What can African history teach us about queer belonging?

From the 1960s to the early 1980s, Ukonu’s Club was hailed as Eastern Nigeria’s most popular television program. The show featured a variety of entertainers like Mazi Ukonu, the show’s namesake and Christy Essien. In the 1970s, one unique entertainer made a name for themselves on the show, an individual by the name of Area Scatter. 

The story of Area Scatter begins sometime during the civil war, when Scatter, who was previously a civil servant, disappeared into the forest and emerged seven months and seven days later as a well-endowed woman. Per their admission, the gods had blessed them with supernatural powers that enhanced both their musical talent as well as their feminine qualities. 

On Ukonu’s Club, Scatter is seen dressed traditionally as a woman and playing their thumb piano to an audience of well-respected elders and leaders. They watch Scatter with an intense focus, in admiration of the performer before them. Scatter is not met with disgust nor discrimination; the room of spectators seeks only to enjoy their music. 

Five decades later, one must wonder just how different the reactions to Scatter might be with today’s elders as opposed to those of the past. It is as if the ancestors, the long-gone elders of yesteryear, saw individuals like Scatter from an entirely different, more ancient, and traditional perspective.   

As a child of the first decade of the 21st century, it’s no secret that I, like many gay men, was drawn almost innately to the intensely feminine characters and personas I saw in the media. I was obsessed with the ladies of the Winx Club cartoon series, with Flora being my favorite. I was infatuated with the “badassery” of cartoon characters like Kim Possible and the girls of Totally Spies. Female pop stars of the era like Britney Spears, Beyoncé and the Pussycat Dolls were dropping music videos I couldn’t get enough of, and in a family of boys that loved the WWE, Trish Stratus was easily a favorite wrestler of mine. 

I watched these ladies on television and came to idolize them. Their femininity wasn’t a weakness, it was a strength and it inspired me. In many ways, I came to adapt much of their character into my personality. Lines were drawn rather strictly, however, regarding gender-appropriate behavior at home. 

It’s a common belief amongst Africans that the gender binary has always existed rigidly in traditional spaces. The recent popularity of social media personalities like Bobrisky, a trans woman, in Nigeria has once again brought out this rhetoric. The belief that “lifestyles” like Bobrisky’s are the consequences of the west, pushed upon us by a mass-media agenda. Now that I am an adult, one with a history degree, I’ve come to challenge those notions. I’m re-thinking what I’ve been taught about my ancestors, coming to view them not as one-dimensional icons of bigotry, but as individuals who often themselves were queer, and came up in societies where their identities could be fully embraced. 

While doing research last year on the Ekpe, a form of government that emerged during the 17th century in the Cross-river regions of Southwest Cameroon and South-east Nigeria, I came upon the story of a woman by the name of Nne Uko. Nne Uko Uma Awa was a woman who according to legend not only joined but climbed the ranks of the Ekpe, a society whose rites were exclusive to men. Like other senior members of Ekpe, Nne Uko is believed to have had several wives, at least two. 

According to legend, when asked about why she dressed as a man, Uko responded that by creation she was meant to be a man but had instead been born into the body of a woman (Nne Uko). The discovery of this dazzling icon completely altered my perceptions of my ancestors, bringing them closer to me in the process. Looking through the work of European anthropologists in pre-colonial Africa, I ran quite frequently into individuals like Uko and Scatter. 

In the 17th century, Andrew Battell, a British traveler who was a captive of the Portuguese in Angola lived amongst the Imbangala peoples. Battell wrote that several Imbangala men lived with “men in women’s apparel,” who they kept as wives. Olfert Dapper, a Dutch writer, also wrote of the Chibados of Angola, individuals who constituted a third gender. Known as spiritual guides, they numbered up to fifty in the court of Queen Nzinga. They were noted to have “walked and dressed like women,” and even married men, without reproach.

It’s easy to get the feeling that concepts like gender and sexuality in these societies exhibited a fluidity not commonly found in the West. It was typical of European scholars to label such practices as beastly and degenerate, placing the conduct of those who participated under the broad term sodomy, an act then punishable by law, up to and including death. The need for Western scholars and travelers to put derogatory labels to identities seen in other cultures directly coincided with the colonial objective of reshaping these societies to fit squarely into a Western gender binary. Those who didn’t fit into the binary were oftentimes targeted for violence. 

In the Americas, Spanish Conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa, disgusted by the Berdaches, a population of native men who dressed and behaved like women, massacred up to forty of them when he came upon their dwellings in a local village in 1513. Contact with Europeans, the eventual adoption of Christian ideals and the colonization of most of these societies by European nations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, saw the purposeful decimation of such identities throughout the continent of Africa. 

In later years, when Africa and its people came to be viewed as the pinnacle of man and his primitivity, European ethnographers could further erase the diversity of the identities observed on the continent to push their agendas about the rigidness of gender and sexuality. As a people who were without traditional writing systems, who passed our histories down orally, we are left to wonder what may have been erased from our collective histories under the new constraints of Christian morality and piety.   

The conversations being had today about trans identities and their validity are proof of how Western society has evolved to begin to acknowledge the diversity of the individuals that comprise it. Despite that, it is important to shed light on the fact that these identities are not new, nor were they products of the West. Framing conversations about queerness around the modernity of first-world nations and their global influence does a poor job of recognizing the ancientness of queer identities and how they often manifested all around the world in pre-colonial societies.   

There is a rule of thumb I apply as a student of history, which is that there is not a single feeling any one person feels today, that millions have not felt over the vastness of human history. Understanding our present is only achievable by coming to terms with our past. What makes history interesting, at least for me, are the dichotomies that exist between what we’ve been taught about our past, and the thinly veiled truths that lie underneath. 

As LGBTQ+ Africans, it’s easy to feel disconnected from our cultures, and I’ve struggled with those feelings myself. Learning of individuals like Area Scatter, Nne Uko, and identities like the Chibados of Angola helps to rebuild that bridge and repair the damage meted out by imported bigotries. Making our ancestors icons of intolerance only takes away from the colorfulness of the lives many of them led. Our sexual and gender identities are not modern consequences of Western influence, they are indigenous and ancient expressions of ourselves and our people, and much like our ancestors, we reserve the right to express them as we please.  

Edited/Reviewed by Cassandra Roxburgh, Caleb Okereke, and Uzoma Ihejirika.