Decolonial African Agency and Same-Sex Relations: Beyond the Religious-Secular Divide

Abstract

In this article, I show how discourses of African tradition, human rights, and African indigeneity circumscribe and curtail the emancipatory potential of discussions of same-sex relations in Africa. The terms of the debate on both sides—those who claim that same-sex relations are ‘un-African’ and the critics who rightly challenge this view—are circumscribed by what I call the religious-secular divide. This divide continues to entrap discussions of African humanity and agency within racial-colonial strictures of tradition/religion and secularity/modernity. Instead, by engaging with the work of Amilcar Cabral and Aimé Césaire, I develop a notion of decolonial or emancipatory African agency and a way of understanding African humanity as an alternative basis for engaging with the question of same-sex relations in Africa, African traditions, and African indigeneity, and with questions of African humanity and decolonial agency more generally.

1. Introduction

On 30 March 2026, Senegalese President Bassirou Diomaye Faye signed a bill into law that criminalises same-sex relations, with penalties of up to 10 years in prison. The rationale for such a harsh penalty is that same-sex relations are “un-African”, against African culture, unnatural, and against religious morality. In response to this criminalisation, “UN rights chief Volker Türk has described it as ‘deeply worrying’, saying that the anti-LGBT legislation ‘flies in the face of sacrosanct human rights’” (Negoce and Rukanga 2026). African political elites have often dismissed appeals to human rights in contesting the criminalisation of same-sex relations as entrenching neocolonialism (Mwikya 2014). As such, same-sex relations remain illegal in over 30 African countries and have dominated African national and international political discourse over the past three decades. Both proponents of criminalising and decriminalising same-sex relations on the continent claim to protect African tradition and indigenous practices, to reclaim and rehabilitate African humanity and decolonial agency, and to protect human rights. But if claims to maintain African traditions and indigenous practices and to adhere to human rights can be used to legitimise discrimination and violence against African people and entrench neocolonialism, then on what basis should Africans ground their necessary demand to rehabilitate their systemically denied humanity and decolonial agency? Is the criminalisation of same-sex relations a violation “of sacrosanct human rights” as Volker Türk suggests, or a legitimised dehumanisation of Africans practising same-sex relations? If it is both, under what circumstances do human rights converge with the humanity of the African people in question? Put differently, in our current material and symbolic order, is the violation of human rights laws the same as the dehumanisation of living African people practising same-sex relations? What role do the relations between secular human rights, tradition, and religion play in the debates on same-sex relations in Africa and in the questions of African humanity and decolonial agency?

In this article, I demonstrate how discourses of African tradition, human rights, and African indigeneity circumscribe and curtail the emancipatory potential of the discussion of same-sex relations in Africa. The terms of the debate on both sides—those who claim that same-sex relations are ‘un-African’ and the critics who rightly challenge this view—are circumscribed by what I call the religious-secular divide. The religious-secular divide continues to entrap discussions of African humanity and agency in racial-colonial strictures of tradition/religion and modernity/secular. Instead, by engaging with Amilcar Cabral’s notion of the “return to the source” and Aimé Césaire’s idea of the “return”, I develop a notion of decolonial or emancipatory African agency and a way of understanding African humanity as the alternative basis for engaging the question of same-sex relations in Africa, and questions of African humanity and decolonial agency more generally in relation to discourses of African tradition, African indigeneity, and human rights.

In 2010, a group of LGBTQI Africans gathered in Kenya and developed a document, the MANIFESTO: African LGBTI Manifesto/Declaration. Without isolating the humanity of LGBTQI from the necessities of the “social, political and economic lives” in the need for decolonisation, the voices in the document recognise that: “We need economic justice; we need to claim and redistribute power; we need to eradicate violence; we need to redistribute land; we need gender justice; we need environmental justice; we need erotic justice; we need racial and ethnic justice; we need rightful access to affirming and responsive institutions, services and spaces; overall we need total liberation” (African Queers 2021).1 In making these claims, the voices in the manifesto ground these necessities neither in human rights, nor in African indigeneity, nor in tradition, but in the humanising needs of all living African people. Following the lead of these voices, I will argue that African humanity and decolonial agency should be centred on the living African people and their human needs.

There is an extensive growing literature on same-sex relations in Africa, which is significantly recording, contextualising, elucidating, nuancing and challenging the violence that must be stopped (Tamale 2003, 2020; Hoad 2007; Aldrich 2008; Epprecht 2008; Human Rights Watch 2009; Epprecht 2013; Nyanzi 2013; Lopang 2014; Ward 2015; Matolino 2017; Nicol et al. 2018; Brown 2023; Yang 2020; McElhose 2023; Ibrahim 2015; Aylward 2020). The argument I pursue in this article does not permit me to engage extensively with this literature, because it identifies fundamental connections between debates on same-sex relations and questions of African humanity and decolonial agency more broadly. My aim is to reflect on the role of appeals to African tradition, indigeneity, and human rights in relation to the racial-colonial constraints of the religious-secular divide and the potential for emancipatory agency. As a heteronormative person, I run the risk of overcrowding the already limited space that is hostile to Africans practising same-sex relations and misrepresenting their needs and struggles. But as an African who is deeply invested in contributing to the decolonisation of African lives, that is, bringing an end to the systemic deprivation and the premature deaths to which African people are systemically subjected, I hope to add a contestation against the ongoing dehumanisation of African humanity.

2. The Religious-Secular Divide

Despite the growing study of Christianity’s role in the racial colonisation of Africa, its impact on colonised societies and post-colonial material and symbolic formations remains inadequately understood. Following the work of (Wynter 1984, 1995; Mudimbe 1988; Said 1979; Ramose 2005; Chidester 1996, 2014; Scott 2007; Anidjar 2009; Settler 2018; Westerduin 2020), I briefly outline a way in which the distinction between the religious and the secular has been central to the West’s racial-colonial project. Specifically, I extrapolate the temporal and anthropological polarised dualisms as key to the religious-secular divide, which I will later utilise to examine their role in constraining the understanding of African humanity and agency in debates on same-sex relations and African traditions.

Inherent in its production of difference, the religious-secular divide generates interfacing temporal and anthropological dualities. The temporal duality conjures fragmented and unequal times by positioning the present, or the modern, as superseding the past, with the present acting as a fortress between the past and the future. The coevality of the past, present, and future is presented as impossible (Al-Saji 2021). These different experiences of time are viewed as a sequence whose linearity establishes a hierarchy between an inferior past and a superior future, with the present bridging the polarised duality and serving as the only legitimate site for fashioning futures. The simultaneity of the pasts, presents, and futures within a subject, moment, or era is deemed ontologically illegitimate, rendering their coexistence incomprehensible and their simultaneous existence suppressed. Trapped within the polarised duality of the religious-secular divide, the temporal duality not only denies the co-existence of the three experiences of time but also conceals and obliterates the multiplicities of pasts, presents, and futures by projecting the experiences of non-Western cultures—viewed as Others by the West—into a singular Western past.2

The temporal duality is constructed and experienced through anthropological polarised dualities. The different human groups who are not white or Western Christian have been shaped in a polarised, unequal manner (Said 1979; Mudimbe 1988; Ramose 2003). In this unequal categorisation of human groups, the West has positioned itself as either religious or secular, with whichever slot it allots itself occupying the temporal position of the present and the ontological right to fashion the future for all human groups. Other human groups, such as Africans, Jews, Muslims, Asians, or indigenous Americans, have been relegated to the past of the West and ascribed with an ontological or existential inability to fashion their own futures. From within the strictures of the religious-secular divide, the West distinguishes itself as mature humanity from its constitutive Others, seen as immature humanity locked in the past (Wynter 1995; Chidester 1996; Westerduin 2020; Hordijk 2024).

