“Yintoni Indoda?” Queerness, Cultural Belonging and the Making of African Manhood

Abstract

What makes an African man, and who determines the boundaries of African manhood? In this article, I interrogate the making of African manhood through the isiXhosa question Yintoni indoda? (What is a man?) with particular attention to queer African men and their cultural belonging. Rather than revisiting whether queerness is compatible with Africanness, I turn the analytical gaze towards manhood itself and ask what happens when a queer African man satisfies culturally recognised dimensions of manhood while transgressing heteronormative expectations of masculinity. Positioned as a conceptual study, I critically bring scholarship on amaXhosa manhood and ulwaluko into conversation with African masculinities, queer theory, belonging, and decolonial thought to examine indoda (man) as a culturally negotiated status shaped by social recognition, responsibility, kinship, cultural participation, and communal belonging. I interrogate the privileging of heterosexuality, marriage, and reproduction as markers of legitimate African manhood and question whether these expectations can be understood outside histories of colonialism and their reconfiguration of African gender and sexual relations. I advance conditional cultural belonging as a conceptual lens for understanding how queer African men can belong to cultural communities even as their recognition as legitimate men remains contingent on heteronormative conformity. Ultimately, I use Yintoni indoda? to rethink the boundaries through which African manhood is culturally produced, policed, and recognised.

1. Introduction

Yintoni indoda? What is a man? Although apparently simple, this question unsettles the assumption that manhood is a self-evident category determined solely by biological sex or adulthood. Within many African societies, becoming and being recognised as a man is embedded in culturally and socially mediated processes through which masculinity is produced, performed and conferred (Mfecane 2016; Ratele 2020; Tamale 2020; Qambela 2021). According to Mfecane (2016), indoda constitutes a culturally recognised and privileged form of masculinity associated with traditional initiation rather than biological maleness alone. Evidently, indoda carries meanings that extend beyond being male among amaXhosa. Thus, Ubudoda (Manhood) is associated with cultural recognition and specific expectations regarding responsibility, respectability, social conduct, and participation in communal life. Mfecane (2016) argues that indoda represents a culturally distinctive and highly valued masculine status among amaXhosa and related tribes, with ulwaluko (traditional male circumcision) occupying an important position in the transition towards recognised manhood. Significantly, however, cultural recognition does not end with ulwaluko; ubudoda is also negotiated through expectations concerning conduct and responsibility. As such, Qambela (2021) cautions against reducing manhood within amaXhosa to ulwaluko alone, demonstrating how class, economic marginality, location, and changing social conditions complicate how masculinity is constituted and experienced.

For this article, I use the term amaXhosa broadly to refer to isiXhosa-speaking peoples who share cultural practices associated with ulwaluko and ubudoda. I recognise, however, that linguistic identity should not be conflated with a singular ethnic or cultural identity. Not every isiXhosa-speaking person necessarily identifies as umXhosa, and isiXhosa-speaking communities encompass distinct historical and cultural groupings, including, inter alia, amaMpondomise, amaMpondo, abaThembu, amaBhaca and amaGcaleka. I therefore employ amaXhosa as an analytical and linguistic umbrella rather than as a claim of cultural or ethnic homogeneity. Notwithstanding their distinct identities and histories, these communities share the practice of ulwaluko and attach cultural significance to it as a transition to socially recognised manhood. This terminological clarification is important to the argument advanced in this article because it acknowledges internal diversity among isiXhosa-speaking peoples while permitting an analysis of the shared cultural relationship between ulwaluko and the making and recognition of indoda.

Yet the question Yintoni indoda? becomes considerably more complicated when sexuality enters the discussion. Dominant constructions of masculinity frequently position heterosexuality as normative, producing expectations around heterosexual relationships, marriage, reproduction and the continuation of family lineage. Queer African men consequently inhabit a particularly revealing location from which to interrogate African manhood. Their presence raises a conceptual question that cannot be resolved simply by asking whether homosexuality is African: what happens when a queer African man satisfies culturally recognised dimensions of manhood but transgresses heteronormative expectations of masculinity? The question shifts analytical attention away from queer Africans as subjects required to demonstrate their cultural authenticity and towards the cultural architecture through which manhood itself is produced and recognised.

This shift is important because the relationship between queerness and African manhood is more complex than a straightforward opposition between homosexuality and African culture. Earlier research among gay Xhosa men has documented how ulwaluko can constitute an important site through which cultural identity and masculine belonging are negotiated. More provocatively, Mfecane (2016) argues that completion of traditional initiation can confer the status of indoda irrespective of sexual orientation, complicating Western models of masculine hierarchy that automatically position heterosexual men above gay men. This produces an important theoretical contradiction. A queer man may be culturally recognised as indoda through one register of masculinity while simultaneously encountering social expectations through which heterosexuality is treated as evidence of legitimate manhood. Queerness, therefore, does not necessarily locate African men outside culture; rather, it exposes the possibility that cultural recognition and masculine legitimacy may operate through overlapping but sometimes contradictory registers.

It is precisely this contradiction that requires a decolonial interrogation. Contemporary African masculinities cannot be approached as culturally sealed formations that have travelled unchanged from a precolonial past into the present. Scholarship increasingly conceptualises African masculinities as historically contingent and socially negotiated formations shaped by intersecting relations of culture, sexuality, socioeconomic position and coloniality (Mfecane 2020; Ratele 2020; Mbah 2023). Within the amaXhosa context specifically, contemporary constructions of manhood are similarly dynamic: Qambela (2021) demonstrates how class, location, economic marginality and changing political economies complicate initiation- and homestead-centred understandings of Xhosa manhood, while Sipungu (2024) illustrates that culturally recognised pathways towards respectable Xhosa manhood are negotiated through embodied and social difference rather than constituted through a singular masculine ideal. These insights complicate appeals to “African culture” as a self-evident justification for fixed or heteronormative constructions of masculinity.

I therefore do not approach heteronormativity as simply imported into otherwise uniformly sexually permissive African societies, nor do I romanticise precolonial masculinities. Rather, I understand contemporary African manhood as historically entangled and continuously made through interactions between indigenous cultural formations, coloniality and changing socioeconomic and social relations (Mfecane 2020; Ratele 2020; Mbah 2023). Decoloniality consequently enables me to interrogate not only what presently constitutes legitimate indoda, but how particular criteria of manhood acquire cultural authority, whose masculinities they legitimise, and which historical processes become naturalised as “African culture.”

Such an interrogation is particularly important because scholarship on African masculinities has already demonstrated that there is no singular, timeless African masculinity. Masculinities are shaped through social location, political economy, generational change, cultural practices and changing expectations of men’s roles. Qambela (2021) challenges initiation-centred explanations by demonstrating that economic conditions, the ability to establish a household and other material circumstances also shape possibilities for performing socially recognised manhood. This plurality makes it problematic to treat heterosexuality as an unquestionable or universal constituent of African masculine authenticity. If indoda is culturally made rather than naturally given, then the criteria through which one is recognised as indoda must themselves become objects of critical inquiry.

