In Kenya a woman fought a ten-year court battle to bury her ‘husband’. Her husband was a fellow woman. Mukethe Mwanza finally won the case in 2018. Theirs was a Kamba traditional marriage known as Iweto. Iweto was done for continuity. If a lineage did not have a son, the ancestors would be lost in limbo. To save the ancestors, two women would get married, often an older, sonless woman and a younger woman with a son.  

Fast forward to 2024. Two Iweto women who came before the courts to seek redress on property division after separation were told that their marriage was unconstitutional. This is despite Kenya’s Article 45 which clearly states that the legislature will provide guiding legislation to protect cultural marriages. Article 45 of Kenya’s Constitution addresses the family. While section two defines who is eligible for marriage and family, section four requires the state to enact legislation recognizing various forms of marriage, including those under religious, personal or cultural law, such as Iweto. No one interpreted the second section to be about consent and choice; everyone focused solely on the sex of the parties in the first half of it. The law does not confer sex or assign gender roles; it simply recognizes the different sexes and protects people’s rights to consent to participating in marriage and a family. 

Why am I focusing here on the Iweto? If you ask any average African within and beyond Kenya about their culture, they will regurgitate Victorian Christian pseudo-African things such as ‘the man is the head of the family’ and ‘African culture is one man and woman in marriage.’ No one will tell you about obinrin and okunrin in Yoruba culture in the way African feminist professor Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí articulates in her book, The Invention of Women. According to Oyěwùmí, reproductive roles does not translate to boxes of societal roles. No one will mention Kikuyu matriarchs or the fact that the whole tribe being named after Mumbi’s daughters was one of the inspirations for the women’s movement in Kenya, as documented by African feminist scholars Wilhelmina Oduol and Wanjiru Kabira. Nor will they speak about the Igbo practice of ‘female sons’ and ‘male daughters’ with fluid gender roles, a reality that African feminist scholar, Ifi Amadiume, documented years before the Western academia institutionalized queer theory. 

What the West calls ‘transgender’ has been recognized in Africa by many names: wandarwade and waandawade in Ethiopia, who were often installed as Ashtime who served in the palace; mudoko dako among the Lango in Uganda; the arogi (witchers), iroria (prophets) and aga (healers) of the Meru people, often appointed as Mugwe in the tradition of the Meru people‘s original families of diviners; Chibanda ya Ganga in Congo who were diviners; Zvibanda and Gangas in Angola and Namibia, who were also diviners. No one will mention the different instances of woman-to-woman marriages: mokoomana among the Kuria of Kenya and Tanzania, Kitum Chi Tolah with the Kipsigis, Chi Mwandu with the Luo and the married women of the Kikuyu. 

Yes, there is a huge difference between all of these ways of being and the Western acronym, LGBTQ+, which focuses narrowly on sexuality and gender definitions, and in typically Western fashion, fixates on sex. African understandings, by contrast, were rooted in spirituality, family continuity and communal integration. Yet there has been an intentional erasure, the result of centuries of natal alienation that has disconnected continental Africans from the land and from their true roots. Today, what is truly African is often labelled as ‘unconstitutional’ in supposedly independent African nation-states.  

African families once functioned as communal structures where distinctions between your mother and her sisters were blurred. You called all of them ‘Mama’ and grew up with your cousins as siblings. These communities had customs that protected adopted children. For instance, the Galla and Meru people prohibited speaking about a child’s past when they and their mother joined the community, whether during peacetime after inter-community cattle raids or during famines or other displacement. Only their names indicated their origin, and these names have endured, outlasting colonization in Meru, Kikuyu and Maasai cultures in Kenya. 

Unfortunately, we moved from these complex and beautiful arrangements of care to a Victorian, industrial revolution model of the family: the man slaved for the economy, the woman slaved for him at home, they had as many children as they could and then spent all their earnings within the very systems enslaving them just to keep those children alive. The only unit that mattered was this configuration of man, woman, children—and dog, hopefully behind a picket fence or working toward one. We dropped the true family that was the basic unit of society and adopted the Victorian basic unit designed to supply of labour to a capitalist economy and serve as primary consumers of its products. The family we have now is not a basic unit of society, it is the pillar of capitalist consumption and production. 

Africans adopted this model post-colonization, hook, line and sinker. When people nowadays speak about family values, the family unit being the basic unit of society, they mean a Victorian Christian family. All other families are regarded as lesser. The single mother or single father families are seen as lesser; cultural families such as the Iweto families are seen as unAfrican and in violation of culture; grandmother matriarchal families are seen as a misnomer; children-only families, whether through death or economic circumstance, are not worthy of care by African states; chosen families, where the members come together by choice, like communities of old where the ‘blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb’, are seen as fraudulent distortions of the African postcolonial family.