Ancient Roots: Gender Variance in African and Indigenous Traditions.

A short essay by Naomi Ward

Scholarship in anthropology, history, and African diaspora studies documents the existence of gender variant identities across pre colonial African and Indigenous cultures: not as marginal phenomena, but as socially integrated, often spiritually significant roles. The Yoruba tradition recognizes fluid gender expression among devotees of certain Orishas, particularly within the Candomble and Lucumi traditions carried into the diaspora.1 Two-Spirit identities among numerous Native nations, including the Lakota winkte, the Zuni lāhamana, and the Navajo nádleehí, carried ceremonial authority and distinct community responsibility.2 The sekrata of Madagascar and the yan daudu of Hausa society occupied recognized, respected social positions within their communities.3

These traditions were not incidental. They were structural.

European colonial imposition, through Christian missionary doctrine, British sodomy laws exported across empires, and forced assimilation policies; systematically criminalized and pathologized what indigenous frameworks had long accommodated or revered.4 As C. Riley Snorton has demonstrated in Black on Both Sides, the racial and gender taxonomies enforced by colonial modernity cannot be disentangled from one another; the construction of Blackness and the pathologization of gender non conformity emerged from the same administrative and theological apparatus.5 The binary gender system enforced today as “traditional” is, in historical terms, the recent imposition.

Contemporary opposition to trans and gender nonconforming people within communities of African and Indigenous descent, opposition that frames itself as cultural preservation, has the history precisely backwards. As Don Romero, Deborah Miranda, and others have documented, the erasure of Two-Spirit people was itself a colonial project, a deliberate dismantling of Indigenous social structures.6 Similarly, Patrick Awondo’s ethnographic work on Cameroon and other sub-Saharan contexts demonstrates that contemporary African homophobia and transphobia bear the clear fingerprints of missionary influence, not ancestral tradition.7

Honoring trans and gender nonconforming people is not accommodation to Western progressivism. It is the recovery of suppressed ancestral knowledge: a refusal to mistake the colonizer’s prohibitions for our own.

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Notes

1. See J. Lorand Matory, Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); and Mikelle Smith Omari-Tunkara, Manipulating the Sacred: Yoruba Art, Ritual, and Resistance in Brazilian Candomble (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005).

2. Will Roscoe, Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); and Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, eds., Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).

3. On the sekrata, see David Graeber, Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). On the yan daudu, see Rudolf Gaudio, Allah Made Us: Sexual Outlaws in an Islamic African City (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

4. On the export of colonial sodomy law, see Douglas Sanders, “377 and the Unnatural Afterlife of British Colonialism in Asia,” Asian Journal of Comparative Law 4, no. 1 (2009): 1–49. On missionary influence on African gender norms, see Marc Epprecht, Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008).

5. C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), especially chapters 1–2. See also Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 64–81.

6. Deborah Miranda, “Extermination of the Joyas: Gendercide in Spanish California,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16, nos. 1–2 (2010): 253–284.

7. Patrick Awondo, Peter Geschiere, and Graeme Reid, “Homophobic Africa? Toward a More Nuanced View,” African Studies Review 55, no. 3 (2012): 145–168.