These 5 stories show that queerness was a part of pre-colonial Africa - LGBTQ Nation

"Beneath the dust of colonial archives lies another Africa-one painted in ochre and song, where healers crossed gender and love itself remade the world. Long before Victorian law or missionary decree, people across the continent honored transformation as sacred. From the rock shelters of southern Africa to the royal courts of Buganda, fluidity shaped ritual, healing, and community. What followed-Portuguese missions, British and French conquest, Belgian rule-rewrote those worlds in the language of sin and crime. Yet the stories remain, fragments of a continent that once celebrated the divine in every form."

"In what is now Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe, San rock painters left a visual record stretching back more than 25,000 years. On a rock face near Guruve, a faded scene shows two male figures locked in an intimate pose. Whether it marked ritual, affection, or myth, it proves that love between men was visible-and worthy of paint-millennia before Europe's moral order arrived. The San imagined gender as a current of power, not a cage. In their trance dances, healers blurred human and animal form, crossing spirit and flesh until boundaries dissolved."

"When Dutch settlers and missionaries arrived in the seventeenth century, they condemned these ceremonies in the language of sin. In The Khoisan Peoples of South Africa, Isaac Schapera notes the San as " performing their heathenish dances with frantic gestures, shouting and howling like beasts." Such reports cast San spirituality as a moral disorder, erasing a vision of gender older than writing."

Precolonial African societies often embraced gender fluidity and celebrated transformation in ritual, healing, and community life. San rock art records intimate same-sex imagery and trance-dance healers who blurred human and animal forms, signaling sacred acceptance of shifting identities. Across regions, ritual and court practices incorporated gender crossing and spiritual transformation. European missions, laws, and conquest recast indigenous expressions as sin and criminality, suppressing and erasing many practices. Surviving stories, images, and fragments preserve evidence of a continent that once honored diverse genders and same-sex love as integral to social and spiritual life.

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