Draft:Homosexuality in pre-colonial African societies

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Homosexuality is romantic or sexual attraction between two people of the same sex.^[1] It's a form of human sexual expression/orientation, it has been documented in various cultures and societies, predating the modern identity categories used to describe it today.

This article documents its presence in pre-colonial African societies and peoples, examining the social structures, institutions, and roles through which same-sex relations were organised and understood on their own terms.

Azande (Northern Congo and South Sudan)

Among the Azande, a centralized kingdom in the northern Congo basin, same-sex relationships were an indigenous and institutionalized part of warrior society.^[2][3] Warriors took younger male partners, known as "boy-wives,"^[4][5] Paying a bride price in spears; the boy's parents then became the warrior's in-laws and the union was treated as a formal marriage.^[6][7][8] Anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard documented these arrangements in detail: the boy lived with the warrior, carried out domestic tasks, and engaged in intercrural sex with his older partner.^[7][6][9] The relationship combined mentorship, domestic partnership, and sexual intimacy, and usually ended when the younger partner was old enough to marry a woman.^[10][6][11] The practice ended when the British imposed the 1899 Sudan Penal Code, which introduced a "gross indecency" law that criminalized these relationships and turned the tradition into a criminal offence.^[12]

Warrior men were formally divided into two categories — 'abakumba' (married men) and 'aparanga' (bachelors) — a distinction driven by the scarcity of marriageable women.^[13][14] Nobility and wealthy commoners claimed girls as wives from birth, building large households that left poorer warriors with little chance of possible marriage. Taking a boy-wife was the established solution to that imbalance.^[15]

Boys selected as partners were usually between the ages of twelve and twenty years old.^[16] The boy's parents became the warrior's in-laws, and he was expected to maintain obligations toward them as such.^[17]Anal penetration played no part in the practice - Evans-Pritchard noted that Azande men found the idea disgusting and sex was understood to be intercrural.^[18]

The boy-wife also served an apprentice role, carrying his husband's shield on military activities and taking part in the practical and social life of the warrior company.^[19]Evans-Pritchard conducted his fieldwork in the Yambio district between 1926 and 1929, by which point colonialism had already dismantled the practice. He reconstructed his study through interviews with elders, at least one of whom is thought to have been a boy-wife himself in his youth.^[20][21]

An older warrior of standing could take more than one boy, these were referred to as 'kumba gude'.^[22]The relationship had its own set of names: the warrior was the boy's badiya ngbanga, meaning "court lover." Breaching the codes around these arrangements carried real consequences, sexual contact with a bachelor (aparanga), without proper arrangements could result in mutilation or a fine of twenty spears and a woman.^[23][7]

Women in Azande society had their own similar practices. In polygynous households, co-wives living in close quarters with limited access to their shared husband were documented as commonly forming same-sex relationships, though it was unlike the warrior marriages, these were socially disapproved of.^[24]

When the cycle completed and the boy reaching adulthood or the warrior eventually marrying women — the former boy-wife would start the same cycle over, taking his own boy-wife once he became a warrior.^[25]There were no "homosexuals" in the modern sense the practice was situational, structural, and temporary, rooted in the specific constraints of the warrior society rather than any concept of innate orientation. By the time colonial military service was abolished and rigid marriage customs loosened, the practice had already died out.^[26]

Buganda (present-day Uganda)

The Kingdom of Buganda is associated with one of the most widely known examples of pre-colonial African same-sex relations: Kabaka (King) Mwanga II, who ruled from 1884 to 1897. It was widely understood within his court that Mwanga engaged in sexual relations with male pages and subjects.^[27][28] In 1886, Mwanga ordered the execution of 45 male pages, 22 were Catholics and 23 Anglicans,most of them royal court pages who refused to renounce their Christian faith or submit to the king's sexual demands. The episode was later remembered by the Christian church as the martyrdom of the "Uganda Martyrs."^[29][30]Scholars have pointed out that the missionary written record needs to be read carefully and that every major account came from Christian missionaries whose writings fed directly into the civilizing logic of colonialism, and that those executed may have been political dissidents rather than men who refused sexual advances.^[31]

Mwanga came to the throne when he was sixteen, inheriting a court already divided between Catholic ,Protestant,and Muslim factions tied to competing colonial powers. As his pages converted to Christianity and began refusing royal commands on religious grounds — including traditional ritual obligations and sexual access — Mwanga saw it as his authority being undermined from within. He had already shown how far he would go: in 1885, he ordered the assassination of Anglican Bishop James Hannington at Buganda's eastern border before the bishop could enter the kingdom.^[32][33]

