This land was always ours: Queerness, colonial homophobia, and the forced migration of LGBTQ+ Africans

By Babatunde-Tribe Akande | OMC 2026

Fragments of Unity Within Borders (vi), 2026, papier-mâché, 33cm by 29cm  — Babatunde-Tribe Akande 

I have been told, in many registers and by many mouths, that I do not belong. That my queerness is a foreign contamination. That same-sex love, gender nonconformity, the refusal to fit neatly into the binary inherited from colonial administration, these are not African things. These are imports. Impositions from the West. And yet, when I look at the histories that preceded colonial rule, at the Yoruba traditions I was raised in, at the scholarly and oral records of pre-colonial life across this continent, I find something radically different from the story being told about me.

The claim that homosexuality is "un-African" is one of the most successful lies of the colonial project. It has been adopted so thoroughly by governments, churches, mosques, families, and neighbours that it now masquerades as indigenous wisdom. But it is not. It was installed.

British colonial governance introduced sodomy laws across the territories it controlled, laws that are still in force today in over thirty African nations. The Nigerian Criminal Code, the Ugandan Penal Code, the Kenyan statutes that still criminalise same-sex intimacy: these are not expressions of African culture. They are administrative inheritances, written by colonial officers to enforce a particular Victorian vision of sexuality and family that was itself a historical construction. When postcolonial states retained these laws and, in some cases, strengthened them, they did not reclaim African tradition. They perpetuated a colonial one.

Pre-colonial African societies were not sexual utopias, but neither were they the monolithic prohibitionists the current narrative requires them to be. The Akan people recognized a third gender category. The Igbo had traditions of woman-to-woman marriage. The Hausa concept of yan daudu described feminine men who occupied distinct and recognised social roles. Across the continent, same-sex practices and gender-nonconforming identities were documented, tolerated, and in some cases celebrated. Colonialism did not find homophobia in Africa. It brought it.

This matters not only as a historical argument but as a material one. Because the violence that this lie has enabled is ongoing. In Nigeria, the Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act of 2014 carries penalties of up to fourteen years in prison. In Uganda, the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2023 introduced the death penalty for what it terms "aggravated homosexuality”. Across the continent, LGBTQ+ people are losing their homes, their families, their freedom, and their lives, expelled from belonging by laws that were written for them by their colonisers.

And then comes the second violence. Those who flee who seek asylum in Europe, the United Kingdom, North America often find themselves in the very nations whose colonial histories constructed the conditions that expelled them. The United Kingdom, which exported sodomy laws across its empire. France, whose missionaries preached the sexual "morality" that is now used to prosecute queer Africans. They arrive in these countries and are required to prove their queerness to immigration officers. They are asked for evidence. They are told their stories are not credible. They are detained, deported, and returned to the places that will kill them.

My practice as an artivist, a filmmaker, a sculptor working in papier-mâché and steel and augmented reality has always been in conversation with this paradox. I make work about borders: the borders drawn on maps, and the borders drawn on bodies. I make work about belonging: what it looks like to belong to a land that has been told to disown you, to belong to a community that has been fractured and dispersed, to belong to a tradition that has been deliberately obscured. I make work about reclamation not as nostalgia, but as future-building.

Because the question that drives me is not only historical. It is not simply: who installed this homophobia, and when? It is also: what comes next? If queerness is not un-African; if queer, gender-nonconforming, and same-sex-loving people have always existed on this continent, have always been part of its cultures and cosmologies, then what does an African future look like in which we are not exiles, but ancestors?

We are not a Western import. We are not a contamination. We are not foreign. We are not new. We were here before the colonisers arrived with their Bibles and their statutes and their categories of deviance. We will be here after the laws they installed are dismantled. This land was always ours.

Babatunde-Tribe Akande 

Babatunde (they/them) is a queer nonbinary multidisciplinary artist, artivist, researcher, and experimental filmmaker based in Lagos, Nigeria. Working across painting, sculpture, papier-mâché, installation, augmented reality, and documentary film, their practice is rooted in decolonial research, Yoruba cosmology, and the politics of queer African identity and belonging. They are the 2025 Bertha Foundation Artivist Fellow, a 2023 UN OHCHR International Art Contest for Minority Artists laureate, the 2024 Equality Awards Emerging Creative of the Year, and the founder of Zoku Space, a creative collective supporting minority creatives across West Africa. 

Website: behance.net/babatundeakande1   |   Contact: babtundetribe@gmail.com