"Africa is the cradle of mankind, why on earth would we think that queerness as we know it now did not exist here?"
"In an article written for Rainbow Migration Arya Karijo states that what we now refer to as queerness was always part of Africanness pre colonisation"
Pharaoh Hatshepsut (1507 BC to 1458 BC) was the Fifth Pharaoh. Born to Thutmose I and married to Thutmose II and for a time the second ever regent after Sobekneferu. Hatshepsut built what is one of the wonders of the world the memorial temple at Deir el-Bahri. Depicted in statues with the ceremonial golden beard and a masculine stature and regarded as one of the most successful Pharaoh's to rule Egypt to all of us in an androcentric world we would be shocked to learn that Hatshepsut is female. But to the ancient Egyptians gender of the Pharaoh's was relative, they were after all deity.
Nzinga the Ngola (King) of the Ndongo and Matamba put up a 30 year resistance to colonising Portuguese forces. Nzinga like all other kings had a harem. Nzinga's harem had sixty men and the King was actually a woman.
We could argue that this ambivalence to gender roles was limited to divinity like the Pharaoh or to royalty like the Ngola, but all over Africa we see it unfold. It is the male daughters and female sons of the Igbo, or the mokamööna of the Kuria in modern day Kenya and Tanzania or the Iweto of the Akamba in modern day Kenya or the Agikuyu women who took wives. In all of these instances continuity of family or some type of spirituality was involved.
So when modern day Africans uphold a Victorian framework of gender and claim that queerness is un-African, it is almost laughable but also it is heartbreaking how far removed we are from our pre colonial pasts and how far removed we are from the land and what it truly means to be African.