The interplay between the temporal and anthropological dualities played a crucial role in the West’s racial colonisation of Africa. When the West hegemonically defined itself as religious, Africans were portrayed as lacking religion and therefore as secular. Religion was cast as embodying a high, spiritual, immortal, and celestial life and the best end to human life after death (mature humanity), while the secular was cast as sinful, inferior, earthly, and mortal life, and as the failure to achieve mature humanity (Wynter 1995, pp. 14–26). Religion was equated with belief in and practice of Western Christianity, considered the true faith. Africans were cast either as lacking religion or, at best, as adhering to the wrong religion. With the growing hegemonisation of secularism, the religious-secular divide has created a temporal duality that Westerduin (2020) has termed the religious-secular temporalities, which constructs the religious as immature humanity characterised by irrationality and barbarity—a past to which non-Western cultures, such as African, Muslim, and Jewish cultures, are confined (Westerduin 2020). In this temporalisation, “‘tradition’ and religion are relegated to the past as backward, while secularism’s contemporaneity is taken for granted” (Westerduin 2020, p. 136). The secular embodies modern Western practices of rationality, objectivity, justice, non-violence, and futurity, and thus represents mature humanity. Religion and tradition, on the other hand, represent the opposites of the secular. In the secularising drive, Africans become the bearers of religion and traditions as distinctive marks belonging to the past and embodying immature humanity. As I will show below, these polarised dualities crucially shape the debates on same-sex relations, African tradition, African humanity, and African decolonial agency.

The religious-secular divide’s mode of thinking, recognising, and enacting human differences functions to destroy, hide, and alienate diverse ways of being equally different, and debilitate ways that engender symbiotic and nurturing relations between and within communities. Its orientation and function are to name, coerce, conceal, and enforce symbolic and material inequalities in the formation of the Western Self by negating, dispossessing, displacing, instrumentalising, subjugating, and exterminating those constructed as Others by the West. The history of the West’s racial colonisation of Africa clearly exemplifies this, and it continues to shape Africa’s relationship with itself and the West.

3. Invention of African Traditions and Deflected African Humanity and Agency

The religious-secular divide significantly influences the development and persistence of dominant perceptions and practices of what we now recognise as African traditions, including their role in both opposing and supporting same-sex relations. Therefore, it is essential to examine the debates on same-sex relations within a broader racial-colonial framework of African traditions. Here, I explicate the invention of African traditions (IAT) with their racial-colonial strictures, within which anti-same-sex relations emerge as African traditions. Generally, there are at least two processes through which African indigenous practices have become embedded in racial-colonial power structures and transformed into African traditions.3 The first is assimilationist developmentalism (AD), and the second is the invention of African traditions (IAD). I will demonstrate that both processes (with detailed attention to the latter), operating within the constraints of the religious-secular divide, have produced what I term deflected African humanity and deflected African agency.

The assimilationist developmental approach portrayed indigenous practices as inherently opposed to Western Christian symbolic and material practices. African peoples and their indigenous practices were regarded as belonging to the past, thus needing Christianisation/civilisation, with its supposed exclusive ontological ability to fashion a future for all human populations. The only way to save African peoples from the supposed “immature humanity” trapped in the pastness of indigeneity was for Africans to cease their primal indigenous practices and assimilate into Western Christian culture. As early as the Portuguese violent racial-colonial encounter with Africans along the Atlantic coast in the second half of the 15th century, there was a growing attempt to Christianise indigenous populations, based on a polarised binary and unequal temporalisation of indigenous peoples and practices in relation to Western Christian ones (Wynter 1995; Jennings 2010; de Zurara 2010). The portrayal of indigenous practices as religions belonging to the superseded Western Christian past—which supposedly demonstrated African immature humanity—gradually became normalised (Hegel 1992; Chidester 1996). Same-sex relations observed by white men across various indigenous cultures were viewed as inhuman and part of those practices considered belonging to a past prior to Western Christian civilisation, with no place in the present or future (Jjuuko and Tabengwa 2018, p. 71). If indigenous peoples were to be rescued from their supposed immature African humanity, assimilation into a developed Western Christian culture and matured humanity, which also meant becoming anti-same-sex sexuality, as I will show later, was imposed as the only solution.

Assimilation into Western civilisation, however, only assured subservient roles for indigenous people because all cultural, economic, and political power and initiative increasingly rested in the hands of racial colonialists and the colonising countries. While the assimilationist developmental system promised to “elevate” indigenous people into practising Western culture and embodying its supposed mature humanity, the sociopolitical and material realities consistently showed the opposite. Indigenous people were reduced to supplying the material and symbolic resources that made the practical and material superiority of Western Christian civilisation and white humanity possible (Rodney 1972). In the 17th century, for instance, the conversion of the ruler Ngola Njinga of Ndongo and Matamba (1583–1663) and her people to Catholicism involved a compromise that included engaging in the enslavement of indigenous people for transport to the Americas by the Dutch and the Portuguese. In the French colonies in the 20th century, for example, the head tax and the blood tax (forced military service) compelled African people to provide financial and labour resources to meet the material and sociopolitical needs of the white French in both the colonies and the metropole (Cogneau et al. 2021). Rather than being co-producers, practitioners, and co-beneficiaries of Western civilisation and humanity, the assimilationist approach obscured and justified the conditions of systemic material and symbolic deprivation and violence. Crucially, the abandonment of indigenous practices by indigenous people involved submission to racial-colonial domination, as most African communities that converted to Christianity demonstrate. By framing the racial-colonial power dynamics within a polarised dualism between a static, past-oriented African tradition with its immature humanity and a present and future-oriented Western Christian civilisation with its mature humanity, the racial-colonial structure systemically deflected African agency away from recognising and challenging the complex and ongoing processes of racial-colonial dispossession and domination. The coercion into assimilating into Western Christian discourse constrained African agency into submission and complicity in systemic material and symbolic deprivation and violence against their own people. The assimilationist developmental approach operated across the continent and still does today through discourses of development, democracy, and human rights, often in complex and unpredictable ways.

