Hello friends,

In the final episode of the MA Podcast series on cross dressing in the African context, we talk about cross dressing as an expression of sexual orientation and even sexual availability among African peoples.

We look at examples from scholarly work and folklore across the continent, and read a sample from “Ainichthem” or “What He Has Done” a folktale from German ethnologist and archaeologist Leo Frobenius’s collection of what he termed “Black Erotic Folktales.” It tells the story of Simoa ben Abid, a cross-dressing bisexual man.

"During my teen years I felt like I was unique. I thought I was the only one on earth to feel such a thing. I had never heard of transsexuality, I considered it a disease at first; I thought that I wasn't normal and that I had to change. But the harder I was trying to look like a man, the stronger I felt I was a woman."

Randa

Randa, a Algerian Transgender Activist (Image Credit)

The bottom line is this: like people and other beings in the natural world, Africans do experience these different states of existence, regardless of how they come about. Refusing to acknowledge this blocks us Africans from being able to situate our difficulties in the context of the common human struggle which means we cut ourselves off from the relief offered by solutions which come about from productive mixing of global culture.

It’s not a mental illness, but an incongruence of anatomical sex and psychological sex.

-Audrey Mbugua

I hope this series has been helpful. Stay tuned for the upcoming MA July Newsletter for what’s next on the MA Podcast!

Helen

Can’t Get Enough?

References

Gender Dysphoria and Transgenderism: Understanding the Differences

Mbugua, Audrey "Gender dynamics: a transsexual overview" in Tamale, Sylvia, ed. African sexualities: A reader. Fahamu/Pambazuka, 2011. p240

Epprecht, Marc. Boy-wives and female husbands: Studies in African homosexualities. State University of New York Press, 2021.

Adamu, Aisha Umar. "Neither here nor there: Hausa perception of 'Yan Daudu'in Light of Aliku Aliyu's poem and Hausa proverbs." African Languages, Literatures, and Postcolonial Modernity (2024): 53.

Music

Dance, Simoa, Dance by Phende

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