Was Homosexuality “Un-African”? The 40+ Societies That Say Otherwise

<p><p>Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></p><p>Female husbandry is one of the oldest same-gender-loving institutions on the African continent, documented in more than 40 societies both ancient and contemporary, and I already know good and well that half of y’all reading this ain’t know that, because you been lost in the sauce of a homophobia that somebody handed you and told you was tradition. Let me say it plain so the folks in the back can hear me. The homophobia a whole lot of us carry around like it’s ancestral is not African. It’s imported. It came off the same boats, through the same missions, behind the same flags as the chains, and then it got rebranded as “our values” so we’d do the policing for free. </p><p><strong>I. Before Europe Believed The World Was Round, Africa Already Knew Gender Was A Role, Not A Body</strong></p><p>Long before Europeans set foot on the continent, back when a real lot of them still believed the earth was flat, woman-to-woman marriage was a mainstream, legally recognized institution stretching from the <strong>Nuer</strong> of South Sudan to the <strong>Igbo</strong> of Nigeria to the <strong>Kuria</strong> of Tanzania and Kenya. A woman of wealth and standing could pay the bridewealth, become the legal husband, control the lineage and the property, and her wives could bear children by a chosen male consort, the genitor, whose children belonged to her line and her name. This wasn’t done in secrecy. It was an entire institution, with rites and bride price and public recognition, sitting in the open.</p><p><strong>Ifi Amadiume</strong>, in <em>Male Daughters, Female Husbands</em>, showed that in precolonial Igbo society gender was flexible and was not welded to the sexed body, so a woman could occupy the social role of husband and father, get addressed as such, and wield the authority that came with it. <strong>Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí</strong>, in <em>The Invention of Women</em>, pushed it further and argued that gender as the master category for organizing a whole society was itself a Western imposition mapped onto Yoruba life, which had organized power by seniority and not by what was between your legs. Operationalize that. This means the thing we fight over today, “man” versus “woman” as a fixed biological destiny, was never a universal human fact. It was one cultural arrangement among many, and Africa was running several others at the same time. So anybody who tells you the binary is “just biology” and “just how it’s always been” is wrong on the history. Flat. Two things can be true: bodies are real, and the meanings we stack on top of them are made up.</p><p><strong>II. It Wasn’t A Footnote — Queen Njinga, The Azande, And A Tomb In Saqqara</strong></p><p><strong>Queen Njinga</strong>, who lived from around 1583 to 1663 and ruled the kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba in present-day Angola, dressed as a king and not as a queen, led her armies in person, took women as wives, and — by the accounts of the very Portuguese who were scandalized by her — kept male concubines. I want to be honest about my sourcing, because that’s the whole brand: much of what we “know” about her intimate life comes filtered through hostile colonial chroniclers like the Capuchin missionary Cavazzi, so I read those accounts for what they reveal about European panic as much as for the facts they claim. The Portuguese were already horrified by her military genius. What disturbed them just as much was her gender and her sexual autonomy, and in their own writing they branded her “unnatural.” That word was load-bearing, because “unnatural” was the moral fuel that justified the whole civilizing mission.</p><p>Then peep the Azande of Central Africa, the warrior husbands. <strong>E. E. Evans-Pritchard</strong> documented that Azande warriors married younger men, paid bridewealth in spears to the boy’s family, and the union was socially recognized, not hidden in shame. The anthology that gathers all of this, <strong>Stephen Murray</strong> and <strong>Will Roscoe’s</strong> <em>Boy-Wives and Female Husbands</em>, walks through dozens of these societies across the continent. And go all the way back to the Fifth Dynasty tomb at Saqqara, the resting place of <strong>Niankhkhnum</strong> and <strong>Khnumhotep</strong>, two royal manicurists buried nose to nose in the most intimate embrace canonical Egyptian art ever allowed, a pose otherwise reserved for husband and wife. Here’s my honest caveat, because Research over MeSearch means I don’t cook the books to win: scholars still argue whether those two were lovers or twins, and I’m not gonna pretend that debate is settled. But the fact that the most intimate iconography on the wall is two men is itself the data, and it’s data Europe never expected us to dig up.