The invention of the African traditions approach emerged during the Scramble for Africa at the end of the 19th century, initially under British colonisation, and gradually expanded to other parts of the continent. Despite their differences, both AD and IAD approaches relied on the discourse of civilisation to transform indigenous Africans into effective colonial subjects who increasingly aligned their indigenous practices with colonial powers, and became dependent on colonial culture as inferiorised subjects. While the secular worked hand in hand with the religious, Mamdani notes that in the mid-19th century, “the language of the civilizing mission shifted from the evangelical [religious] to the secular; its practice shifted from religious conversion to spreading the rule of law” (Mamdani 2012, p. 45). This shift meant that Christianisation ceased to be the primary tool of racial-colonial conquest and domination by the emerging colonial state. As colonial settlers became more prevalent across Africa, both branches rooted in Christian civilisation, the secular authority (state) assumed greater control over emerging African colonial states from the missionaries, while still supporting the ongoing Christianisation of indigenous populations. The secular power governed the political and economic aspects of indigenous life, whereas the religious (missionary) authority oversaw cultural (spiritual) matters.

Through the polarising strictures of the religious-secular divide, the secular government established two separate legal systems in British colonies in Africa (Mamdani 1996, 2012). The first legal system, called civil law, was designed for colonisers, Africans of Asian descent, Asian immigrants, and communities formed through sexual relations between whites and indigenous peoples. Significantly, civil law was regarded as a universal symbol of civilisation and mature humanity. However, because its temporality inhabited the present and was oriented towards the future, civil law was made susceptible to interpretation based on time and the needs of white populations. Its universality, nevertheless, was not equally enjoyed by all populations to which it was made to apply. Civil law was intended to always serve white interests, while other communities under its jurisdiction were systematically assigned a second-class legal status, resulting in second-class material and symbolic access (Mamdani 2012). “And yet, claims of civil law as the universal marker of civilization went alongside recognition of different systems of customary law” (Mamdani 2012, p. 45).

The second legal system, known as customary law, was established to dominate indigenous groups through indirect rule. Since customary law was a colonial creation, the British also had to invent the customs the law purported to enforce. African customs or traditions were then fabricated from indigenous and Christian practices. The invention of tradition simultaneously created the subject of African traditions, the natives, who were said to belong to a newly invented community called a tribe (Mamdani 2012, p. 47). Materially and symbolically, the tribe was created to close off a unitary system of customs enforced through customary law. Crucially, tribe and native were defined as purely indigenous, “by obscuring an entire history of migrations, the state portrayed the native as the product of geography rather than history” (Mamdani 2012, p. 47). As I will demonstrate later, the development of African customs and customary law has significantly influenced how African traditions are understood today and has played a part in claims to return to African traditions as acts of African agency and of reclaiming African humanity.

While civilising missions primarily aimed to assimilate indigenous elites so they could govern their own people in line with colonial interests, indirect rule sought to reshape the identities of entire populations, including the indigenous elites, to ensure successful racial-colonial domination (Mamdani 2012, p. 45). As Mamdani notes, colonial indirect rule transformed the identities of different indigenous groups into tribes by attempting “to shape the present, past, and future of the colonized by casting each in a nativist mold, the present through a set of identities in the census, the past through the driving force of a new historiography, and the future through a legal and administrative project” (Mamdani 2012, p. 45). The invention of African traditions altered the experience and conception of time in indigenous African cultures, which often recognised the nonlinear coexistence of past, present, and future (Mbiti [1969] 2010; Ramose 2005), shifting them towards a linear view of time, progressing from past to present to future. This new linear understanding of time further divides the occupation of time by positioning the invented African customs in the past (tradition) and Western civilisation in the present (modern), with the sole ontological right to fashion the future.

By retelling and writing about African precolonial pasts as shaped by racial colonialist historiography, emerging African traditions increasingly came to resemble what was believed to be the past of Western Christianity (Mudimbe 1988; Chidester 1996, 2014; Mamdani 1996, 2012). The present was transformed through the development of tribal identities and traditional authority, whose power structures began to mirror those of Western Christianity. This transformation played a crucial role in accepting and normalising racial-colonial domination and the systemic deprivation of human needs for survival and dignified lives, while racial colonialists claimed to preserve a unique indigenous traditional identity and African humanity. Through intensified conversions to Christianity, the reorganisation of indigenous sociopolitical institutions, and support from growing racial-colonial historiography, African moralities, gender structures, political institutions, and economies increasingly came to resemble those of their colonisers in unequal ways, with detrimental effects on the humanity of indigenous peoples. Indigenous practices that were allowed to differ from the Western norm, or that resisted erasure or reorganisation, served to express and legitimise the supposed superiority of colonial culture.

But “if the production of the past is the stuff of history writing, [then] the securing of a future is the domain of law making” (Mamdani 2012, p. 46). The futures of both colonising and indigenous communities, and therefore their collective agencies, began to be shaped by secular law. While the future of the subjects of civil law remained open to changing times and responsive to the material and sociopolitical demands of its primarily white subjects, the future of the subjects of customary law was closed off by an invented, ossified past, written through racial-colonial historiography.

Important to my argument here, the coloniser’s invention of African traditions was a decoy that systematically limited and distracted indigenous elites from the symbolic and material conditions essential to the nourishment and survival of indigenous people. The invention of African traditions was designed to systematically restrict and deflect African agency from acting to contest racial-colonial domination and systemic deprivation, in order to establish and sustain life-affirming relationships among Africans themselves and with their material and symbolic resources. Instead, they were coerced into directing their agency to conform to the demands of the invented tradition. As such, deflected African agency is agency that is structurally diverted from recognising and acting in ways that contest material and symbolic domination and deprivation by racial colonialism. This happens through legal, economic, political, religious, linguistic, epistemic, and other social structures that mediate human agency, especially the agency that impacts collective material and symbolic arrangements.

To achieve the conditioning of deflected African agency, “colonial powers were concerned first and foremost with establishing the credentials of their native allies as traditional and authentic” (Mamdani 2012, p. 49). Native allies were recognised or appointed as leaders of various tribes, aiming to enforce newly established customs. Created as distinct subjects from non-native people, indigenous people were coerced into actions that validated the practices colonialists had branded as traditions. Acting contrary to tradition—that is, against the interests of the colonialists—was regarded as inauthentically African, therefore illegal. As such, “customary law would only be applicable where it did not offend European notions of natural justice and morality” (Tamale 2020, p. 138). Unlike civil law, which was open to change and interpretation in response to the evolving needs and interests of white civilisation, “customary law in the colonies assumed the opposite. It assumed that law must not change with changing circumstances. Rather, any change was considered prima facie evidence of corruption” (Mamdani 2012, p. 49). Debilitating material and symbolic conditions imposed by racial colonialists were framed as outside the scope of tradition, and thus beyond the reach of indigenous African agency. To act authentically traditional, then, became a mode of complicity with racial-colonial dominance and the systemic deprivation imposed upon indigenous communities.