The existing literature (Mfecane 2016; Ntozini and Ngqangweni 2016; Mashabane 2018; Ratele 2020; Qambela 2021; Tamale 2020) nevertheless leaves an important conceptual space. Studies have examined Xhosa manhood and ulwaluko (Mfecane 2016; Qambela 2021), hegemonic and African masculinities (Ratele 2020; Mfecane 2016), queer experiences of initiation (Ntozini and Ngqangweni 2016; Mashabane 2018), and the historical relationship between colonialism and African sexualities (Tamale 2020). What remains insufficiently theorised is the contradictory cultural location occupied by queer African men who may possess recognised markers of manhood while simultaneously transgressing heteronormative expectations attached to masculinity. This article enters that conceptual space. Rather than treating queer African men primarily as marginalised subjects seeking admission into African culture, I position them as critical interlocutors whose experiences expose the unstable boundaries through which African manhood is constructed.

I conceptualise this condition as conditional cultural belonging. By conditional cultural belonging, I refer to a contradictory location in which an individual is culturally situated within a community and may possess recognised markers of belonging. However, the fullness of that recognition remains vulnerable to particular forms of non-conformity. Applied to queer African manhood, the concept enables me to examine how a man may simultaneously be recognised as indoda and encounter demands to demonstrate masculinity through heterosexuality, marriage, reproduction, or other heteronormative performances. Conditional cultural belonging, therefore, moves the analysis beyond a binary of cultural inclusion versus exclusion. It asks instead which aspects of belonging are recognised, which are withheld, under what conditions, and by whom.

Against this background, I use Yintoni indoda? as both a question and a decolonial analytical provocation. Drawing on scholarship on African masculinities, queer theory, and decolonial thought, I interrogate the cultural making of African manhood and the role of heteronormativity in regulating its boundaries. I argue that African manhood should be understood as a historically situated, relational, and culturally negotiated status rather than a fixed masculine essence. I further argue that queer African men reveal the contradictions within this process because their cultural belonging can coexist with the contestation of their masculine legitimacy. In asking “Yintoni indoda?” I do not, therefore, seek to prescribe a new definition of an African man. Instead, I seek to unsettle the apparent certainty of the category itself and create theoretical space for reconsidering how African manhood is made, who participates in making it, and whose masculinities are permitted to belong.

Methodological and Analytical Positioning

This article is grounded in conceptual and theoretical positioning. My argument is thus developed through a critical and interpretive engagement with existing scholarship on ubudoda and ulwaluko (Mfecane 2016; Ntozini and Ngqangweni 2016; Mashabane 2018; Qambela 2021), African masculinities (Mfecane 2020; Ratele 2020; Mbah 2023), queer African sexualities (Mkhize and Mthembu 2023; Otu and van Klinken 2023), belonging (Allen et al. 2021; Yuval-Davis 2016), and decolonial thought (Tamale 2020; Mfecane 2020; Ratele 2020). I bring these academic conversations to a specific problem: how culturally recognised manhood may coexist with the contestation of masculine legitimacy when indoda does not conform to heteronormative expectations. I use the already existing empirical studies, particularly those involving amaXhosa men who identify as gay and ulwaluko, as empirical illustrations through which this conceptual tension can be identified and theorised rather than as data that has been generated and analysed in this study.

Accordingly, in this article, I do not claim that all queer African men or all isiXhosa-speaking communities experience or regulate ubudoda in identical ways, despite ulwaluko playing a critical role in all their lives and being part of all their rites of passage. The primary analytical positioning is the amaXhosa cultural context, in which indoda, ubudoda, and ulwaluko provide a culturally specific vocabulary for examining the relationship between manhood, recognition, and sexuality. As such, scholarship on African masculinities and queer African subjectivities is used to situate this culturally specific problem within broader theoretical debates, rather than to generalise amaXhosa constructions of manhood throughout the African continent. Admittedly, the figure of the queer indoda is therefore employed as an analytical position through which to theorise a particular possibility: that cultural membership and recognition of masculine status may actually coexist with normative contestation. It is, therefore, from this tension that, in this article, I develop conditional cultural belonging as a conceptual framework whose wider applicability remains to be examined in other cultural and social contexts.

2. Conceptual and Theoretical Grounding: Making Indoda

2.1. From Male to Indoda: The Cultural Production of Manhood

The question Yintoni indoda? requires a distinction between being biologically male and being socially recognised as a man. Within isiXhosa cultural contexts, indoda cannot be adequately understood as the isiXhosa equivalent of the English word “man” because it carries cultural, relational, and social meanings that extend beyond biological maleness. Mfecane (2016), in theorising Xhosa masculinity, distinguishes between being male and attaining the culturally recognised status of indoda, demonstrating that manhood is socially conferred and culturally mediated rather than automatically acquired through biological maturation. This distinction is important because it positions ubudoda as something that is made, recognised, and continuously negotiated within particular social and cultural relationships rather than possessed simply by virtue of being an adult male.

Ulwaluko occupies a particularly significant position within this making of indoda. Among amaXhosa, passage through traditional male initiation marks an important transition from ubukhwenkwe (boyhood) to ubudoda, conferring a culturally recognised masculine status and changing how an individual may participate within particular family and community spaces (Mfecane 2016; Ntozini and Ngqangweni 2016). Ntozini and Ngqangweni (2016), in their study of gay Xhosa men who had undergone traditional male initiation, demonstrate the continuing cultural significance attached to initiation, even among men whose sexual identities challenge dominant heterosexual expectations. Their findings are particularly significant for the present argument because they demonstrate that queerness does not necessarily prevent participation in a cultural institution through which indoda is produced and recognised.

However, reducing ubudoda to the completion of ulwaluko risks treating manhood as a status permanently settled at the moment of initiation. Contemporary scholarship complicates such an interpretation. Qambela (2021), for example, demonstrates that Xhosa masculinities are also negotiated through structural and socioeconomic circumstances, including class, unemployment, location and men’s capacities to satisfy changing social expectations. Ubudoda, therefore, extends beyond ritual transition and is continually evaluated through men’s relationships with families, communities and the material conditions within which masculine responsibilities are performed. This suggests that indoda operates simultaneously as a culturally conferred status and an ongoing social accomplishment: one may become indoda, but what it means to live recognisably as indoda remains subject to social evaluation.