</p><p><strong>III. Two Things Can Be True — And Pretending They Can’t Is The Colonial Filing System Talking</strong></p><p>Now here’s where folks get lost in the sauce from both directions. One camp wants to wave female husbandry around like it’s ancient gay marriage, full stop. The other camp, the homophobes, want to say “see, it was never even sexual, so it proves nothing.” Both of y’all are wrong, and the truth is more interesting than either lie. The historians and ethnographers, <strong>Amadiume</strong> included, stress that most female-husband unions were not primarily erotic. They were kinship, labor, land, and lineage arrangements that handed women access to property and power a rigid patriarchy would otherwise deny them. Two things can be true: female husbandry was mostly about material power and lineage, and the same societies also held open, recognized space for erotic same-gender bonds, like the Azande and Njinga’s court. The thread tying all of it together was never modern “sexual identity.” It’s that gender was a social role you could occupy regardless of the body you were born into, and that domestic and erotic life had more than one legitimate channel to flow through.</p><p>So watch the move when somebody says “this was just economics, not gay.” That person thinks they’re being neutral and historical. They’re not. Choosing to read only the kinship and erase the erotic, and treating “economic” and “queer” as if they’re opposites, is itself a position. That’s not neutrality. That’s the colonial filing system still doing its job in your mouth, sorting human lives into the boxes Europe built and calling the sorting “objective.” Naming a position as neutral is how power hides.</p><p><strong>IV. Colonialism Didn’t Just ‘Introduce’ Homophobia — It Installed A System With Three Moving Parts</strong></p><p>Through the colonization and the enslavement of the continent, Europe didn’t just bring a bad vibe. It installed a system, and the system ran on three specific parts. One: the binary gender system, the one that says a man is a man and a woman is a woman, fixed at birth, no movement, no exceptions. Two: heterosexual marriage as the only legitimate frame, welding sexuality to reproduction and to property inheritance under European legal logic. Three: the criminalization of gender nonconformity, and this is the turn — once the female husband lost her legal recognition, she didn’t just lose a title, she became “deviant,” a criminal, a sinner to be saved or jailed.</p><p><strong>Charles Mills</strong>, in <em>The Racial Contract</em>, gives us the frame: colonial power doesn’t just take land, it decides whose knowledge counts as knowledge, so African ways of organizing gender got reclassified from “wisdom” to “savagery” by people who couldn’t pronounce the names. <strong>Saidiya Hartman</strong>, writing on the archive, teaches us that the colonial record doesn’t neutrally “lack” evidence of these lives, it actively worked to erase them, so the silence in the archive is not an absence, it’s a crime scene. This also proves the so-called “African values” argument is running on European software. This also proves that the anti-gay criminal codes still on the books across the continent are, in a lot of cases, literally inherited colonial sodomy statutes with the colonizer’s fingerprints still on them. This also proves that when Europe left, it left the homophobia behind like a tenant who skips out on the lease but leaves all his furniture, and we been decorating around it for generations, calling his couch our heirloom.</p><p><strong>V. Quare vs. Queer — Why E. Patrick Johnson’s Grandmother Is The Theorist We Need For This</strong></p><p>How you read this whole history depends on the theory you bring to it, so let me get specific about the lens. <strong>Queer theory</strong> — your <strong>Judith Butler</strong>, your foundational 1990s canon — did something necessary and I’m giving it its respect: it taught us that gender is performative, that the categories are constructed and can be denaturalized, that the binary is a costume the culture sews and not a fact God handed down. That is exactly the tool that lets me stand here and say the female husband proves gender is a role and not a body. Real talk. But two things can be true: queer theory, for all its brilliance, has a documented habit of floating up into abstraction, treating race and class as discourse instead of as material conditions, and quietly defaulting its imagined queer subject to somebody white, somebody with the luxury to theorize identity instead of the obligation to survive it.</p><p>Enter <strong>E. Patrick Johnson</strong>. In 2001, in an essay with the longest, most Southern title in the academy — <em>“Quare” Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother</em> — Johnson takes “<strong>quare</strong>,” his grandmother’s Southern Black vernacular pronunciation of “queer,” and turns it into a theory. Quare studies is, in his own words, a vernacular rearticulation of queer theory built to hold racialized sexual knowledge, which means it flat-out refuses to talk about queerness as if it floats free of Black skin, working-class money, and grandmother kitchens. Here’s the comparison operationalized: queer theory deconstructs the binary, and quare insists you do that deconstruction while standing in the body, in the bloodline, in the material. And that is precisely the lens female husbandry demands, because female husbandry was never abstract. It was land. It was bridewealth. It was who inherits, who eats, who carries the name into the next generation. You cannot read it right through a theory that treats identity as a free-floating performance and skips straight past the property records.