ABSTRACT
Condemnation of homosexuality on the grounds that it is alien to African tradition and religious teachings can be found in numerous statements by African heads of state. For example, Arap Moi, former president of Kenya, is recorded as having said: ‘It is not right that a man should go with another man or a woman with another woman. It is against African tradition and Biblical teachings’. He added ‘I will not shy away from warning Kenyans against the dangers of scourge’, stating that ‘Kenya has no room or time for homosexuals and lesbians’ (Foreman 1999: 115). Postcolonial expressions of opinion on homosexuality in Africa, however, often obscure the relation between colonialism and sexuality. Writers on the history of homosexuality have rarely focused on same-sex relations in the contexts of colonialism, and, when they do so, their focus is often on homosexual experiences between Europeans and local people in colonised countries (Aldrich 2003). What needs closer inquiry therefore are the forms of same-sex sexual relations that existed preand postcolonialism. An analysis of these practices and experiences needs integrating not only with later postcolonial analyses of homosexuality but also with a more general rethinking of sexuality throughout Africa (Anfred 2004; Thomas 2007). Discourses on homosexuality in Africa are located within troubled epistemological paradigms in which basic assumptions about sex, sexuality and gender often go unchallenged in the light of anthropological findings (Oye˘wùmí 1997) and recent advances in biological discourse and research (Fausto-Sterling 2000). Within this context, Moore (1994) has cautioned against reducing account of gender, culture and experience to their linguistic and cognitive elements; features which, she points out, should be understood as embodied in social and political processes. Instead, deeper questions need to be asked about the local descriptors applied to particular expressions of sexuality. How and through which metaphors and discursive expressions are sexual categories constructed, for example? Which discourses come to situate the wordings and legitimate practices, policies, gender politics and biopolitics? And what underlying histories, cultures, social relationships, social organisations and dynamics give their meaning to these discourses?