This distinction is central to the conceptual problem that I pursue in this article. If ulwaluko can confer culturally recognised manhood upon a queer man, as the experiences documented by Ntozini and Ngqangweni (2016) suggest, sexuality introduces a potential tension between acquiring the status of indoda and satisfying the social expectations subsequently attached to that status. Mfecane’s (2016) theorisation is particularly provocative in this respect because it suggests that initiation can confer the status of indoda irrespective of sexual orientation. The analytical problem, therefore, cannot simply be whether queer men are permitted to become amadoda. Rather, attention must also be directed towards what happens to their recognition as amadoda when their subsequent lives do not correspond with heteronormative expectations of how culturally recognised men ought to live.

2.2. African Masculinities as Plural and Relational

The analytical positioning of this discussion calls for a critical distinction between amaXhosa manhood and African masculinities expansively. The concepts of indoda, ubudoda, ulwaluko, and ukuyala here are examined within the specific cultural context of isiXhosa-speaking communities. As such, they should not be treated as representative of African manhood in its entirety. The discussion now turns to African masculinities as a broader conceptual field through which the amaXhosa case can be situated alongside scholarship demonstrating that masculinities throughout the African continent are historically situated, plural, relational, and shaped by intersecting social, economic, and cultural processes (Mfecane 2020; Ratele 2019; Mbah 2023). Thus, African masculinities provide a broader theoretical field, with amaXhosa manhood providing the culturally specific position from which this argument is developed. Importantly, this distinction is of significant importance because neither “Africa” nor “African masculinity” constitutes a culturally homogeneous category.

Such a question cannot proceed from the assumption that there is one coherent model of “African masculinity”. Contemporary African masculinity scholarship increasingly rejects universalised representations of African men and instead approaches masculinities as plural, relational and situated within particular historical and material conditions (Ratele 2020; Mfecane 2020; Qambela 2021). Masculine identities are constituted not only through gender but through relationships with age, class, economic position, culture, sexuality and other social locations. Consequently, what constitutes a respectable or legitimate man can vary between communities and can change within the same community across generations and socioeconomic conditions.

This plurality is especially important for understanding indoda. Qambela (2021) demonstrates that structural inequalities complicate culturally established expectations of Xhosa manhood, particularly where socioeconomic marginalisation restricts men’s ability to fulfil materially demanding masculine roles. Such findings demonstrate that cultural expectations do not operate independently of changing social conditions. Rather, ubudoda is negotiated within the possibilities and constraints of men’s everyday lives. A man may therefore occupy a culturally recognised masculine position while being unable to satisfy every social expectation conventionally associated with that position.

The relational character of manhood is equally important. Masculinity does not derive its meaning exclusively from an individual’s understanding of himself; recognition is shaped through relationships with other men, women, families, peers, and broader communities. Indoda, from this perspective, exists partly through others’ recognition. The question: Yintoni indoda? Therefore, it necessarily generates another question: who possesses the social and cultural authority to recognise someone as indoda? This moves the analysis beyond individual masculine identity towards the social processes through which particular masculinities are authorised, contested or rendered less legitimate.

2.3. The Heteronormative Architecture of Recognised Manhood

It is at this point that sexuality becomes analytically significant. Research involving queer Xhosa men indicates that attaining culturally recognised manhood does not necessarily dissolve heteronormative expectations surrounding how that manhood should subsequently be performed. Ntozini and Ngqangweni (2016) found that gay initiates encountered expectations concerning heterosexuality and future relationships with women, demonstrating that initiation and queer sexuality can coexist while remaining socially tensioned. Mashabane (2018) similarly examined the experiences of Xhosa-speaking gay men undergoing ulwaluko, highlighting the complex negotiation between sexual identity, initiation and culturally constructed masculinity.

This exposes an important distinction between recognition and conformity. A queer man may be recognised as indoda because he has satisfied culturally recognised requirements through which manhood is conferred, yet remain non-conforming in relation to expectations that legitimate men should desire women, establish heterosexual relationships, marry, reproduce or continue a family lineage. Heteronormativity consequently requires examination not simply as prejudice against homosexuality but as a broader social ordering through which heterosexuality can become embedded within assumptions about what an intelligible masculine life should look like.

The theoretical problem is therefore not adequately captured by asking whether a queer African man is an indoda. Existing scholarship already complicates any straightforward negative answer to that question (Mfecane 2016; Ntozini and Ngqangweni 2016; Mashabane 2018). Instead, I ask how culturally conferred manhood is negotiated when the person recognised as indoda does not reproduce the heterosexual masculine trajectory expected of that status. This distinction shifts the analytical gaze from access to manhood towards the conditions governing continued masculine legitimacy. It is within the tension between cultural recognition and heteronormative conformity that the question of queer cultural belonging becomes most theoretically productive.

3. Queering Indoda: Decoloniality, Heteronormativity and Boundaries of Manhood

Understanding the queer indoda, therefore, requires attention to the historical and political processes through which contemporary constructions of gender, sexuality, and cultural legitimacy have been produced. A decolonial approach is useful here not because it assumes a simple opposition between an authentic indigenous past and a Western present, but because it draws attention to the layered and unequal histories through which African gender and sexual formations have been constituted. Scholarship on African masculinities has cautioned against treating African gender formations as static or culturally uniform, emphasising instead their historical contingency, internal complexity, and relationship to changing political, economic, and social conditions (Mfecane 2020; Ratele 2019; Mbah 2023). Similarly, decolonial African scholarship has emphasised the importance of examining how colonial power, knowledge production and contemporary social institutions intersect with, rather than simply replace, existing African cultural formations (Tamale 2020).

This approach is particularly important for the present discussion because it avoids two equally problematic assumptions. The first is that heteronormative constructions of manhood are exclusively indigenous and therefore culturally immutable. The second is that heterosexuality and heteronormativity were simply introduced into African societies through colonialism. Neither position adequately captures the historical complexity of African gender and sexual formations. Rather, contemporary expectations surrounding ubudoda must be understood as situated within cultural practices that have themselves been interpreted, contested, and transformed across different historical periods and social conditions. The argument advanced here is consequently not that ulwaluko or Xhosa manhood is inherently heteronormative, nor that heteronormativity is wholly external to Xhosa cultural formations. It is that the contemporary recognition of indoda operates within a historically layered social world in which cultural expectations concerning masculinity, sexuality, family, marriage and reproduction have acquired particular meanings and regulatory force.

