In an opinion piece, author Nyasha Karimakwenda challenges the idea that queer existence is contrary to African values, and analyzes violence against LGBTQ+ people on the continent as a tool of social control.
The argument is familiar: queer identities are supposedly a product of Western influence, foreign to African cultures. Nyasha Karimakwenda, an African feminist, rejects this outright. For her, the violence perpetrated against LGBTQ+ people on the continent is not a tradition to be defended: it is a mechanism of oppression designed to define who deserves dignity and who must be deprived of it.
Violence, she writes, functions like a language. It traces the contours of an imposed normality, designates behaviors deemed acceptable, and excludes those who deviate from them. Applied to queer African bodies, this logic takes a particularly brutal form: it involves forcing individuals into a heteronormative mold, sometimes even to the point of death.
African leaders are mobilizing a diverse arsenal to this end: rhetoric, legal proceedings, political pressure, physical violence, and religious condemnation. Queer people thus find themselves exposed to a constant threat, forced to resist multiple forms of erasure of their existence.
Karimakwenda points out that this existence on the margins of the continent remains very real, and that the resistance it generates testifies to a presence that official rhetoric struggles to make disappear.
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