Secondly, racial colonialists were “preoccupied with defining, locating, and anointing the traditional authority—in the singular” (Mamdani 2012, p. 49). Most precolonial African societies did not have absolutist states with centralised sites of authority like those in the modern West. “This means that the rule-making authority was not in the singular but always plural. Instead of a centralized state authority whose writ was law—in all social domains—the practice was for different authorities to define the convention in different domains of social life. Besides chiefs, the definers of tradition could come from women’s groups, age groups, clans, religious groups, and so on” (Mamdani 2012, p. 49). Authority was exercised by different actors in society and responded to the dynamic flow of social and individual needs and forces. The centralisation of authority in a single, often patriarchal institution of the chief aimed to eradicate the multiplicities of anticolonial agency-informed authorities that responded to the people’s dynamic human needs. In their stead, the colonialists established customary law, with the chief as the sole arbiter of tradition and traditional law, whose function was to ensure his people’s submission to tradition.

Further, the creation of a single site of authority established traditional material and symbolic regimes that operated irrespective of their negative effects on the humanity of indigenous people, precisely because traditional authority was not answerable to the dynamic human needs of the African people, but rather to the discourse of traditional authenticity, understood as immutable. Indigenous people witnessed and bore the violence of the emergence of African traditions, which marked colonial sovereignty. “Confronted by it, there could be only ‘wrong-doing’ and infraction. Anyone who did not recognise this violence’s authority and challenged its protocols was considered a savage and an outlaw” (Mbembe 2000, p. 7).

The discourse of African traditions systematically establishes what I call deflected African humanity. It deflects African humanity away from the material and symbolic needs that make indigenous people human (or dehumanise them when systematically deprived) and towards the discourse of African tradition as a site of African humanity. Locked in an eternal, static state of tradition enforced by customary law, the discourse of African tradition systematically deflects attention from the essential dynamic relationship that African indigenous people, like all humans, have with their sociopolitical and material realities in order to realise their humanity. These are the very conditions that racial-colonial regimes exploit, extract, and systematically deprive indigenous people of for their survival. Instead, African humanity is portrayed as beings whose humanity does not require material and symbolic well-being and cultural independence to live full and dignified lives, but rather conformity to traditional practices. The material and symbolic needs of indigenous people are made subordinate to those of the colonisers by subsuming them in the discourse of tradition, while claiming to respect African humanity and ensuring that Africans conform to it. With deflected African humanity, the role of deflected African agency is to authenticate the former, regardless of the consequences for the actual humanity of living indigenous people. As Aimé Césaire sharply criticised the Catholic priest Placide Tempels’ depiction of Bantu Philosophy (Tempels [1945] 2010), he argued that it shifts African humanity away from material and symbolic needs towards a discourse of an ontologically immaterial Bantu humanity.

Wonderful! Everybody gains: the big companies, the colonists, the government--everybody except the Bantu, naturally. Since Bantu thought is ontological, the Bantu only ask for satisfaction of an ontological nature. Decent wages! Comfortable housing! Food! These Bantu are pure spirits, I tell you: “What they desire first of all and above all is not the improvement of their economic or material situation, but the white man’s recognition of and respect for their dignity as men, their full human value.”

(Césaire [1950] 2000, p. 58)

Although customary law was a British construct for indirect colonial rule, Temple’s discourse in the Belgian Congo reveals similar practices of inventing African traditions and discourses of African humanity to justify racial-colonial domination and systemic deprivation, and to divert African agency from exercising decolonial agency. This happened, even when these traditions were not formally recognised under customary law. The French, on the other hand, created tribes alongside an assimilationist developmental approach. For example, in colonial Morocco, the French created the Berber tribe “administered according to their own laws and customs and that the French authorities would prepare the appropriate legal texts or regulations” (Hoisington 1978, pp. 433–34).

Importantly, the punitive prohibition of same-sex relations on the continent was constructed as African tradition through the invention of tradition, customary law, and Christianisation, via processes of assimilation and the invention of tradition (Tamale 2003, 2020; Hoad 2007; Epprecht 2008, 2013; Jjuuko and Tabengwa 2018). Anti-same-sex relations were introduced to many indigenous cultures beginning with Christianisation, which initiated the processes of shaping African traditions, and later through secular civil law and embedded in customary law through the hegemonisation of exclusive heteronormativity.

By contrast, with the uniformity of punitive heteronormativity in the Christian West, “the treatment of gender and sexuality in precolonial Africa varied from discouraging public discussion of homosexual desires and acts to complete tolerance, including the institutionalisation of some forms of same-sex relationships” (Ibrahim 2015, p. 268). The homogenisation of punitive heteronormativity is an imposition of racial colonialism through the cultural processes of assimilation and the invention of African traditions. As a result, anti-same-sex sentiments and violent practices among African peoples today are fundamentally linked to the strictures of the religious-secular divide, which functions through polarised dualism and creates symbolic and material conditions that shape African humanity and deflected African agency. Designed to normalise and justify the coloniser’s dominance and white humanity, assimilation and the constructed African traditions and customary law reinforced anti-same-sex relations as part of precolonial African history. They did so even though anti-same-sex relations are largely extensions of both the past and present of Western Christian civilisation.

4. Post-Colonial African Agency: African Traditions and Human Rights

The Nigerian philosopher Táíwò (2022) has urged those who use the concept of decolonisation to stop doing so, arguing that, when applied beyond the narrow sense of historical and political decolonisation, the concept fails to take African agency seriously. Contrary to Táíwò’s focus on recognising African agency regardless of its impact on the humanity of African people, I am interested in decolonial (emancipatory) African agency, which seeks to consciously and substantively challenge the dehumanising structures of (neo)colonisation in Africa that continue to debilitate African people. To properly understand the potential of decolonial African agency in debates about same-sex relations, it is important to identify key constraints posed by the religious-secular divide, both more broadly and specifically in relation to same-sex relations. Here, I show how pro- and anti-same-sex relations stances, which invoke the discourse of African tradition and its polarised binary of human rights, remain within the limits of deflected African humanity and deflected African agency.

4.1. Anti-Same-Sex Relations

During the colonial period, when Western notions of sexuality were rooted in the religious, it introduced and enforced punitive laws and cultural norms against same-sex relations. The West also fabricated African traditions as primarily hostile to same-sex practices, which most African people ambiguously adopted. However, from the 1990s onwards, after the West reconstructed itself as secular on issues concerning sexuality, it increasingly demanded that African countries support and recognise same-sex relations. Here, I will argue that those opposing same-sex relations by appealing to African traditions and culture perform deflected African humanity and deflected African agency. I will place the anti-same-sex stance within the context of Western neocolonial domination of Africa, amplified by the rise of neoliberalism. Co-centring the West in these debates is important because Western colonial and neocolonial practices in Africa largely set the terms by which Africans contest same-sex relations. To look only for African actors in the debates without foregrounding the material and symbolic plays of the West is to miss the primary forces to which most African elites and their supporters, unfortunately, respond with a colonial disposition.

Before the 1990s, same-sex relations were not a topic of public or political discussion in most African countries. Several factors contributed to the politicisation of same-sex relations. These include the resurgence of Pan-Africanism in response to the imposed neo-liberalisation of the continent after the fall of the Soviet Union; the HIV and AIDS epidemic, initially linked to same-sex relations in the West; the global rise in Western-inspired LGBTQI+ movements; and the emergence of American evangelical and religious fundamentalism as a reaction to the increasing recognition and protection of same-sex relations in the West (Mwikya 2014; Jjuuko and Tabengwa 2018).