Having established indoda as a culturally produced and socially recognised status, the question shifts from how manhood is acquired to how its boundaries are maintained. Queer theory is particularly useful for this task because it challenges the treatment of gender and sexuality as natural, stable, and self-evident categories and instead draws attention to the normative processes by which particular identities and performances become intelligible, while others are marginalised (Rasmussen 2015; McCann and Monaghan 2020). Within African contexts, however, the application of queer theory requires caution, as uncritical reliance on theoretical traditions developed predominantly in Western contexts risks reproducing the epistemological hierarchies that decolonial scholarship seeks to challenge. Tamale (2020) and Otu and van Klinken (2023), for example, demonstrate the importance of situating African sexualities within their specific historical, political, and cultural contexts rather than assuming the universality of Western categories of sexuality. I therefore employ queerness less as a fixed identity category and more as an analytical disruption through which the apparent naturalness of heteronormative African manhood can be interrogated.

Scholarship on African queer belonging, kinship and recognition further complicates any binary framing of inclusion and exclusion. According to Morison et al. (2019), same-sex-attracted people actively forge and inhabit forms of family, relatedness and communal belonging that both draw upon and rework existing cultural repertoires of care, responsibility and recognition. Moreover, Andrikopoulos and Spronk (2023) revealed that, in Kenya, same-sex couples navigate kinship systems by mobilising the inclusive and exclusive capacities of relatedness, producing accommodation and acceptance that coexist with homophobia rather than simply overcoming or being defeated by it. These studies accentuate that queer Africans are not solely subjects seeking admission into culture; they already participate in and reshape the social practices through which belonging is enacted. Within isiXhosa contexts, the experiences of gay men who undergo ulwaluko illustrate a parallel dynamic: cultural recognition as indoda can be secured through initiation even as subsequent expectations of heterosexual partnership, marriage and reproduction remain sites of contestation and negotiation (Ntozini and Ngqangweni 2016; Mashabane 2018; Mashabane and Henderson 2020). Recognition and belonging, therefore, operate through multiple, sometimes contradictory, registers rather than through a single threshold of cultural authenticity.

From this position, queering indoda does not mean rejecting ubudoda, ulwaluko or African cultural constructions of manhood. Rather, it involves questioning how particular performances have acquired the authority to represent legitimate manhood and why others are rendered incompatible with it. This distinction is important because cultural recognition as indoda and conformity to heterosexual masculinity are not necessarily synonymous. Mfecane (2016) demonstrates that Xhosa masculine status acquired through initiation may extend to men irrespective of their sexual orientation, while Ntozini and Ngqangweni (2016) show that gay Xhosa men can undergo ulwaluko and acquire culturally recognised manhood while simultaneously negotiating expectations surrounding heterosexuality. The queer man, therefore, presents a conceptual disruption: he may inhabit the recognised category of indoda without necessarily reproducing every normative expectation associated with it.

Heteronormativity becomes particularly important in explaining this contradiction. Rather than referring only to negative attitudes towards homosexuality, heteronormativity describes a broader ordering of social life in which heterosexuality is assumed to be natural, desirable and institutionally privileged, while gender is organised around complementary masculine and feminine positions (McCann and Monaghan 2020; Mkhize and Mthembu 2023). Within constructions of manhood, this ordering can manifest through expectations that a legitimate masculine adulthood should progress towards heterosexual partnership, marriage, fatherhood and reproduction. Mkhize and Mthembu (2023) demonstrate that heteronormativity remains pervasive across sub-Saharan African contexts and argue for greater recognition of the multiplicity of African sexualities. These expectations matter for the present argument because they potentially establish a second register through which manhood is evaluated: a man may possess cultural recognition as indoda, yet the legitimacy of how he inhabits ubudoda can remain open to contestation when his sexuality disrupts the anticipated heterosexual life course.

A decolonial perspective adds an important historical question to this analysis. It asks not only which norms regulate manhood, but how those norms acquired their contemporary authority. Tamale (2020) demonstrates that colonialism and missionary interventions significantly reconfigured African gender and sexual relations, including through the imposition and institutionalisation of particular moral and sexual orders. Otu and van Klinken (2023) similarly caution against representations of queerness as external to Africa, demonstrating how the category “queer” itself becomes productive when used critically to interrogate the histories and assumptions that have constructed Africa and sexuality. Decoloniality, therefore, prevents contemporary heterosexual masculinity from being treated automatically as an uncontaminated expression of indigenous African culture. At the same time, it does not require the opposite assumption that precolonial African societies were universally sexually permissive. The analytical task is instead to examine how indigenous gender arrangements, colonial regulation, missionary moralities and postcolonial social transformations have become historically entangled in contemporary understandings of legitimate manhood.

This historical interrogation is particularly significant because claims about culture can obscure the processes through which culture itself changes. When heterosexual marriage, reproduction, or particular gender performances are invoked as evidence of authentic African manhood, a decolonial analysis asks whether these expectations derive exclusively from indigenous cultural systems, whether they have been reconfigured through colonial encounters, or whether contemporary expectations represent combinations of both. Tamale (2020) cautions against treating contemporary African sexual norms as timeless representations of African tradition, while Ratele (2020) challenges singular representations of African masculinity by foregrounding its plurality and changing social constitution. Consequently, the question Yintoni indoda? becomes genealogical as much as cultural: it requires an interrogation of the historical processes through which particular characteristics came to signify legitimate manhood.

Queer African men occupy an especially productive position from which to expose these processes because their existence can separate dimensions of manhood that heteronormativity often collapses together. A queer man may undergo culturally recognised transitions into manhood, assume responsibilities towards family, participate in cultural institutions, contribute economically and socially to his community and be addressed and recognised as indoda, while simultaneously refusing or being unable to reproduce the heterosexual trajectory associated with masculine adulthood. The contradiction is therefore not necessarily between queerness and African culture, but between cultural recognition and heteronormative expectations within the cultural performance of manhood. This distinction moves the discussion beyond the familiar question of whether homosexuality is “African” and towards an examination of how the boundaries of culturally legitimate masculinity are maintained.

I use this contradiction to conceptualise queer cultural belonging as neither complete inclusion nor absolute exclusion. Belonging can instead be differentiated, negotiated and contingent. A queer man may belong genealogically, linguistically, culturally, territorially and relationally to an African community while particular dimensions of his masculine identity remain contested. His queerness does not necessarily remove him from culture; rather, it can expose the conditions through which recognition within culture is distributed. This creates the conceptual foundation for what I term conditional cultural belonging: a condition in which cultural membership and recognition are present, but the fullness or security of that recognition remains contingent upon conformity to particular normative expectations. The following section develops this concept through the paradox of the queer indoda.

