This is the third post written to both honor and spread awareness of gender diversity across cultures in both past and present day. To adequately do that, I will be addressing the forms of oppression these communities have faced as well as the implications that they have had on BIPOC communities today. While I have done some additional research, much of my analysis for this post in particular has been drawn from research I have done for classes in the past, and I will share sources throughout as well! If you have not already read the first post addressing the overall topic, I would highly recommend doing so for additional context.
I will admit that this post has been months in the making. Africa is vast not only in land but also in diversity and history. It is never my intention to portray the continent as monolithic. That being said, I also celebrate many aspects of Pan-Africanism as a descendent of those who were taken from the continent and survived elsewhere. A big part of accepting who I am in terms of my racial, ethnic, and gender identities have been dependent on discovery of some ways that Africans lived prior to colonization. This comes from having much of my association with my Blackness coming from a Christian evangelical church community and because of that, I found myself needing to reconcile my queerness. However, the more I learned about the gender diversity present in many pre-colonial African societies, I realized that my gender identity wasn’t contradictory to being Black at all. While much of what we know about gender norms has been limited or lost to history, much of what we do know about them can be revealed or inferred by the spiritualities of different groups! As far as gender diversity that can be found in some African spiritualities, Olokun, an Orisha from the Yoruba tradition is a strong example. Olokun has been recognized as being male, female, or androgynous by different groups. In addition to different interpretations about Olokun’s gender, there are some possible social implications as a result to Olokun’s deviation from the binary. Women have been allowed to have the same spiritual authority and power in the worship of the deity as men do, which has not always been the case in other spiritual practices. Another example is Amma, who is the supreme creator in Dogon spirituality. Amma is believed to embody both male and female principles. This has been explained both for the reasons of being consistent of the duality present throughout Dogon beliefs and because Dogon represents the reproductive process as a whole. One final example is Hapi from Egyptian spirituality. Though Hapi is generally referred to as male, he has been depicted as having large breasts to represent the prosperity that comes from the annual flooding of the Nile River. In other regions of the continent, gender diversity was evidenced in multiple human societies. According to Syvia Uganda of Makere University Uganda, the “mudoko dako” were part of the Langi in northern Uganda. She claimed that they were “effeminate males” who “were treated as women and could marry men.” In what is known as Angola, a Portuguese soldier in 1681 reported that there was “among the Angolan pagan much sodomy.” In the same account, the soldier claimed in less kind terms that Chibados were not monogamous and dressed as women. From another Portuguese account, there was an enslaved woman named Vitoria who was arrested in 1556 during the Inquisition in Lisbon. In spite of being arrested for deviance and sodomy, James H. Sweet of University of Wisconsin Madison claims that she “insisted that she was a woman and had the anatomy to prove it.” Unfortunately, she was given a life sentence. Sweet explains that, for people like Vitoria, “same-sex behaviours were simply expressions of their broader spiritual roles, roles that went completely unrecognized by the Portuguese.” What was described above are only a few small examples in regard to gender diversity in connection to the history of the vast continent of Africa. However, I did not grow up hearing of these examples at all, and I am now very protective of this information and determined to seek out much more. By doing so, I hope to educate more Black communities of who some of our ancestors were and how they may have lived for centuries prior to and even during the onset of enslavement and colonization. Not only do we need to honor their memory, but we need to do better by each other and acknowledge some of the damaging views about gender that have been imposed on and embraced in our communities today. One could argue that we have lost many Black women like Vitoria in only the last few years, and we need to do more to protect each other. It is by engaging with and acknowledging our full histories that these lasting trends are recognized. Bek References and Further Reading: "Amma." Britannica Academic, Encyclopædia Britannica, 11 Apr. 2014. academic-eb-com.proxy.seattleu.edu/levels/collegiate/article/Amma/605230. Asante, Molefi K. and Ama Mazama. "Amma." Encyclopedia of African Religion. Edited by Vol. 1. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2009, pp. 40. SAGE Knowledge. 2 Jun 2022, doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412964623.n25. Asante, Molefi K. and Ama Mazama. "Olokun." Encyclopedia of African Religion. Edited by Vol. 1. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2009, pp. 489-90. SAGE Knowledge. 2 Jun 2022, doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412964623.n307. Elnaiem, Mohammed. "The “Deviant” African Genders That Colonialism Condemned." JSTOR Daily, 29 Apr. 2021, daily.jstor.org/the-deviant-african-genders-that-colonialism-condemned/. "Hapi." Britannica Academic, Encyclopædia Britannica, 10 Jul. 2008. academic-eb-com.proxy.seattleu.edu/levels/collegiate/article/Hapi/39188.
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January 2024
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