The argument that gender and sexual diversity is un-African has been weaponized by many states in West Africa to justify the exclusion of gender and sexual minorities from participating in political, social and economic life. Such discourses often frame queerness, non-heteronormativity and the demand for LGBTIQ+ inclusion by gender and sexual minorities as a western Euro-American imperialist imposition from the global North. This discourse, though popularized in southern Africa by Zimbabwe’s leader, Robert Mugabe, and echoed by political elites across West Africa, has been used to justify policies that marginalize gender and sexual minorities and rationalize social harm against them. Such rhetoric is completely ahistorical and stands as a distinct reminder of how colonial ideologies continue to permeate the very essence of what is considered West African culture. 

First, this discourse assumes a coherent whole West Africa with a static culture fixed in a certain point in time. This assumption of a singular ‘African’ or West African identity is fiction. As thinkers like Cameroonian historian, Achille Mbembe, have pointed out, Africa is a geographic reality, not a cultural monolith. The continent’s 54 countries and over 3,000 ethnic communities have always held distinct beliefs and knowledge about gender, sexuality and community that transcends even western understanding and conception of queerness, identity and kinship. West Africa itself encompasses more than 1,000 distinct ethnic communities with different languages, practices and traditions—to assume all of these communities genuinely had no tolerance for gender diversity would be nothing short of ahistorical revisionism.   

Historical evidence documents non-heteronormative societies of gender and sexually diverse groups existing across time and communities throughout Africa and specifically West Africa. In Nigeria, for instance, professor of anthropology, Rudolf Gaudio, details an ethnographic account of the Yan Daudu, a distinct non-heteronormative community of self-identified feminine men in northern Nigeria who predated the influence of both Christian and Islamic religions in the region, but are facing increasing politics, scrutiny and marginalization in contemporary times. While some of Yan Daudu engage in same-sex activities, this is not a defining criterion of their identity. The Yan Daudu should be understood not solely through the lens of contemporary LGBT+ identities but as a socio-occupational group with distinct roles in Hausa society predating the import of western religion and politics. They often worked in brothels and similar environments, serving as intermediaries between clients and sex workers, managing interactions with authorities, and recruiting individuals into sex work. Beyond this, they also engaged in tasks traditionally coded as ‘women’s work’ within Hausa contexts, such as preparing and selling food—particularly snacks like fried potatoes, eggs and chicken—which reinforced their integration into gendered economic structure. 

Similarly, cultural anthropologist, Edwin Otu, and intercultural communications scholar, Godfried Asante, have documented other indigenous communities of feminine and female embodied men in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. The traditions of female embodied men in the Sassoi communities in southern Ghana, for instance, existed long before colonial encounters in West Africa. In the cosmology of Fantes in central and western Ghana, third genders or effeminate men and masculine women were considered to have souls changed at birth. For them, effeminate men had light souls while masculine women carried heavy souls and this category of third gender served an important part of traditional authority. Men of the Woodabe nomadic pastoral community, indigenous to West Africa and roaming across Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, Burkina Faso and Ghana, have historically embraced  beauty standards that emphasize what would be categorized as feminine aesthetics and crossdressing according to contemporary western politics and norms. Women marrying other women for several reasons including love, socioeconomic support and inheritance have also been documented across at least 30 groups in Africa, including among the Nankani, documented by philosopher Rosemary Amengo and among other indigenous same sex loving or knowing women living in southern Ghana, as documented by social anthropologist Serena Dankwa. Nigerian feminist anthropologist, Ifi Amadiume, and Yoruba literary scholar, George Olusola Ajibade, have also respectively documented both indigenous queer existence and colonial imposition of gender binaries among the Igbo and Yoruba living in Nigeria, Benin and Togo. Amadiume’s work in fact predates the institutionalization of queer theory, which began in the early 1990s, in western academy, demonstrating how West African scholars have long identified and pushed against the colonial ways we interpret gender in the sub-continent.  

It is in fact approaching West Africa with a colonial gaze that flattens and erases its gender and sexual diversity. It is also this same gaze that attaches a rigid notion of ‘Africanness’ to the culture of many diverse communities in West Africa. When people today dismiss queerness as ‘unAfrican’, they are not defending tradition or culture, rather what they are doing is recycling colonial scripts through discourses meant to other and legitimize violence against gender and sexually diverse West Africans.