</p><p>Johnson channels <strong>Barbara Smith</strong> and the <strong>Combahee River Collective</strong>, the Black feminist tradition that said the personal is material before it’s anything else, and that is the same intersectional floor I stand on every time I sit down to write. <strong>Kimberlé Crenshaw</strong> named it, <strong>Combahee</strong> lived it: you cannot separate the gender from the race from the class, and any theory that asks you to is asking you to read your own ancestors with one eye closed. So here’s the difference in one breath. Quare is queer that never left home. Quare is Southern. Quare is Black. Quare is the grandmother saying “that child is a little quare” with love in her mouth and no diagnosis in her hand. Queer tells you the category is constructed. Quare tells you who paid for the construction and who’s still paying. Feel me?</p><p><strong>VI. We’re Not Importing Labels — We’re Subtracting The Lie</strong></p><p>Just for clarity, because somebody always tries it: reclaiming this history is not about importing Western rainbow labels onto Africa and stapling 2026 vocabulary onto people who never asked for it. It’s the exact opposite move. It’s about subtracting the Western homophobia that got imported four centuries ago and dressed up as tradition the entire time. It’s about reclaiming a past that was more diverse, more flexible, and more free than the European archive ever wanted us to find out. So when you stand on a corner and yell “homosexuality is un-African,” understand what you’re actually doing: you are not defending African tradition, you are performing European Christianity, and by saying it out loud you make the whiteness of your own position visible to everybody in earshot who knows the receipts.</p><p>Every accusation is a confession. The loudest man in the room screaming that queerness is a “Western import” is confessing, without knowing it, that he has no idea his own homophobia is the actual import. So when I said up top that you been lost in the sauce, hear me right — that wasn’t an insult, it was an invitation, back to a history that was bigger, freer, and more yours than the colonizer ever wanted you to know existed. Happy Pride, y’all. Education is elevation. Research over MeSearch.\</p><p><p>Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it.</p></p><p><strong>5 Key Takeaways</strong></p><p><strong>1. </strong>Female husbandry and woman-to-woman marriage were mainstream, legally recognized institutions across 40+ African societies — not secret, not marginal, not modern.</p><p><strong>2. </strong>Precolonial African gender systems decoupled the social role from the sexed body. A woman could be a legal husband and father. “Just biology” is a colonial story, not a universal fact.</p><p><strong>3. </strong>Two things can be true: most female-husband unions were kinship and property arrangements, and the same societies still made room for openly recognized same-gender intimacy.</p><p><strong>4. </strong>Colonialism installed homophobia through three mechanisms — the fixed binary, reproduction-bound marriage, and the criminalization of nonconformity — and many of today’s anti-gay laws are inherited colonial statutes.</p><p><strong>5. </strong>Quare theory (E. Patrick Johnson) reads this history better than queer theory alone, because it keeps race, class, and the material body in the frame instead of floating into abstraction.</p><p><strong>Become A Paid Subscriber</strong></p><p>This work runs on no corporate backing, no brand deals dictating what I can and can’t say, no foundation putting a leash on the analysis — just readers like you. Less than 1% of the people who read this actually pay, which means the folks who do are carrying the whole thing on their backs, and I don’t take that lightly. What you’re funding is PBS-depth, independent digital curriculum, built on community expertise instead of a marketing department, filling the void left by the retreat of public-education media that used to do this and walked away from it.</p><p>If “Education is Elevation” and “Research over MeSearch” mean something to you, then becoming a paid subscriber is how you keep this independent, keep it free of corporate strings, and keep it pointed at our community instead of a sponsor. This ain’t no threat, this is a promise: the deeper the support, the deeper the work goes. Pull up.</p><p><p>Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></p><p><strong>Works Cited and Related Readings</strong></p><p><strong>1. </strong>Amadiume, Ifi. <em>Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society</em> (Zed Books, 1987).