African Traditional Religion, Sexual Orientation, Transgender, and Homosexuality

Abstract

This chapter examines intersections in African Traditional Religion, sexual orientation, homosexuality, and transgender. It provides critical engagements of normative assumptions and definitions. Granted that most people in Africa publicly and privately identify as either male or female, Christian or Muslims, this study explores a third option that examines whether traditional African religions have tolerance for sexual orientations or gender categories outside of popularly known and accepted ones. This chapter uncovers key factors-historical, psycho-social, and political-that shape public and popular perceptions of sexuality and gender in modern Africa. Considering as insufficient the unabashedly bland and seemingly ideological mis-narratives that lead to the hypersexualization of gender and their consequences in society, this chapter both interrogates the systemic productions of violence through the discursive and rhetorical lenses of religious tropes and contextualizes issues that arise for the individual and the nation out of such productions. Whereas stories of violence against non-conformist individuals with iconoclastic sexual and gender orientations, this chapter compares the fate that awaits the former with what happens to individuals, particularly women, who are accused of practicing witchcraft in several African societies. A critical, historical, native, discursive approach is adopted in the methodology, with a scope covering pre-colonial eras and the period, which for the sake of making simple the already complicated histories of nation-making, may be identified by the term “post-colonial setting.” Incorporating digital humanities that provide a visualization of sex and gender with textual engagement that engages history from multiple perspectives, literature, and orature, the chapter flows as one quick essay with an introduction that provides justifications for the study, a segment, which is both a body and a theorization on religion, sexuality, and gender in Africa, and a conclusion that calls for openings, opportunities, and continuations in conversations around the desires to be human.