On January 13, 2014, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan\u00a0signed a bill<\/a>\u00a0against gay relationships, outlawing gay marriage, public displays of same-sex relationships, and membership in gay groups. A few days later, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni refused to sign an anti-homosexuality bill that has been in the works since 2009 on the grounds that there are other ways of dealing with \u2018an abnormal person.\u2019 Pondering the issue earnestly, he wrote: \u2018Do we kill him\/her? Do we imprison him\/her?\u2019<\/a>\u00a0The \u2018soft,\u2019 revised \u2018Kill the Gays Bill,\u2019 as it is commonly nicknamed in the media, which has transformed the death penalty into incarceration,\u00a0has caused substantial aid cuts<\/a>, especially from European countries like Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands. One expects other Western countries to follow suit. Museveni is not alone in figuring out how to hang dissenters. In the wake of the trial for \u2018sodomy\u2019 of the first president of Zimbabwe, Canaan Banana, his successor Robert Mugabe spoke of homosexuals in his 2002 campaign speech as \u2018mad person[s]\u2019 who will be sent to jail: \u2018we don\u2019t want to import it [homosexuality] to our country [Zimbabwe], we have our own culture, our own people\u2019 (quoted in the\u00a0Herald<\/em>, Harare, Zimbabwe, 6 March 2002). 86 United Nations member countries have laws that criminalize same-sex relations; some 37 African countries, along with Middle Eastern countries, constitute a majority of those so that it is dangerous and even life-threatening to be\u00a0out in Africa<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n Homosexuality, itself a slippery contender finding its roots in nineteenth-century medical literature, is still thought to be quintessentially \u2018un-African\u2019\u2014recall Winnie Mandela\u2019s supporters displaying for the cameras in 1991 outside the Johannesburg Supreme Court placards declaring that \u2018HOMOSEX IS NOT IN BLACK CULTURE.\u2019 However, South African Bishops were the only ones among African Anglican bishops not to defeat \u2018resolutions\u2019 (section I.10 on \u2018Human Sexuality\u2019) to improve the Church of England\u2019s attitudes toward homosexuality at\u00a0the 1998 decennial Lambeth Conference<\/a>. It remains that the Church, especially in its Evangelical garb, is always ready to identify homosexuality as an abomination to God. American film-maker Roger Ross Williams, director of\u00a0God Loves Uganda<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(2013), speculates that \u201cAmericans are behind\u201d this Evangelical frenzy against such abominations as same-sex sex in a country that happens to be one of the top 3 in the world\u00a0to assiduously watch gay internet porn<\/a>.<\/p>\n Homosexuality is also often depicted as an import from the deviant West. But the African Continent has always been more\u00a0queer<\/em>\u00a0than generally acknowledged; it has always rainbow-hazed into such a range of sexualities that it is a matter of legitimate political and critical concern that homosexualities and African societies are read as antinomous. Also, these homosexualities fall outside of the purview of the law and even of language. The expression\u2014\u2018to call a spade a spade\u2019\u2014 entails speaking plainly without avoiding embarrassing issues. But what if the spade, while remaining a tool, is called differently in another language? While same-sex practices are rampant throughout the African Continent, claiming homosexual identity is forbidden and even condemned. The question of what constitutes \u2018sex\u2019 in Africa and, in particular, same-sex sex is still a blindspot. As\u00a0the work of Marc Epprecht and Neville Hoad<\/a>\u00a0has revealed, not all African men or women who have same-sex sex think of themselves as gay or homosexual or bisexual or queer. They are seldom members of activist LGBT organizations and are not computed in the sexual health literature on HIV\/AIDS. Also, in Africa, Latin America and other parts of the world, there is a tension between homosexual identity and homosexual practice. \u2018Homosexual\u2019 would be more likely reserved to the passive partner whereas the active partner retains heterosexual identity. In the Arab Muslim world, some thinkers like Joseph Massad in\u00a0Desiring Arabs<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(2007) have pitted the \u2018Gay International\u2019 against \u2018the Arab World.\u2019 What is at play here is a politicization of African indigenous or Islamic same-sex desire as a form of resistance to Westoxification. Yet, the West is not always perceived as the white peril that it is portrayed to be, as was obvious in the Arab Spring movements, during which the West and the \u2018Orient\u2019 did and continue to share the same vocabularies that spread like bushfire in the harmattan through the media, the internet, and social network sites.