4. The Paradox of Queering Indoda: Recognition, Legitimacy and Cultural Belonging

Building on the theoretical framing developed above, the queer indoda presents a conceptual paradox because cultural recognition and heteronormative conformity do not necessarily operate as the same process. A man may acquire culturally recognised manhood through ulwaluko, participate in family and communal responsibilities, demonstrate socially valued forms of responsibility and be recognised by others as indoda, while simultaneously transgressing expectations that associate legitimate masculine adulthood with heterosexual desire, partnership, marriage and reproduction. Existing scholarship provides evidence of precisely this tension. Mfecane (2016) demonstrates that the culturally privileged status associated with indoda may extend to initiated amaXhosa men irrespective of sexual orientation, while Ntozini and Ngqangweni (2016) document how gay amaXhosa men undergoing ulwaluko simultaneously negotiated cultural recognition and expectations surrounding heterosexuality. Mashabane (2018) similarly shows that initiation, sexuality and masculine identity are not mutually exclusive domains but intersect within queer men’s negotiations of amaXhosa manhood. These studies evidently destabilise any straightforward assumption that queerness automatically places a man outside ubudoda.

This distinction requires attention to what I conceptualise as recognitional plurality within African manhood. By recognitional plurality, I refer to the possibility that indoda can be recognised through multiple, overlapping registers rather than through a single criterion. Initiation may constitute one register; responsibility towards family and community as another register; age, social conduct, economic contribution, marriage, fatherhood, and cultural participation as other registers. These registers need not carry identical weight, nor should they be assumed to operate uniformly across African societies. Scholarship on African masculinities demonstrates precisely this plurality by showing that masculinity is negotiated through shifting relationships among culture, class, age, socioeconomic conditions, and social location (Ratele 2020; Mfecane 2020; Qambela 2021). The analytical significance of the queer indoda lies in making visible what happens when recognition within some of these registers coexists with non-conformity within another.

Heterosexuality consequently warrants interrogation not simply as one characteristic among many but as a potential regulatory expectation of manhood. Heteronormativity operates by rendering heterosexuality as socially expected and by organising gender around assumptions concerning appropriate relationships between men and women (Mkhize and Mthembu 2023). For men, this may connect masculine adulthood to anticipated trajectories of heterosexual partnership, marriage, fatherhood and reproduction. However, these expectations produce a theoretical difficulty when applied to a queer man who has already acquired culturally recognised status as indoda. If initiation, responsibility and communal recognition establish his manhood, his failure to pursue heterosexual marriage cannot logically return him to ubukhwenkwe. Instead, what potentially becomes contested is not whether he has crossed into manhood but whether the form of manhood he embodies is regarded as sufficiently legitimate.

This distinction between status and legitimacy is central to my argument. Status refers to cultural recognition as indoda, while legitimacy concerns the extent to which one’s performance of manhood corresponds with prevailing normative expectations. The two may reinforce one another, but they should not be conceptually collapsed. A heterosexual initiated man may experience relatively little tension between culturally conferred status and heteronormative legitimacy because his sexuality corresponds with the anticipated masculine trajectory. For a queer initiated man, however, the relationship may be less settled. His status as indoda can coexist with challenges to the legitimacy of his inhabiting that status. Queerness, therefore, reveals that recognition as a man and recognition as the right kind of man are potentially different social processes.

This becomes especially visible around marriage and reproduction. Where masculine adulthood is associated with establishing heterosexual partnerships, producing children or continuing the family lineage, queer men may encounter expectations that are not necessarily resolved by their cultural recognition as amadoda. Ntozini and Ngqangweni (2016), for example, identified expectations among families of gay Xhosa initiates that initiation would be associated with changes towards heterosexually normative masculine behaviour. Such expectations illustrate how ulwaluko may confer manhood while simultaneously becoming a site through which particular performances of that manhood are anticipated. The queer indoda therefore does not simply stand outside heteronormativity; he inhabits a culturally recognised masculine position from which its demands become particularly visible.

This paradox also complicates the binary language of inclusion and exclusion. Describing queer African men simply as culturally excluded risks overlooking the multiple ways in which they remain embedded within families, kinship networks, languages, cultural practices and communities. Conversely, describing them as included because they possess recognised cultural status risks obscuring the conditions under which that recognition may be questioned or disciplined. Neither complete exclusion nor uncomplicated inclusion adequately captures this position. What requires theorisation is the possibility of belonging while being contested: being culturally recognised without necessarily enjoying equally secure recognition across all dimensions of masculine life.

Importantly, this argument does not presume that every queer African man experiences manhood in the same way, nor that all amaXhosa communities impose identical expectations upon queer men. Such a claim would reproduce precisely the cultural essentialism that this article seeks to resist. African masculinities are plural and internally differentiated, and queer men themselves occupy different positions shaped by class, age, geography, family relations and other social locations (Ratele 2020; Mkhize and Mthembu 2023). The queer indoda is therefore employed here as an analytical position rather than a universal experiential category. It enables me to identify a contradiction that becomes possible whenever culturally conferred manhood coexists with sexuality that departs from heteronormative expectations.

The question Yintoni indoda? Consequently, it acquires a different significance. If an initiated queer man can legitimately be indoda, then heterosexuality cannot automatically be treated as the defining condition of Xhosa manhood. If his manhood nevertheless becomes contested because he does not marry a woman, reproduce heterosexually, or conform to other expected masculine performances, the question becomes not whether he is a man but why some dimensions of manhood possess greater power than others to determine the legitimacy of his belonging. Queerness, therefore, functions as an analytical disruption that exposes the hierarchy operating within different criteria of masculine recognition.

It is from this contradiction that I develop the concept of conditional cultural belonging. The concept describes more than marginalisation and differs from outright cultural exclusion. It captures a situation in which cultural membership is already established, and particular forms of recognition have already been conferred. Nevertheless, the security, completeness, or legitimacy of that belonging remains contingent on compliance with additional normative expectations. In the case of the queer indoda, the condition is especially visible where culturally recognised manhood coexists with demands for heterosexual masculine conformity. Conditional cultural belonging, therefore, provides a conceptual vocabulary for understanding how one may be simultaneously inside culture and contested by it.

5. Conditional Cultural Belonging: Towards a Conceptual Framework

The preceding discussion demonstrates that the relationship between queerness, manhood and culture cannot be adequately captured through a binary distinction between belonging and exclusion. Queer African men may be culturally embedded within families and communities, participate in cultural practices, fulfil socially recognised responsibilities and occupy the culturally conferred status of indoda, while simultaneously encountering contestation because their sexuality departs from heteronormative expectations of masculine life. I conceptualise this simultaneous recognition and contestation as conditional cultural belonging. The concept describes a form of belonging in which one’s membership in a cultural community is neither absent nor necessarily disputed, but in which the legitimacy, security, or completeness of that belonging becomes contingent on conformity to particular normative expectations.

