I want to be clear that these posts are not perpetuating the false idea that precolonial Africa was a Utopian paradise without issues of class or hierarchy. Precolonial African traditions of gender & sexual variance still had its issues. I also want to be clear that certain African peoples, both pre and post colonialism, do not have the same language for gender as Western or other societies do-for ex: the Yoruba people.
Here is a wonderful thread addressing these topics in addition to confirming the presence of people in precolonial Africa who were not what we consider cisheterosexual-filled with book recommendations, full PDFs and various text resources
Enough of us do not even realize how much of a post-colonial white-supremic world we still live in. Things like racism, the gender binary, homophobia are all concepts and inventions of the european influence on us globally.
Too many times I have read about a pre-colonial culture (the fact that I even have to say pre colonial 🙄) where I read that certain things were or were not common practice until Europeans arrived and forced their culture on everybody and then used Christianity to justify it while they were enslaving, raping, kidnapping, and committing genocide. And there are actual poc who can’t see pass the eurocentricity of literaly EVERYTHING because it’s what we were raised to think and believe and were never exposed to anything that would suggest otherwise.
i want to be able to come back to this information, to these conversations.
“Ezili’s Mirrors” by Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley was one of many books to inform the ethics of Ezili’s Respite. meant to be a space of autonomy for Black Queers, this farm, this land, this project doesn’t need to imagine that Black Queer genders exist; we already know they do and strive to embrace the multitudes.
