The Colonized Black Male Body & Today’s African Anti-gay Laws

Colonized Black Male Bodies: The Battleground for African Anti-LGBTQ+ Laws

A longstanding battle on the African continent rages on; its battleground is located squarely on the bodies of Black gay men. When Britain colonized large areas of Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, thet set in place penal codes which outlawed “crimes against nature,” meant to signal homosexual acts.1 These penal codes remain in many postcolonial countries; a 2019 report by the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association found that thirty-two of fifty-four African nations currently criminalize same-sex relations.2 Gay sex is punishable by death penalty in Mauritania, Sudan, Northern Nigeria, and Southern Somalia.3 These laws have remained almost immutable for over sixty years; occasionally an amendment might be disputed around election periods.4 Although these anti-LGBTQ+ laws never originally existed in Africa before colonization, the rhetoric around these nations’ laws often includes the defense of preserving “traditional African values.” This convenient yet historically untrue defense is then used to criminalize, bully, and discriminate against LGBTQ+ individuals and advocates as well as anyone who is suspected of sympathizing with their cause.5

So why are many African nations upholding colonially-imposed anti-LGBTQ+ laws at the same time their colonizers are turning away from those laws? As the West has gained increasing knowledge on the spectrum of human sexuality and moved on from categorizing LGBTQ+ individuals as diseased or criminal, countries like the United States, Canada, and Britain are moving to recognize the rights and freedoms of LGBTQ+ people. This includes embracing marriage equality, enshrining LGBTQ+ protections in law, and criminalizing conversion therapy. Many nations in Africa, on the other hand, do not seem willing to adopt similar laws or even acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ+ individuals in their own countries.

In April of 2018, British Prime Minister Theresa May publicly stated that she “deeply regrets” Britain’s legacy of anti-LGBTQ+ laws across the Commonwealth.6 She called for an overhaul of laws regarding the criminalization of “outdated” legislation and declared that Britain had a “special responsibility” in righting the wrongs of colonial-era anti-gay laws.7 May’s call to action ignited controversy over pre-colonial Africa’s position on sexual minorities. Was it exclusively heterosexual or as sexually-diverse as African LGBTQ+ activists claim it was? “Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta responded to May that “[LGBTQ+ equality] is not an issue, as you would want to put it, of human rights. This is an issue of society, of our own base, as a culture as a people.”8

Most Africans today do not acknowledge homophobia as part of a colonial legacy.9 Some Africans maintain that there existed a pre-colonial, heterosexual continent10 where there were little to no sexual minorities native to the land. This impression of an African past free of LGBTQ+ people has resulted in legislators, religious leaders, and even presidents casually referring to homosexuality as “un-African.”11 Africans decolonizing their continent from its British colonial legacy have constructed an ideal “original culture.” According to those who trust this narrative, “making Africa great again” means strengthening and tightening antiLGBTQ+ laws to recover their bygone tradition.

While notions of a heterosexual Africa are popular, it is challenged by the ethnographic evidence “from the Azande of the Congo to the Beti of Cameroon…from the Pangwe of Gabon to the Nama of Namibia” of same-sex relationships existing and flourishing before British colonial rule.12 Despite the overwhelming evidence of gender and sexual minorities in pre-colonial Africa, there remains an active polarization between defenders of the heterosexual “African culture” and the upsurge in African LGBTQ+ activism. This all plays into the systems of colonialism. Colonizers first conquered the continent by successfully turning Africans against each other so that they might blame themselves for divisions and not their settlers.13 This narrative of African in-fighting is key to ongoing, or neocolonialism. An acknowledgement of the past, and its interpretation, is key to solving present-day issues.

The sodomy laws prevalent in African sexual politics today stem from a history of widespread Christian colonization; this colonial process whitewashed traditional African sexualities and erased histories according to the standards of Eurocentric heteronormativity. Christian missionaries to Africa planted a particular interpretation of the Bible that demonized those who deviated from Western notions of heterosexuality. This rhetoric especially affected Black gay men who posed a distinct threat to white masculinity. African proponents of today’s socalled sodomy laws routinely portray LGBTQ+ individuals––especially gay men––as demonic, predators of young boys, and as infectious, diseased degenerates.14 Today’s African sexual politics mimics the White imagination of early Christian colonizers who considered Black men to be hypersexual, animalistic, and predisposed to violence.15 The white men of British colonial rule reduced Black men to their bodies: they “identified their muscles and their penises”16 as their most important sites. To assert control, white masculinity had to quickly tame Black male sexuality according to their own sexual morality––only then would Black men be suitable citizens. Today’s anti-gay laws find their colonial roots in the fears and anxieties of white masculinity.

Over time, these LGBTQ prohibitions have left a psychic mark upon Black gay men and the culture that surrounds them.17 Due to fear of the police discriminating against them due to sexual orientation, Black gay men will likely not seek out the police in the unfortunately common instances of hate crimes like extortion, blackmail, or physical or sexual assault.18 The existence of the so-called sodomy laws creates a deadly silence that turns a blind eye on the daily discrimination of Black gay men as they seek jobs, rent housing, and pursue education. The oppression of gay men in Africa translates to barriers for obtaining and receiving proper, life-saving medical treatment. Because they worry of being outed, abused, or shamed by insensitive healthcare workers, they often suffer in silence. Unsurprisingly, there is a gap in HIV research and health programmes because of the taboo and criminalization of sexual relations between men; it can be estimated that thousands of gay men are dying each year as a result of unawareness or inability to get medication.19

Val Kalende, a Ugandan LGBTQ+ activist, explains it well when she suggests that “an honest discussion is needed on human sexuality in the African context before, during and after the colonial period. This is a conversation local activists, civil society, academics, and the media should begin to shape.”20

Carter Sawatzky (they/them)

English major, Gender Studies minor