continent are pressing issues that require global attention and action. But I wish to stress the fact that not all of Africa is starving and dying and warring and emigrating — and that this viewpoint is both offensive and outdated.
It is not the alleged backward and barbaric nature of African societies that should be held responsible for anti-gay governance across the continent. The discourse surrounding homophobia in Africa must also acknowledge how colonialism informs present policy and persecution. It’s time for the West to reckon with its legacy of homophobia and retire the idea of an “uncivilized Africa” for good.
Image by Teddy Österblom is licensed under the Unsplash License.