<\/p>\n However, such terms as \u2018gay\/lesbian,\u2019 which reek of Western liberation struggles, and, more recently, \u2018queer\u2019, a movement generated in academe, certainly point to the globalization of sexual identities. These words were originally imported to the African continent via English, French and other Western languages and often clash with indigenous designations and their corollary practices. In South Africa, a \u2018masculine man\u2019 playing the dominant role in a relationship with another man is called \u2018a straight man\u2019 and is not perceived as \u2018gay\u2019 because he acts as penetrator during sexual intercourse. Conversely, the use of \u2018gay\u2019 is susceptible to a category crisis as some South African women self-identify as gay women rather than lesbians. Whereas the term \u2018male lesbians\u2019 is an attempt at translating the Hausa (e.g. Northern Nigerian) for \u2018passive\u2019 male partners or \u2018yan kifi,<\/em>\u00a0who have sex with each other, \u2018lesbian men\u2019 in Namibia designate women who play the dominant \u2018butch\u2019 role in a same-sex relationship. Even though the terms \u2018butch\u2019 and \u2018femme\u2019 are not known in (Namibian) Damara culture, the various sexual practices and dress codes find some resonance in the admittedly Western butch-femme dyad. Conversely, in Kampala, Uganda, where sections 140 and 141 of the Penal Code condemn same-sex relations, some Ugandan women identify themselves as \u2018tommy-boys,\u2019 that is, biological women who see themselves as men, who need to be the dominant partner during sex, rather than \u2018lesbians,\u2019 and often pass as men.<\/p>\n From Senegal to Southern Africa, many African gay men invoke the animistic belief in ancestor spirit possession. A Shona gay man in Zimbabwe claims he is inhabited by his \u2018auntie\u2019 whereas in Senegal, the\u00a0gor-djigeen<\/em>\u00a0(male-female in Wolof) is haunted by the primordial severance between male and female in the Creation of the Universe. In her autobiography,\u00a0Black Bull, Ancestors and Me<\/em>\u00a0(2008), written in the safety provided by the new South African Constitution in 1996, with its ground-breaking sexual orientation (9:3) clause in its bill of rights, Nkunzi Zandile Nkabinde relays her gradual empowerment as a \u2018lesbian sangoma\u2019 or traditional healer in Johannesburg. Yet, more than the famed sexual orientation clause, the \u2018homosexual\u2019 relationship between her as a sangoma \u2018male woman\u2019 dominated by her \u2018male ancestor\u2019 and her \u2018ancestral wife\u2019 is sanctioned by Zulu spiritual possession cults, which often privilege female men over male women. Upon closer scrutiny, it appears that lesbian sangomas and their ancestral wives are not united in a common identity based on shared sexual orientation but rather are distinguished from each other according to gender difference, complicated by spirituality. Ancestral wives can only function in their relation to masculine females or \u2018male women,\u2019 the way \u2018dees\u2019 (from the last syllable of the English word \u2018lady\u2019) function solely in their relation to \u2018toms\u2019 (from \u2018tomboys\u2019) in Thailand. Thai\u00a0toms\u00a0<\/em>are capable (khlong-tua<\/em>) biological women who protect and perform sexually for\u00a0dees\u00a0<\/em>or female partners, without\u00a0toms<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0dees\u00a0<\/em>being thought of as \u2018lesbians.\u2019 Even though Nkunzi Nkabinde, unlike the Thai\u00a0tom<\/em>, translates her gender identity into \u2018tomboy\u2019, \u2018lesbian\u2019 and \u2018butch\u2019, the Zulu label tagged onto her \u2018ancestral wife,\u2019 like the Thai term \u2018dee,\u2019 falls off the grid of a global, translational and transnational vocabulary.<\/p>\n That vocabulary is also expanding in Western societies where the LGBT spectrum has now become LGBTQI2.\u00a02\u00a0<\/em>refers to \u2018Two-Spirit,\u2019 the translation of\u00a0niizh manitoog<\/em>, the Northern Algonquin term in vogue since 1990 in Canada, which has been added alongside the Q of Queer and the \u2018I\u2019 of Intersex. Both in and outside of Africa, there is an argumentative frenzy around the instability of gender and sex and non-conforming performances of gender. This may lead to the worldwide need to re-orient sexual orientation clauses to embrace and protect a gender diversity that dare not speak its name. After all, a spade is a shovel but it is also one of the four suits in conventional playing cards.<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t Candela Citations<\/h3>\n\t\t\t\t\t