Back in the spring, I was asked to respond to a group of papers at Lehigh University’s Queer in Africa Conference. It was a wonderful experience to share space with scholars and activists doing the work of creating a livable and flourishing life for queer Africans. My session was titled, “Queering Politics of the Self in the Ghanaian Context” and the two panelists presented quite fascinating embedded studies of expansive genders and sexualities in Ghana. I reproduce my opening remarks on their papers below as a way of sharing my own positions on how to study and think with “queer Africa.”
Obaaberima, kwadwo-basia. These terms loosely translate to “a woman who is a man” and a boy (kwadwo) who is a girl. These are just two of the terms I know as an Akan-speaking Ghanaian. I know there are others in Ga, Hausa, Ewe, and the myriad languages spoken in Ghana and around the continent. So, when I read Sidra Lawrence’s ethnographically rich essay, which introduced me to the Dagara phrase pog leb deb, I had an historical and familiar entry-point. It was an articulation of my own gendered experiences. This essay also raised a number of questions for me about what it means to theorize “queer Africa,” which I will return to shortly.
Hold on to these phrases and this question, as I tell another story by way of beginning my comments on the papers you have just heard.
On a recent trip to Accra, I found myself struck by how much sex there was in the city. Everywhere I turned, I saw flirtation and invitation. Not much of this erotic energy seemed particularly serious. It was a playful energy, fleeting and flighty. Sex was a means of communication and commerce. I saw it between the trotro mate and his passengers, flirtatious banter with men and women; the Hausa koko seller as she made change for her customers. One day, getting lunch at Mawarko, a Lebanese owned fast-food restaurant in La, I found myself on the receiving end of such intense flirtation. The woman who gave me my packaged meal elicited a bigger than usual tip. The erotic energy she exuded remains ineffable, but her request was simple. “Coca-cola is 3 cedis.”
From my vantage point, the sex in Accra is explicit and it is hot. And more importantly, it resists the dominant framing of Ghanaian sexuality as monogamous, missionary, and homophobic.
In my transmasculine embodiment, I found myself navigating propositions from unexpected sources – cis men who emphasized their heterosexuality while obviously flirting with me, as both man and woman; cis women who explicitly expressed their curiosity and desire to have me in their beds. All this in the midst of, “are you a boy or a girl?” wei kraa, obaa anaa barima?
Aside from an overt eroticism, my experiences in Accra are also marked by legitimate fears that I will be the victim of trans-antagonist violence, particularly from the police. Often this violence intersects with the policing of working-class black masculinity and heterosexist violence against women who will not conform to heterosexual femininity.
I begin my remarks here, rooted in my body and my experiences of the landscape of gender and sexuality in Accra to highlight the messiness of this context; to my mind, a context already queered by the confluence of colonialism, Christianity, and indigenous modes of being.
From my vantage, I identify one primary concern from the preceding papers. My discussion unfolds by first explicating on the intersecting themes, briefly commenting on each presentation, and ending with some questions for our presenters.
Overlapping Themes: Western lens
Godfried Asante’s paper opens with a similar grounding. He writes as “a same-gender loving man” and currently, “a U.S. based queer postcolonial scholar.” These positions matter. Where we come from, where we write from, and how the two meet.
The where of where we write from is a matter of particular concern for me in both papers. Although both empirically rooted in communities and organizations in Ghana, I worry that a Western epistemology colors the analysis and discounts the indigenous meanings that might otherwise emerge. Asante’s paper is grounded in a concern for how neoliberal discourses of empowerment shape the landscape of anti-homophobic organizing in Ghana. We are to understand that these neoliberal discourses are an imposition of what Joseph Massad and others have called “the gay international,” or the universalization of gay rights and normalization of what queer sexuality ought to look like. But how might we rethink notions of individual empowerment as western neoliberal discourses when we acknowledge, for example that Akan philosophies and cultural ethos are similarly inclined? In other words, how might a serious engagement with the local landscape complicate the analysis of what the NGO workers are doing?
The same question is relevant for Lawrence. Lawrence argues that pog leb deb and Fofo’s experiences indicate a transgressive gender that challenges dualistic Dagara gender ideologies. Her analysis reveals frequent surprise that perhaps an assumed gender binary might be more porous and less binary than imagined. As such, she finds transgression in a context where the empirical data suggests no such thing. That Fofo’s father happily raises her as a boy, that her community sees her as a man, helping other men with their marriage rituals and the like, resists the conclusion that her gender is transgressive.
What might it mean to take the indigenous meanings of gender seriously? It seems to me that to dismiss the seeming comfort that the community has with a woman who becomes a man in favor of reifying an idea that Dagara gender ideologies are binary is to discount the complexity of this landscape. In other words, how do we continue to insist that obaabarima, pog leb deb, yan daudu, and all the other binary gender busting modes of being amongst African peoples are transgressive? For whom do they transgress?
I ask this question as part of a broader political investment in the project of theorizing queer Africa. What makes Africa queer and according to whose rubrics? What do we gain by taking seriously the messiness of indigenous contexts, knowledge, and theory as we try to make sense of our contemporary modes of being, recognizing that these ways of being are not detached from a colonial past, a neocolonial present, and an insistent will to modernity.