This post should probably be longer. Were I younger, and if I had more patience, it probably would be. I’m just so tired though.
So I’ll briefly warn my fellow Africans in the diaspora and the continent what is going on. Do whatever you like with this information. Just don’t continue to fuck up and then later say that nobody told you.
I’ve noticed that “white” supremacists are borrowing and reframing talking points from the discussion of colonial gender roles and their negative impact on Africa and Africans. The fact that we didn’t get as much into people’s business so long as they fulfilled obligations relative to their respective nation and family has become “there was no Gay” in Africa and then “there were no Gays in Africa”. By extension, nothing else except cis hetero existed there either. Because there is no explicit reference to these things as identities apart for a few local terms for non binary people, and no record of punishing anyone for how they loved people except non consensual sex or unsanctioned extramarital sex, the stretch is that it must not have existed. Had it existed, according to their logic, it would have been punished.
The ones who will concede that this is too much of a stretch instead take the lack of explicitly referenced gender confirmation surgeries to mean that Africans were/are against this and therefore medical transitioning is unnecessary or wrong. The goalposts shift to whatever will deny Trans and body mod people their right to morphological self determination.
In the past couple weeks, I’ve had to break things down for way too many African English speakers because they are the ones imbibing the most “white” supremacist garbage via American moral panic grifters. So I’m just going to leave this post here and reference it whenever I have to start all this over again.
First off, the first sign that you are on some fakery and/or anti Black bullshit is if some nazis agree with you. The fact that someone just yesterday was talking about how superior western culture is, suddenly agrees with you means that you are saying something that supports your inferiority, and you just don’t know it yet. You need to back up and think about what sort of stereotype or disinformation you just promoted. In this case, you need to consider that their premise for their superiority is “advancement” and “complexity”, or “higher” context. Part of their argument for controlling people’s behavior and over manipulating demographics/eugenics is that “advancement” has a cost, so they will look to cultures they view as more “simple” or “primitive” whether or not this is true, as examples for slowing down “advancement”.
It is a lie that African cultures were less advanced. There were only three reasons Europe successfully colonized Africa, and those were technology geared specifically to world domination, economics focused on the same goal, and the psychological drive and determination towards this. These people were bound to dominate for a time because it is what they were, and many still are about. It is unsustainable in the long term, which is why we shouldn’t go down that road, but we should not take anything that has happened to indicate that we were in any way inferior or simpler or more primitive. At all.
https://youtu.be/x5KH79mKa90
So y’all need to be careful. What you’re mistaking for us somehow magically not having LGBTQIA+ people, aside of being a horribly unnatural scenario by itself, gets columbus-ed by “white” supremacists into us being “primitive”, and they sell their followers the need to be more “primitve”. From the carnivore diet to its equally unhealthy veganism scams to “gender exploration” the same people are also promoting one version or another of racist ideology. If you’re going to promote some nostalgia, at least make it accurate, and for the love of your ancestors, some of whom were Gay and Trans and not even in the closet, but just weren’t shut out of society because of who they were or who they preferred to shag, don’t take cues from nazis on gender. They are not the people you should be looking to as an example.
Now go do some research so you can stop sounding like an arrognoramus.
Said in love.
Ashé!
