It might sound insulting and derogatory, however, the point is there is a word for the behaviour.
In digging up facts I found that, while many Africans say that homosexuality is un-African, African culture is no stranger to homosexual behaviours and acts.įor example, in my local language (Yoruba), the word for “homosexual” is adofuro, a colloquialism for someone who has anal sex.
I had to teach students about a history that is mostly unwritten. When I was appointed by Berlin’s Humboldt University this year to teach the course “Pre- and post-colonial sexual orientation and sexual identity in Africa”, I knew I had a huge task before me. This year Gambia’s president Yahya Jammeh called for gay people’s throats to be slit. This is the same argument that Robert Mugabe used to suppress the human rights of LGBT people in Zimbabwe that the former president of Nigeria, Goodluck Jonathan, used when he signed the most dangerous law against LGBT people in the modern world and that President Yoweri Museveni used in a ceremonial signing of the anti-gay bill in Uganda. As I dug deep, I realised that African culture is no stranger to homosexual behaviours and acts