Crucially, amid threats of sanctions against African dissident countries, the West imposed neoliberal policies through Structural Adjustment Programmes, which demanded the privatisation of parastatals and opened them to Western businesses. To secure the success of Western businesses with less government interference, the West demanded that African countries adopt new liberal constitutions with multiparty democracies (Mkandawire and Soludo 1999; Stein 2012; Mwikya 2014; Jjuuko and Tabengwa 2018).

These transformations had debilitating economic effects on the majority of the African people, forcing the political elites into a predicament. To remain in power, they had to enforce the West’s neoliberal and democratic demands based on human rights, which largely brought economic deprivation to the majority. On the other hand, they needed to secure votes from the economically deprived masses while demonstrating independence from Western control. Between these two positions, most African political elites, such as Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe), Yoweri Museveni (Uganda), Peter Muthariak (Malawi), Olusegun Obasanjo (Nigeria), Daniel arap Moi (Kenya), Muammar Gaddafi (Libya), Pual Biya (Cameroon), Sam Nujoma (Namibia), Omar al-Bashir (Sudan), Yahya Jammeh (Gambia), and Frederick Chiluba (Zambia) deflected attention from the causes of the economic and political crisis—the West’s neoliberal and democratic demands built on human rights and their complacency—by promoting a discourse centred on preserving African traditions. Mwikya observes that:

During the onslaught on neoliberalism in Africa at the end of the Cold War, a time that saw massive social unrest in urban areas and dwindling opportunities for development all over the continent, African leaders … came to heavily rely on a mix of violent repression and populist invocations of a shared cultural identity to deflect the focus of social unrest from themselves.

(Mwikya 2014, p. 101)

The discourse of holding on to a shared African culture by reclaiming and preserving African traditions against Western culture and neocolonialism deflected attention from some underlying causes of economic problems. It also coerced the African voting majority into electing political elites who were complicit in the economic deprivation inflicted upon them. The realisation that the claim to preserve African traditions was effective in mobilising African voters and projecting independent agency against the West led African leaders to vigorously oppose Western demands to recognise and protect same-sex relations. The political elites came increasingly under the support of the religious elites, who argued that same-sex relations were against Christianity and Islam. Some Christian fundamentalists from the United States of America (the US) also began to play an important role in funding African Christian elites to support the criminalisation and cultural prohibition of same-sex relations (Kaoma 2009, 2012).

To sustain a humanitarian image while violently reshaping economic and political institutions to serve their interests and subjugating Africans to systemic deprivation, the West increasingly provided developmental aid and demanded that African states adopt Western values, such as same-sex relations, which the West had, after criminalising them across the world during the colonial period, begun to recognise as a human right. As some scholars have observed, Western aid to Africans practising same-sex relations also functioned as homo-developmentalism, which equates Western support for same-sex relations with a developed culture, contrasting it with allegedly underdeveloped African traditions that are homophobic (Yang 2020; Klapeer 2018). Homo-developmentalism reinforces the West’s self-image as secular, mature humanity in contrast to African traditional-religious, immature humanity.

The claim that repression of same-sex relations is essential to African humanity and crucial to independent African agency rests on three key assumptions. First, same-sex relations are portrayed as “‘un-African’ and against African culture and tradition” (Mbaru et al. 2018, p. 187). African traditions and culture encompass competing practices within Christianity, Islam, and what remains of colonial-invented traditions. Second, African humanity is portrayed as relying less on the material and symbolic conditions African people face today than on their traditional practices and values. Third, achieving African humanity and agency is seen as authenticating or adhering to what they regard as traditional African practices and values, while resisting Western influences that “corrupt” the authenticity of African traditions. However, beneath these assumptions lies a deflection of African humanity and agency away from their proper foundation in the actual material and symbolic conditions of African peoples, and a neglect of the role of decolonial African agency in dismantling structures that subjugate African populations and lead to systemic deprivation and premature deaths.

By harnessing the colonial inventions of tradition and culture, African elites speak from a position of material and symbolic initiative and mastery of the West over their own existence. Consequently, they lack mastery over their own pasts and present conditions, which means they lack (emancipatory) historical initiative—that is, the capacity to intervene in the persistent racial-colonial flow of violence to fundamentally change the course of their history or to forge something new. The kind of historical initiative aims to challenge systemic deprivation and prevent the premature deaths that abound among the majority of African people. Their agency inadvertently reproduces and perpetuates the suffering of those they claim to emancipate and protect from foreign domination, often by appealing to tradition.

4.2. Pro-Same-Sex Relations

Proponents of same-sex relations respond to anti-same-sex claims in several ways, but I am interested in two: challenging the colonial invention of African tradition and appealing to human rights. Apart from their short-term purchase, I see them as largely constrained by the religious-secular divide, with its tendency to deflect African humanity and agency from material conditions, towards the discourse of indigenous practices or human rights. First, I will focus on the position that supports same-sex relations by challenging the view that they are un-African.

Most efforts by African activists and intellectuals, and foreign Western NGOs to oppose anti-same-sex relations have concentrated on decriminalisation because the strongest anti-same-sex stance has been through criminalisation. Among other aims, criminalisation seeks to legitimise the dehumanising violence against Africans practising same-sex relations by rendering such violence permissible and incontestable within the established legal framework of African states. While the legal contestations have primarily rested on human rights, the cultural and political reasons behind criminalisation are rooted in the views that same-sex relations are not indigenous to African precolonial practices and offend African religions. Challenging their opponents’ claims, advocates of same-sex relations have convincingly shown that what their opponents consider precolonial indigenous practices and culture are actually racial-colonial inventions, what I have labelled African traditions, designed to subjugate Africans and erase precolonial indigenous African histories (Tamale 2003, 2020; Jjuuko and Tabengwa 2018; Epprecht 2008, 2013; Mbaru et al. 2018). The redeployment of African tradition on sexualities does not demonstrate the sovereignty and decoloniality of Africans, as African elites would have it. Instead, they demonstrate the continuity of racial-colonial cultural domination, normalised by post-colonial native elites.

Instead of reinforcing exclusionary, colonial-invented sexualities mistaken for precolonial indigenous sexualities, supporters of same-sex relations argue that Africans must reclaim their indigenous precolonial sexualities, which largely recognised and protected same-sex relations in various ways. Their main argument against opponents of same-sex relations is that what they take to be indigenous practices are actually racial-colonial inventions. Fundamentally, the idea that the realisation of African humanity and decolonial African agency rests on the authentication of precolonial indigenous practices, however, remains unchanged.