My conceptualisation of conditional cultural belonging begins from the premise that cultural belonging is multidimensional. Belonging involves more than physical membership in a community; it is constituted through social relationships, recognition, participation, and the boundaries that communities use to distinguish those who legitimately belong (Allen et al. 2021; Yuval-Davis 2016). Yuval-Davis (2016) has particularly demonstrated that belonging is connected to processes of boundary-making through which membership is evaluated and contested. Within African contexts, these processes cannot be detached from histories of colonialism or from contemporary negotiations of sexuality, gender, family and cultural authenticity (Tamale 2020; Otu and van Klinken 2023). Belonging is therefore not merely something an individual feels; it is also something that can be socially recognised, regulated and made contingent.

Existing formulations of contingent, negotiated, ambivalent or partial belonging have productively unsettled binary models of inclusion and exclusion (Yuval-Davis 2016; Allen et al. 2021). Contingent belonging often highlights the provisional character of membership itself; negotiated belonging emphasises ongoing interaction and mutual adjustment; ambivalent or partial belonging, on the other hand, captures simultaneous attachment and distance. Conditional belonging builds upon these insights but addresses a more specific analytical problem. It directs attention to circumstances in which membership itself is not the principal matter in dispute. The individual may already be genealogically, linguistically, relationally, and culturally situated within the community and may already possess a culturally recognised status. What becomes conditional is not necessarily membership itself; it is the security and the legitimacy that is attached to particular ways of inhabiting that membership. As such, the concept shifts analytical attention from the boundary between belonging and non-belonging to differentiation within belonging: how a person who already belongs may nevertheless encounter unequal recognition because a particular dimension of identity and conduct departs from normatively privileged expectation.

I extend this understanding by distinguishing cultural membership, cultural recognition and normative legitimacy. Cultural membership refers to one’s situatedness within a cultural world through relationships such as kinship, language, ancestry, community and participation. Cultural recognition concerns the acknowledgement of particular culturally meaningful statuses, including recognition as indoda. Normative legitimacy, however, concerns whether the manner in which an individual inhabits that recognised status corresponds with prevailing expectations concerning how a legitimate member ought to live. These dimensions may overlap, but the queer indoda demonstrates why they cannot be treated as interchangeable. A man may possess cultural membership and recognition while encountering contestation at the level of normative legitimacy.

Three related, yet analytically distinct, concepts structure the framework that I am advancing here. Firstly, recognitional plurality describes the existence of multiple registers through which manhood may be socially and culturally recognised. Within amaXhosa, these may include ulwaluko, responsibility towards family and community, social conduct, economic contribution, and participation in cultural life. The significance usually attached to economic contribution is captured clearly in the familiar isiXhosa expression, “ilizwi lendoda engenamali alivakali” (the voice of a man without money is not heard). This expression accentuates how economic capacity may shape the social authority, respectability, and recognition available to men, especially where masculine expectations are connected to material responsibility and contribution. Qambela (2021) took this up and argued that unemployment and economic marginalisation complicate men’s ability to meet socially recognised expectations of amaXhosa manhood. Therefore, recognitional plurality addresses the question: through what registers is an individual recognised as an indoda?

Secondly, a hierarchy of masculine legitimacy concerns the unequal normative weight that may be attached to these registers. It asks why conformity within one domain, specifically heterosexuality, marriage, and/or reproduction, may acquire greater regulatory authority than recognition that is achieved through other dimensions of manhood. In amaXhosa, these expectations are evident during ukuyala, a process through which newly initiated (amakrwala) receive counsel on the responsibilities and conduct expected of indoda. When amakrwala return from Entabeni (mountain), including during umgidi, they are counselled to rebuild and/or contribute towards their family homes, replace the sheep and cattle slaughtered for their umgidi, marry and have children. Such counsel reveals that ulwaluko does not merely confer the status of ubudoda; it can also be followed by the articulation of expectations concerning how ubudoda should be subsequently lived. As such, for an indoda that is queer, the expectations of marriage and reproduction are especially significant as they reveal a possible distinction between having acquired culturally recognised manhood and conforming to the anticipated heterosexual trajectory that is attached to that status. To this end, a hierarchy of masculine legitimacy therefore asks why some expectations may acquire greater power than others in determining whether an already recognised indoda is regarded as living manhood legitimately. Thirdly, conditional cultural belonging describes the consequence of this unequal weighting for the culturally situated person: one may possess cultural membership and recognised masculine status, while the legitimacy or security of that belonging remains contested because of non-conformity within a normatively privileged register. This concept begins from the premise that the queer indoda is not necessarily outside, culturally. Such a man would have undergone ulwaluko, returned from entabeni as indoda, have their umgidi done, received ukuyala, and continue to occupy culturally meaningful positions within his family, kinship network, and community. His queerness does not retrospectively undo these relationships nor automatically return him to ubukhwenkwe. The conditionality becomes visible in what may follow recognition. For instance, the expectations bestowed during ukuyala visibly articulate an anticipated trajectory through which ubudoda should be lived. A queer man may fulfil some of these expectations, such as family responsibility, economic contribution, cultural participation and care for kin, while departing from the heteronormative expectation that marriage and reproduction should take a heterosexual form. Thus, conditional cultural belonging captures a position in which one does not cease to belong, but the legitimacy, security, and completeness of how one belongs may become contingent upon conformity to normatively privileged expectations. It asks not simply whether the queer indoda belongs, but which dimensions of his belonging remain secure, which become contested, who possesses the authority to make them conditional, and how he negotiates those conditions without necessarily relinquishing either his cultural identity or his queerness.

Conditionality emerges when recognition is attached to expectations of conformity. In the context considered here, heteronormativity can operate as one such condition. A queer man may have undergone ulwaluko and consequently be recognised as indoda, yet assumptions that masculine adulthood should culminate in heterosexual partnership, marriage, reproduction and fatherhood can establish additional criteria against which his ubudoda is evaluated (Ntozini and Ngqangweni 2016; Mashabane 2018). The important distinction is that such expectations do not necessarily erase his existing cultural status. Instead, they may qualify it. He belongs, but aspects of how he lives that belonging can remain subject to scrutiny, negotiation or demands for conformity.

I therefore conceptualise conditional cultural belonging as operating through three interrelated processes: recognition, regulation and negotiation. Recognition concerns the cultural statuses and forms of membership already conferred upon an individual. Regulation concerns the normative expectations that prescribe and police legitimate performances of those statuses. Negotiation refers to the ways individuals inhabit, reinterpret, resist or reconcile the tensions between their recognised cultural position and the normative demands attached to it. These processes are not necessarily sequential. They may occur simultaneously and differently across families, communities and stages of an individual’s life.

The concept of regulation is particularly important because it shifts attention away from individual prejudice towards the broader normative organisation of manhood. Heteronormativity does not require every community member to reject queer men in order to exert regulatory force explicitly. It can operate through taken-for-granted assumptions about whom a man should marry, whether he should father children, how he should express masculinity, and what kind of household he is expected to establish. Queer African men’s encounters with such expectations, therefore, illuminate how masculine legitimacy can be regulated through ordinary cultural and familial expectations rather than exclusively through overt homophobia. Research documenting queer men’s negotiations of ulwaluko and Xhosa masculinity demonstrates the significance of these tensions between culturally recognised manhood and expectations of heterosexual masculine conduct (Ntozini and Ngqangweni 2016; Mashabane 2018).