</p><p><em>The foundational text on Igbo woman-to-woman marriage. Amadiume argues precolonial Igbo gender was flexible and not biologically fixed, so women could occupy male social roles. This is the spine of the “gender is a role, not a body” argument.</em></p><p><strong>2. </strong>Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́. <em>The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses</em> (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997).</p><p><em>Argues that gender as the organizing logic of society was a Western imposition onto Yoruba life, which ranked by seniority rather than sexed bodies. Use to show the binary itself is culturally specific, not universal.</em></p><p><strong>3. </strong>Murray, Stephen O., and Will Roscoe, eds. <em>Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities</em> (St. Martin’s Press, 1998).</p><p><em>The canonical survey gathering same-gender practices across dozens of African societies, including the Azande warrior husbands and female-husband institutions. The receipts for the “40+ societies” claim.</em></p><p><strong>4. </strong>Evans-Pritchard, E. E. “Sexual Inversion among the Azande,” <em>American Anthropologist</em> 72 (1970).</p><p><em>Ethnographic documentation of Azande warriors marrying younger men and paying bridewealth in spears. Read critically — it’s a colonial-era anthropologist — but it records a recognized, public institution.</em></p><p><strong>5. </strong>Johnson, E. Patrick. “‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother,” <em>Text and Performance Quarterly</em> 21, no. 1 (2001).</p><p><em>The origin of quare theory. Johnson critiques queer theory’s neglect of race and class and grounds queerness in the body, vernacular, and material life. The lens for this entire piece.</em></p><p><strong>6. </strong>Johnson, E. Patrick, and Mae G. Henderson, eds. <em>Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology</em> (Duke Univ. Press, 2005).</p><p><em>Reprints the quare essay and builds out the field. Use for the broader Black queer theoretical tradition that quare opened up.</em></p><p><strong>7. </strong>Butler, Judith. <em>Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity</em> (Routledge, 1990).</p><p><em>The queer-theory anchor. Gender as performative, the binary as constructed. Necessary tool and necessary foil — quare theory is in conversation (and tension) with exactly this.</em></p><p><strong>8. </strong>Cohen, Cathy J. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” <em>GLQ</em> 3, no. 4 (1997).</p><p><em>Bridges queer theory and Black radical politics, insisting queerness be measured against material power, not just identity. Pairs with quare to keep the analysis grounded.</em></p><p><strong>9. </strong>Tamale, Sylvia, ed. <em>African Sexualities: A Reader</em> (Pambazuka Press, 2011).</p><p><em>A pan-African corrective to outsider framings of African sexuality, written largely by African scholars. Essential for centering African voices over the colonial archive.</em></p><p><strong>10. </strong>Reeder, Greg. “Same-sex Desire, Conjugal Constructs, and the Tomb of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep,” <em>World Archaeology</em> 32, no. 2 (2000).</p><p><em>The scholarly case for reading the Saqqara tomb as a same-sex pairing. Cited honestly alongside the twins counter-reading — the debate is live, and I say so.</em></p><p><strong>11. </strong>Nwoko, Kenneth Chukwuemeka. “Female Husbands in Igbo Land: Southeast Nigeria,” <em>The Journal of Pan African Studies</em> 5, no. 1 (2012).</p><p><em>A focused account of the status, ritual authority, and gendered standing of Igbo female husbands. Detail for the property-and-power reading.</em></p><p><strong>12. </strong>Heywood, Linda M. <em>Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen</em> (Harvard Univ. Press, 2017).</p><p><em>The leading modern biography of Njinga, working both Portuguese colonial records and African oral tradition. Use to separate Njinga’s documented life from the hostile chroniclers’ spin.</em></p><p><strong>13. </strong>Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts,” <em>Small Axe</em> 12, no. 2 (2008).</p><p><em>On the violence of the colonial archive and reading its silences. The basis for treating archival erasure of these lives as a crime scene, not a neutral absence.</em></p><p><strong>14. </strong>Mills, Charles W. <em>The Racial Contract</em> (Cornell Univ. Press, 1997).</p><p><em>The epistemology of how colonial power decides whose knowledge counts. Explains how African gender systems got reclassified from wisdom to “savagery.”</em></p><p><strong>15. </strong>Combahee River Collective. “The Combahee River Collective Statement” (1977); Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” <em>University of Chicago Legal Forum</em> (1989).</p><p><p>Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></p><p></p> <br /><br />This is a public episode. 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