But this appeal to indigeneity creates certain problems. If African humanity is limited to indigenous practices and African agency is confined to validating them, it follows that Christianity, Islam, and colonial-invented traditions are seen as un-African because they are not indigenous. Although the mobilisation of Christian values and practices against same-sex relations can be criticised as not being indigenous to African societies, it cannot be convincingly demonstrated that they are un-African, as some proponents of same-sex relations argue (Tamale 2003, 2020; Jjuuko and Tabengwa 2018; Jjuuko and Mutesi 2018; Thirikwa 2018). Precisely because, while “there is something deceitful about the anti-LGBT rights campaign in how it legitimises a colonial imposition as something that is essentially African. However, at the same time, many colonial practices have been so entrenched that they are no longer dismissed as alien” (Ibrahim 2015, p. 265). Christianity and colonial-invented traditions, with their tendency towards anti-same-sex relations, are endogenously African; they form the symbolic, affective, and dynamic conditions within which African people strive to realise their humanity. In this context, it is therefore useful to distinguish between indigenous and endogenous African practices and values, while recognising that both contribute to the syncretic and diverse material and symbolic conditions of African life. The tendency to view African humanity and agency within the binary of indigeneity versus Western colonialism, and to confine African humanity and agency to indigeneity, is a stricture imposed by the religious-secular divide.

By restricting African humanity to indigenous practices and limiting African agency to authenticating these practices, this support for same-sex relations operates within the constraints of African deflected humanity by shifting African humanity from the living African people towards the discourse of precolonial indigenous sexualities. It also deflects African agency from the actual living conditions and Africans themselves to validating precolonial indigenous sexualities. Not all precolonial African societies recognised and protected same-sex relations. If we argue today that recognising and protecting the human need to engage in same-sex relations is justified by their presence in precolonial African societies, then on what grounds can we defend their protection among the descendants of precolonial communities that did not endorse them? My critique here is that, while appealing to precolonial indigenous sexualities can be a way to challenge claims that same-sex relations are not indigenous and open alternative conceptual avenues to thinking gender and sexuality, it should not serve as the primary basis for advocating for the recognition and protection of same-sex sexualities in Africa. African intellectuals must not only expose the racial-colonial roots of anti-same-sex positions, but must also become aware of and move beyond the fundamental racial-colonial structures within which these debates and practices are framed, to re-centre the humanisation of living African people as beings rooted in both dynamic material and symbolic structures and history.

4.3. Human Rights

African states and their religious and cultural elites enlist the discourse of human rights to claim the human right to protect African cultural and traditional values, including those opposing same-sex relations (Mbaru et al. 2018, p. 179). Similarly, most proponents of same-sex relations base their claims on human rights (Human Rights Watch 2009; Jjuuko 2013; Mbaru et al. 2018; Jjuuko and Mutesi 2018; Lusimbo and Bryan 2018; Thirikwa 2018; Onwunyirimadu et al. 2021; McElhose 2023; Brown 2023; Strand and Svensson 2023). They argue that it is Africans’ human right to practise same-sex relations as part of their sexualities. Their argument is strengthened by evidence that most indigenous precolonial cultures were not opposed to same-sex relations. Most visible pro-same-sex-relations struggles are largely supported by Western human rights and aid organisations, which offer legal, health, financial, and political support through Western governments, NGOs, and businesses. Beyond the important work being done through the discourse of human rights, a critical examination shows that it, like the discourse of African tradition, largely operates within the strictures of the religious-secular divide. As such, it plays a crucial role in deflecting African humanity and agency within the larger sociopolitical and economic context in which the recognition and protection of same-sex relations are mobilised. Human rights, being Western values, Fanon reminds us of “the violence with which the supremacy of white values is affirmed and the aggressiveness which has permeated the victory of these values over the ways of life and of thought of the native” (Fanon 2008, p. 43).

Human rights have developed within the constraints of the religious-secular divide, which unequally differentiates human groups and modes of being human (Wynter 2003; Maldonado-Torres 2017; Odysseos 2024; Tembo 2024). In African debates on same-sex relations, some proponents of human rights occupy at least two positions. The first reconciles secular human rights with precolonial indigenous practices, as both legitimise same-sex relations. The second contrasts human rights with African tradition. For instance, the claim that “the challenge for LGBT human rights defenders in Africa is that human rights are inherently forward-looking and visionary. Tradition, on the other hand, is intrinsically rooted in the past and fixed” (Mbaru et al. 2018, p. 199). Here, the religious-secular divide operates by unequally distinguishing secular human rights from African traditions with their religious inflexions. Human rights are believed to have an ontological necessity to be imposed in the African present and extended into the future because they are supposed to embody mature humanity capable of projecting itself into possible futures. But African traditions, the view suggests, belong to the past; their presence in present-day Africa is taken to constitute an ontological and temporal violation because they are believed to preclude the possibility of a modern and mature African humanity. African traditions, the argument goes, cannot be drawn on to envision an African future because they are “intrinsically rooted in the past and fixed” (Mbaru et al. 2018, p. 199).

But what remains unexamined in this religious-secular divide between secular human rights and African traditions/religion is that for anything to be forward-looking and visionary, there must be a subject who looks and creates these visions. Equally important, the visionary subject cannot be a transcendental Kantian subject, because every human subject emerges from historical, material, and symbolic conditions that contour their subjectivity and the future they envision. These visions and the futures they carry are fundamentally shaped by the visionary’s experience, making the projected future the specific subject’s future. But sadly, the subjects whose vision and future the human rights discourse articulates remain absent from most of its subscribers. By treating human rights as metaphysical universals and imposing them on African people, they assume that African people have no experiences, visions, and futures of their own humanity, informed by their own experience and understanding of what it means to be human and how to live their humanity.

While Africans increasingly appeal to the discourse of human rights after a Western education, the West possesses the material means to effectuate the subjects of human rights. For African people more generally, and Africans practising same-sex relations specifically, to base their humanity on the discourse of human rights means surrendering the symbolic and material means by which African humanity is realised to the whims of the West and its institutions, which have the material means to effect the subjects of human rights. This surrender means deflecting African humanity and African agency from the primary needs of the African people to realise their humanity, and subjecting African people and their needs to the needs of Western humanity. This is because African lives and humanity have primarily been of instrumental value to the West, and have never been structured as worthy in and of themselves. And this is evident in the history of human rights and the UN, which safeguards the realisation of the subjects of human rights.

It is therefore necessary to reiterate that human rights are not human beings. They are ideas about what it means to be human, developed and epistemically naturalised by white men to safeguard their well-being and the global domination of their modes of being human (Maldonado-Torres 2017; Liotta and Szpiga 2022; Odysseos 2024). When they were first declared in 1948 as applying to all human beings, human rights were intended exclusively for white people, as Africans were still considered sub/non-human and incapable of self-governance and human rights, therefore deserving of racial-colonial domination. Africans fought for independence and forced the West to symbolically recognise them as human beings and to admit them to the United Nations. It was not the West, but the growing number of post-colonial countries in the UN led the UN to declare in 1960 that colonialism violated human rights because Africans and other racialised populations are human, 12 years after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Tembo 2024, p. 24).4 But the inclusion of Africans and other racially colonised peoples in the discourse of human rights and the UN did not dismantle the unequal material power structures that created the UN and the discourse of human rights. To be sure, there is a systemic disjunction between the symbolic attribution of human rights to African people and the material recognition and protection of African human lives. Human rights, as epistemic discursive objects, require material means to effectuate the kind of human subjects they articulate.