Negotiation, however, is equally important because conditional cultural belonging should not construct queer African men as passive recipients of cultural regulation. Queer Africans actively interpret, inhabit, and negotiate their cultural identities and social worlds (Otu and van Klinken 2023). The queer individual may reject the proposition that heterosexuality determines his manhood, reinterpret cultural expectations through alternative understandings of responsibility and belonging, or selectively participate in cultural practices without abandoning either his sexuality or his cultural identity. Such negotiations demonstrate that cultural boundaries are not merely imposed from above; they are also contested from within by people who already belong to the cultural worlds under consideration.

Although developed through the culturally specific case of the queer indoda, conditional cultural belonging has comparative resonance beyond African contexts. Ethnic and religious communities whose traditions have historically been perceived as restrictive or heteronormative have similarly sought to create spaces of inclusion for LGBTQ+ people without abandoning communal identities and traditions. Liberal Christian congregations, for example, have developed rituals, prayers, and religious practices that specifically address LGBTQ+ experiences, enabling gay and lesbian Christians to integrate sexual and religious identities within affirming church communities (Rodriguez and Ouellette 2000; Rodriguez 2009; Walton 2006). In these settings, belonging is neither automatic nor unconditional: recognition as a full member of the faith community often remains contingent upon particular theological or liturgical performances, even as the community itself reworks its own traditions to accommodate sexual diversity. Parallel dynamics appear in liberal Jewish communities and synagogues that have developed new liturgical and theological approaches to LGBTQ+ identities and forms of family and belonging (Ben-Lulu 2019, 2022). Ritual innovations such as LGBTQ-affirming Kabbalat Shabbat or reinterpreted Tashlich ceremonies allow queer Jews to inhabit Jewish tradition while simultaneously expanding the boundaries of what that tradition can recognise. In both Christian and Jewish cases, cultural or religious membership is already established; what remains conditional is the legitimacy and security of inhabiting that membership without heterosexual conformity. These comparative examples reinforce the analytical distinction central to conditional cultural belonging: the possibility of being already inside a community while still encountering normative conditions that regulate the fullness of recognition. This is where the decolonial significance of conditional cultural belonging becomes particularly important. If contemporary expectations of legitimate manhood have developed through historically entangled relationships among indigenous cultural systems, colonial governance, missionary moralities, and postcolonial transformations, then the conditions placed upon cultural belonging itself require interrogation (Tamale 2020). Decoloniality allows me to ask not simply whether queer men conform to existing cultural expectations, but why particular expectations possess the authority to determine legitimate belonging in the first place. This reverses the burden of explanation. Rather than requiring the queer African man to demonstrate why his sexuality should be compatible with Africanness, the cultural norm itself becomes an object requiring historical and epistemological explanation.

Conditional cultural belonging, therefore, differs from cultural exclusion. Exclusion implies that an individual is positioned outside a cultural community or denied meaningful membership within it. Conditional belonging instead describes an individual who is already situated within the community but whose recognition becomes uneven across different domains. It also differs from assimilation in that the individual need not seek admission to an external cultural group. The queer indoda is already culturally located; what is at stake is whether that location permits him to inhabit manhood without heterosexual conformity becoming the price of uncontested recognition.

The concept consequently redirects the question Yintoni indoda? away from the search for a definitive checklist of masculine attributes. If indoda is culturally recognised through multiple registers, the more analytically productive question concerns how these registers are weighted and who possesses the authority to determine their relative importance. Why might initiation establish a man as indoda, yet his sexuality subsequently become grounds for questioning the legitimacy of his manhood? Why might responsibility, cultural participation, or communal contribution be insufficient to secure uncontested masculine recognition when heterosexuality is absent? Such questions expose what I describe as a hierarchy of masculine legitimacy, whereby some attributes of manhood may acquire greater regulatory power than others.

I therefore propose conditional cultural belonging not as a universal description of queer African men’s experiences but as a conceptual framework for analysing circumstances in which cultural recognition and normative legitimacy diverge. Its analytical value lies precisely in this distinction. It enables us to move beyond asking whether queer African men belong and instead examine how they belong, the conditions attached to that belonging, who establishes those conditions, and what occurs when those conditions are contested. In doing so, the concept returns us to Yintoni indoda? with a different proposition: perhaps the more consequential question is not simply what makes a man, but who is authorised to decide which ways of being a man are culturally legitimate.

6. Rethinking the Boundaries of African Manhood

The question Yintoni indoda? has often been approached through culturally recognisable pathways into manhood, particularly the distinction between biological maleness and socially conferred masculine status. In this article, however, I have used the question differently. Rather than seeking to establish a definitive set of attributes that constitute indoda, I have interrogated what happens when different criteria of manhood cease to align. The queer indoda makes this tension particularly visible. He may possess culturally recognised masculine status, participate meaningfully in family and community life, and fulfil responsibilities associated with adulthood, while departing from heteronormative expectations concerning desire, partnership, marriage and reproduction (Mfecane 2016; Ntozini and Ngqangweni 2016; Mashabane 2018). The central issue is therefore not simply whether queer African men can become amadoda, but whether their manhood can remain culturally legitimate without heterosexuality becoming a condition through which that legitimacy is continuously evaluated.

This distinction has implications for how African manhood itself is conceptualised. If manhood is constituted through several cultural and social registers, then no single dimension should be assumed to exhaust its meaning. Scholarship on African masculinities has already demonstrated the plurality and contextuality of masculine formations, including the influence of class, economic circumstances, location and changing social relations on men’s capacities to inhabit socially valued forms of masculinity (Ratele 2020; Mfecane 2020; Qambela 2021). Queerness adds sexuality to this plurality, but it does something more theoretically significant: it reveals how different dimensions of manhood can be hierarchically organised. A queer man may satisfy several culturally valued dimensions of ubudoda. However, heterosexuality may continue to exercise disproportionate power in determining whether the form of manhood he embodies is regarded as legitimate.

I have described this as a hierarchy of masculine legitimacy. The concept draws attention to the unequal regulatory power attached to different attributes of recognised manhood. Initiation, responsibility, cultural participation, family contribution, marriage, fatherhood and heterosexuality may all intersect with constructions of indoda, but they need not carry equivalent social authority. The analytical question, therefore, shifts from identifying the characteristics of an African man to examining which characteristics become decisive when competing claims to legitimate manhood are evaluated. For queer men, this becomes particularly important where heterosexuality is treated not merely as one possible expression of masculine life but as a normative requirement against which other dimensions of manhood are judged.