The Western discourse of protecting African human rights to practice same-sex relations comes with two fundamental strictures that structure colonial agency. First, upon closer critical examination, it becomes clear that while the West demands African leaders to recognise the human rights of African subjects practising same-sex relations with the threat of withholding financial aid to African governments. The West simultaneously systemically imposes neoliberal economic policies that structurally expose the majority of the African people and their habitats to degradation and premature deaths. The enforcement of these policies is carried out in the name of neoliberal democracy, as the only state structure capable of protecting human rights (but of course not African lives). Africans practising same-sex relations are among those exposed to the debilitating material deprivation of neoliberal policies, the people whom the West’s discourse of human rights righteously claims to protect from violent treatment and dehumanisation, which is convolutedly supported by African elites. Through this double, a profound basic human reality that no human being can have sexual intimacy without a nourished and healthy functioning body is masked: the fundamental symbiosis between economy and sexuality is mystified. Africans practising same-sex relations, like those in heteronormative relations, need to feed their bodies to be able to practice their sexualities. If it is African humanity that the West wishes to recognise and protect, then they cannot demand that African leaders recognise the diversity of sexualities while at the same time systemically denying the same African people the necessary material means that enable them to practice their sexualities. With one hand, the West gives a drop of water by demanding that African elites recognise a diversity of African sexualities, but with the other hand, they take the rivers of water (African economic resources) that make African lives possible, including the practice of same-sex relations. Here, we see the deflection of African humanity and agency from the sociopolitical and economic necessities from within which African humanity is moored to the discourse of human rights.

Second, the discourse of human rights preserves the racial-colonial strictures of dependence that leave African humanity at the whims of the West. Aside from some of the humanising work done (most of which manages the damage of racial-(neo)colonialism), the UN remains largely a “universal human” face to the neocolonial, unequal economic exploitation and military domination of largely former colonies inhabited by mainly non-white human populations. On 21 January 2026, the Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, delivered a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos in which he acknowledged the implicit racial inequality within international institutions. He said that “We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim” (Carney 2026). Of course, Carney points out these inequalities because the US’s Trump-led government has begun to treat other white-majority countries like Canada as potential economic and political instruments for achieving the racial imperial objectives of the US.

The inequalities that gave rise to the discourse of human rights and that have kept them in place run deeper. African elites have long pointed out that the International Criminal Court (ICC) was created mostly for Africans, long before Carney confessed to the racial foundations of the current international order (Tamale 2020, p. 135). In 2025, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for crimes against humanity in the ongoing genocide in Palestine. The West condemned the ICC for issuing the warrant, and the US imposed sanctions on the ICC for targeting leaders of the state of Israel and for attempting to stop the dehumanisation and extermination of Palestinians, who, from the West’s standpoint, either have no human rights or their human rights need no recognition and protection. If anything, the West continues to materially enforce the extermination of Palestinian humanity. Further, the West has drastically reduced its funding to the UN because the organisation no longer serves its white supremacist interests, making the enforcement of human rights increasingly impossible (United Nations 2025). In our current planetary conditions, in which China has become almost as powerful as the US and threatens the reigning terror of white supremacy, the West has become openly racist and colonial, with an urge for direct racial-colonial control, as demonstrated by Israel’s mass and rapid occupation of Palestine (with the unconditional support of the West) and Lebanon, the US’s takeover of the Venezuelan government for its oil reserves, the bombing of Nigeria, the war on Iran, and Europe’s stern protest against the US’s direct colonial takeover of Greenland, a colonial domain of Denmark, a white country.

The increasing right-wing takeover of Western governments with their open disregard for the discourse of universal human rights and anti-same sex relations increasingly reveals how structurally vulnerable Africans practising same-sex relations, and Africans in general, are if the legitimacy of African humanity is premised on human rights. The discourse of human rights will not recognise and protect African lives if the West does not view them as valuable for maintaining white supremacy. This context creates an easy environment for the African elites, intoxicated with colonial-invented African traditions with a taste for maintaining African suffering, to harness the right-wing discourse in extreme disregard for the humanity of the African people. Furthermore, as we have grown accustomed to measuring African humanity and sexuality against Western racial-colonial experiences and patterns of thought, Africans largely remain fractured and constrained to disrupt the structural hold of racial-colonial power that deflects African humanity and decolonial agency. To recentre African humanity and practice decolonised agency, therefore, Africans need to rethink the basis on which to think and practice African humanity between the African past and overcoming racial-colonial domination and internalised coloniality.

5. “Return to the Source”: African People, African Humanity, and Decolonial Agency

To consider African tradition and indigenous practices, and to protect African humanity and agency outside the strictures of the religious-secular divide, I find Cabral’s concept of “the return to the source” and Cesaire’s “return” helpful. While colonisers invented African traditions for domination, the idea of returning to indigenous practices arose during anticolonial struggles among Western-educated indigenous elites, who felt alienated from their people due to partial Western assimilation. These elites, not fully accepted by settlers but required for colonial governance, sought to reconnect with indigenous modes of life (Cabral 1974). Cabral notes that this call was mainly among the petite indigenous bourgeoisie, as most indigenous people preserved their practices and values under racial-colonial constraints. For indigenous elites, returning to indigenous practices became vital in decolonisation, distinguishing exploitative foreign power from indigenous practices needing liberation. Cabral also observed that indigenous elites were divided on this call, identifying two types among those advocating for a return to African traditions.

The first group aimed to return to precolonial practices to separate foreign and indigenous agency and end colonial domination, but it maintained colonial structures by craftily opposing fundamental racial-colonial societal change. Their appeal to indigenous values for self-determination was not for emancipation from racial-colonial violence but for elite-controlled political and economic power. Without radical transformation, members of this class of the “petite bourgeoisie are condemned to mimic the culture and the colonialising powers”, even when they claim to be against it (Cabral 1974, p. 63), which only means the continuation of racial-colonial domination and systemic deprivation. This continues a tradition where African elites invoke African tradition to justify their domination. The second group also sought a return to precolonial practices to challenge colonial domination. However, unlike the first, they aimed to use indigenous practices and experiences to transform their societies into equitable communities for African people. Cabral situates his notion of the “return to the source” within the second strand.

Avoiding the coloniality of deflected African humanity and agency, Cabral locates African humanity in the living African people and in the systemic realisation of their human needs, grounded in the material and symbolic conditions of their existence. Contrary to what grounds much of the debate on same-sex relations, as intimated earlier, he contends that “the ‘return to the source’ is not and cannot in itself be an act of struggle against foreign domination [colonialist and racist] and it no longer necessarily means a return to traditions” (Cabral 1974, p. 63). Expelling foreign racial-colonial domination does not, in itself, create the material and symbolic conditions in which African people can durably realise their humanity. On the contrary, witnessing developments in some post-colonial African countries, Cabral, like Fanon and Nkrumah before him, recognised that local indigenous elites could help reproduce and maintain colonial-racial conditions among their own people. Refusing to conflate African humanity with the discourse of African tradition or indigenous practices, Cabral also showed that retaining indigenous practices (whether rightly or wrongly identified) does not, in itself, mean the humanisation of Africans. Redirecting African agency away from authenticating either precolonial practices or colonial-invented traditions, he argues that African agency should be directed towards emancipating African humanity, which is embodied in “the economic realities of the country, of the problems, sufferings, and hopes of the popular masses” (Cabral 1974, p. 54). Precisely because African humanity is the living African people and not discourses of tradition, “the question of a “return to the source” or of a “cultural renaissance” does not arise and could not arise for the masses of these people, for it is they who are the repository of the culture and at the same time the only social sector who can preserve and build it up and make history” (Cabral 1974, p. 61). By culture, Cabral means a dynamic synthesis of the material and symbolic conditions of a people that forges and expresses relations among people and between people and natural environments, and that informs individual and collective identity, including economic conditions (Cabral 1974, p. 66).

By taking living African people as the source of African humanity and tradition, Cabral recognised how discourses of Western humanity (civilisation, human rights) and African traditions deflected African humanity from the people and African agency from reordering material-symbolic conditions. Further, Cabral’s “return to the source” is not a return to African precolonial practices, because they are but one aspect of the diverse experience and humanity of living African people. The failure to decolonise some African post-colonial countries by the early 1970s convinced Cabral of the need for revolution, or a comprehensive cultural transformation, with the necessity to meet the human needs of the people playing a driving role.

The ‘return to the source’ is of no historical importance unless it brings not only real involvement in the struggle for independence, but also complete and absolute identification with the hopes of the mass of the people, who contest not only the foreign culture but also the foreign domination as a whole. Otherwise, the “return to the source” is nothing more than an attempt to find short-term benefits–knowingly or unknowingly, a kind of political opportunism.

(Cabral 1974, p. 63)

As such, through emancipatory agency, the return to African tradition does not mean that African political, religious, and cultural elites force the African masses into being authentically African, i.e., heteronormative. Instead, it calls for the participation of all ordinary Africans in shaping African cultures to create humanising conditions for them. Within Cabral’s call for ordinary Africans to participate (not only through elections) in reenacting African humanity and agency, the need for some Africans to practise same-sex relations will not be based on human rights, colonial traditions, or indigenous practices. The basis for practising their sexuality, instead, is grounded in recognising and protecting their existential ontological need to realise an essential aspect of their humanity through their sexualities.

If decolonised agency requires Africans to recognise “hopes of the mass of the people, who contest not only the foreign culture but also the foreign domination as a whole”, then recognising the operation of foreign domination in all its complexity becomes crucial. Failing to do so enables Africans, for example, to accept Western support for same-sex relations while failing to acknowledge its deep connection to debilitating economic and political policies that subjugate African people to systemic deprivation and premature deaths. It also allows African elites to endorse oppressive economic policies and to enforce dehumanising laws against same-sex relations as acts of African sovereignty, without recognising the underlying disposability of African lives within the racial-neocolonial economic power structure they help sustain.

Calls to “return” have mostly been criticised for espousing mythical pasts that bear no relation to the present or for being advanced regardless of present-day realities for Africans, as I do in this essay. However, not all of them suffer from this problem. Rather than claiming bygone practices, Serequeberhan demonstrates that Cabral’s “‘return’ is aimed at systematically sifting through and appropriating, in terms and out of the exigencies of the present, aspects of our pre-colonial and colonial heritage of indigenous and hybrid knowledge” (Serequeberhan 2009, p. 47).

Cabral’s call for a “return to the source” is rooted in a longstanding Africana tradition of critical thought that seeks to reclaim indigenous practices, colonial legacies, and histories, whose potential to foster emancipatory politics today remains pressing. Aimé Césaire, writing before Cabral, similarly advocates for a return to indigenous practices and histories of racial colonisation to forge decolonised societies and African humanity. In response to critics who accused him of promoting a myth of a return to an African mythical past, Césaire explains:

So the real problem, you say, is to return to them [African indigenous culture]. No, I repeat. We are not men for whom it is a question of “either-or.” For us, the problem is not to make a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat the past, but to go beyond. It is not a dead society that we want to revive. We leave that to those who go in for exoticism. Nor is it the present colonial society that we wish to prolong, the most putrid carrion that ever rotted under the sun. It is a new society that we must create, with the help of all our brother slaves, a society rich with all the productive power of modern times, warm with all the fraternity of olden days.

(Césaire [1950] 2000, pp. 51–52)

Césaire explicitly rejects the linear-temporalist and exclusive dualism that pits the African past against the Western present, thereby rendering the present the sole legitimate author of the future. With the idea of ‘the return’, Césaire calls for understanding contemporary African life (including the diaspora) as situated at the intersection of past, present, and future, with precolonial African and racial-colonial heritages playing a crucial role in creating conditions for emancipatory agency and in shaping emancipated presents and futures. For Cabral and Césaire, it seems to me, the primary source of the return is neither indigenous nor endogenous practices. Rather, it is the humanising demands of living African people. In Césaire’s view, reclaiming precolonial and colonial pasts gains legitimacy for present praxis only insofar as they help create symbolic and material conditions that support the humanisation of living African people. As such, claims by opponents of same-sex relations that use tradition to dehumanise fellow African people are not acts of decolonial agency, nor do they recognise and protect African humanity. Similarly, proponents of same-sex relations who invoke precolonial African practices can practise decolonial agency only to the extent that such practices help recognise and protect the human needs of living African people.

Going beyond the racial-colonial strictures of the religious-secular divide, which polarise indigeneity and endogeneity and reduce African humanity to indigeneity, Césaire highlights the vital role that precolonial practices, experiences of slavery (“our brother slaves”), and colonial heritage play in understanding the oppressive power structures of racial-colonial domination and the possibilities for dismantling them. Therefore, it is not enough to engage merely with precolonial indigenous practices; it is essential to re-member precolonial, slavery, and colonial pasts in their interconnectedness to inform present modes of knowledge and resistance against racial-(neo)colonial domination, while simultaneously developing alternative, sustainable, humanising practices. Furthermore, if we centre living African people as the primary reference point—where Africans must always locate their humanity and agency—then foreign cultural practices, including Western ones, are not inherently dehumanising, nor should they necessarily be considered un-African. Césaire demonstrates that the rejection of Western practices and values should not be based on their foreignness to African lives, as the temporal and anthropological dualisms of the religious-secular divide would have us believe. Instead, such rejection should stem from their dehumanising intent and impact on African humanity, which, in Césaire’s view, renders Western racial-colonial culture “the most putrid carrion that ever rotted under the sun”.

In line with Cabral and Césaire’s call to focus on African humanity as embodied by living African people, I align this piece with advocates of same-sex relations who have begun shifting from perspectives rooted in precolonial practices, African traditions, and human rights towards one centred on living African people. Crucially, the essay supports Africans practising same-sex relations who have no recourse to human rights, African traditions, or indigenous practices to navigate their sexualities as they enact their humanity in difficult and hostile post-colonial material and symbolic conditions.