A decolonial reading further requires caution regarding how this normative authority is explained. It would be reductive to attribute contemporary heteronormativity entirely to colonialism, just as it would be historically problematic to treat present-day constructions of African masculinity as unchanged continuations of precolonial cultural systems. Tamale (2020) demonstrates the significance of colonial and missionary interventions in reorganising African gender and sexual relations, while contemporary African sexuality scholarship continues to challenge narratives that position sexual diversity outside African histories (Otu and van Klinken 2023). The significance of decoloniality here, therefore, lies less in identifying a singular historical origin of heteronormativity than in refusing to allow contemporary norms to escape historical interrogation simply because they are articulated in the language of culture.

This position also requires resisting a false opposition between culture and queerness. When queer African men are approached primarily through questions about whether their sexuality is compatible with African culture, Africanness is implicitly positioned as settled. At the same time, queerness becomes the phenomenon requiring explanation. Such an approach leaves the normative architecture of culture largely untouched. I reverse this analytical direction. The queer indoda does not need to function primarily as evidence that queerness can be African; instead, his culturally situated existence provides a standpoint from which the assumptions underlying legitimate African manhood can themselves be examined. The question, therefore, moves from “Can a queer man belong?” towards “What conditions have been attached to his belonging, and why?”

It is this shift that gives conditional cultural belonging its analytical significance. The concept recognises that belonging can coexist with contestation. A queer African man need not be expelled from family, culture or community for his cultural belonging to become conditional. Conditionality may instead operate through everyday expectations concerning whom he should marry, whether he should father children, how masculinity should be performed, which aspects of sexuality should remain unspoken, or whether cultural recognition requires conformity in other domains of life. Such processes demonstrate why inclusion and exclusion are insufficient as opposing categories for understanding queer cultural belonging. One can be culturally inside while remaining normatively contested.

This conceptualisation also changes how queer agency is understood. Queer African men should not be positioned merely as recipients of cultural judgement or as subjects awaiting inclusion by heterosexual cultural authorities. Their participation in cultural life already contributes to the ongoing production of culture. Otu and van Klinken (2023) demonstrate the importance of attending to African queer agency and the ways queer Africans negotiate and produce meanings within African social worlds. From this perspective, a queer indoda does not merely negotiate an already-completed definition of manhood; by inhabiting ubudoda differently, he participates in its ongoing social production. Queerness can therefore reveal not only the limits of established masculine categories but also their capacity for reinterpretation.

This is where Yintoni indoda? becomes most consequential as a decolonial question. I do not answer it by proposing that a new universal definition should replace heterosexual understandings of African manhood. Doing so would reproduce the very essentialism that the article challenges. Instead, the question should remain deliberately open. Its value lies in exposing that indoda has always required processes of cultural interpretation, recognition, and negotiation. Asking Yintoni indoda?, therefore, becomes a means of examining who participates in those processes, whose understandings acquire authority, and whose ways of inhabiting manhood remain conditional.

Ultimately, the queer indoda does not represent the failure of African manhood. He reveals its plurality. His existence demonstrates that cultural recognition, masculine legitimacy, sexuality and belonging do not necessarily align neatly within a single normative trajectory. Recognising this complexity does not require abandoning African cultural understandings of manhood; rather, it requires taking their dynamism seriously. If culture is historically constituted and continually negotiated, then ubudoda must likewise remain capable of being questioned, interpreted and remade by the people who inhabit it. The decolonial task is therefore not to determine once and for all what an African man is, but to ensure that the authority to make African manhood is not restricted to those whose lives already conform to its dominant expectations.

7. Conclusions

In this article, I began with a deceptively simple question: Yintoni indoda? Rather than seeking a definitive description of what constitutes an African man, I have used this question to interrogate the cultural, social and historical processes through which manhood is produced, recognised and regulated. I have argued that indoda cannot be reduced to biological maleness, nor can ubudoda be understood as a singular and culturally static masculine identity. Manhood is relationally constituted and culturally mediated, and its meanings remain responsive to changing historical, material and social conditions (Mfecane 2016; Ratele 2020; Qambela 2021).

The queer indoda brings the complexity of these processes into particularly sharp focus. Existing scholarship demonstrates that queer men can participate in ulwaluko and acquire culturally recognised masculine status while simultaneously negotiating expectations associated with heterosexuality and normative masculine conduct (Mfecane 2016; Ntozini and Ngqangweni 2016; Mashabane 2018). I have therefore argued that the critical question is no longer simply whether a queer African man can be recognised as indoda. Instead, attention must be directed towards what happens when culturally recognised manhood and heteronormative masculine legitimacy cease to coincide.

To explain this tension, I have advanced the concept of conditional cultural belonging. The concept captures circumstances in which cultural membership and recognition are present, but the security or legitimacy of that recognition remains contingent upon conformity to particular normative expectations. Through the interconnected processes of recognition, regulation, and negotiation, conditional cultural belonging offers a way to understand how queer African men can be culturally situated within communities while particular expressions of their manhood remain contested. It therefore moves analysis beyond the binary assumption that queer African men are either culturally included or excluded.

I have further argued that this conditionality exposes a hierarchy of masculine legitimacy. Different markers of manhood do not necessarily possess equal regulatory authority. Where an initiated man may be culturally recognised as indoda, heterosexual partnership, marriage, fatherhood, or reproduction can nevertheless operate as additional expectations through which the legitimacy of his manhood is evaluated. The queer indoda makes this hierarchy visible by demonstrating that recognition as a man and recognition as the right kind of man can constitute distinct social processes.

A decolonial reading of this contradiction requires more than attributing heteronormativity to either African tradition or colonial imposition. Contemporary African masculinities emerge from historically entangled indigenous, colonial and postcolonial social formations (Tamale 2020; Otu and van Klinken 2023). Decolonising indoda, therefore, requires interrogating how particular expectations acquired the authority to define legitimate manhood, rather than treating everything currently articulated as culture as historically fixed or epistemologically unquestionable. Equally, decoloniality should not romanticise precolonial Africa or presume that indigenous cultural formations were universally accepting of sexual diversity.

Ultimately, Yintoni indoda? remains intentionally unanswered. A singular answer would risk replacing one restrictive definition of African manhood with another. Instead, I propose that the question itself should remain open to cultural dialogue, historical interrogation, and reinterpretation by those who inhabit ubudoda. Queer African men are not external subjects asking to be admitted to African manhood; they are already participants in African cultural worlds and, consequently, in the ongoing making of what indoda can mean. The decolonial possibility lies not in determining once and for all who qualifies as an African man, but in unsettling the conditions through which some ways of being indoda are authorised while others remain conditional.