The pages were well known people. Among those executed were Charles Lwanga and Joseph Mukasa Balikuddembe, both of which held the court position of Master of the Pages.^[34] Lwanga had been shielding younger pages from Mwanga's advances, putting him in direct conflict with the king over control of the court. The youngest victim was Kizito, thirteen or fourteen years old, baptized by Lwanga just days before the executions.^[35][36] Most of the Catholic pages were burned alive at Namugongo on June 3, 1886 — a date that's a national holiday in Uganda, drawing hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to the shrine each year.^[37][38]

The twenty-two Catholic martyrs were canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1964, cementing the episode in church history.^[39] Uganda's 2014 Anti-Homosexuality Act framed homosexuality as a Western import, critics noted the irony that the martyrs' feast day, observed by the same legislators, was premised entirely on the documented existence of indigenous same-sex practice.^[40][41]

The historical record on Mwanga is a debate. Ugandan scholar Samwiri Lwanga-Lunyiigo, in his 2011 biography, argued that the pages were executed as suspected spies passing intelligence to European colonisers, and that the sexual framing was missionary propaganda, a way to discredit a king who refused baptism and resisted colonial encroachment and that the homosexuality charge was applied retroactively to make Mwanga appear despicable to his own people.^[42][43] Other accounts note that Mwanga had sixteen wives and numerous male lovers at the same time, and that within his court, his male and female intimates were referred to by the same term: Bakopi, meaning wives. He was addressed as nnanyimu or omufumbo — husband.^[40][44]

Langi and related Nilotic peoples (Northern Uganda)

Among the Langi of northern Uganda, effeminate males known as 'mudoko dako' were recognised as occupying a social position similar to women.^[45] They were allowed to marry men and integrated into the community in this gender-variant role, neither treated as taboo or punished for it.^[46][47]

The word 'dako' in the Lango language means "woman."^[48] Lango society recognised mudoko dako as a distinct gender position rather than a deviation from the two established ones, and they moved through community life normally, cooking, cleaning,farming , and even simulating menstruation and taking part in domestic life in ways that mapped onto the roles expected of women.^[49] The term 'dano mulokere' was also used for the same category. Earlier designations for men who became mudoko dako included 'Jo Apele' and 'Jo Aboich' , names that marked the transition before the fuller social identity was taken.^[50]

The primary ethnographic record comes from British anthropologist Jack Herbert Driberg, who lived with the Lango while serving in the Uganda Protectorate from 1912 and published 'The Lango: A Nilotic Tribe of Uganda' in 1923.^[51][52] He recorded that mudoko dako dressed in women's clothing, took on women's domestic roles, and in some cases went further, he observed individuals simulating menstruation using leaves.^[53][54] In Lango understanding, mudoko dako were thought to be impotent from birth, it was considered a condition attributed to God, which framed their role as something given rather than chosen, placing it outside the register of transgression.^[50]

The same categories, or one's that closely resemble appear among neighboring groups. The Teso people acknowledged men who dressed as women, and the Karamojong had comparable recognised figures.^[50]Among the Lugbara, gender-variant individuals served as spiritual mediums, their dual nature considered to make them better suited for communication with the spirit world. Transgender women mediums were called 'okule' ("like women") and transgender men 'agule' ("like men").^[55][56]

Ugandan legal scholar Sylvia Tamale, former dean of the law faculty at Makerere University and editor of 'African Sexualities: A Reader' ,has cited the mudoko dako as direct evidence that gender diversity in Uganda predates any Western or colonial contact.^[57][58]

Ancient Egypt

Homosexuality has also been documented in ancient Egypt.

Kingdom of Ndongo and Matamba (present-day Angola)

Portuguese Jesuit missionaries documented from around 1606 a category of people among the Mbundu-speaking Kingdom of Ndongo(Angolan coast) known as chibados and also referred to as quimbandas who were born male but living publicly as women.^[59] They formed a distinct caste, serving as spiritual arbiters in political and military decisions and performing burials.^[60] Jesuits in Angola described ‘‘chibados, as ‘‘extremely great fetishers, men who went around dressed as women.^[61] Marriages between chibados and men carried no social sanction and such unions were not just merely tolerated but honored. They were considered fine feiticeiros(accomplished sorcerers) and were a transvestite ‘‘homosexual’’ community, that set itself apart from the rest of society.^[61]

Queen Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba (c. 1583–1663), who ruled presenting as male and dressed as a man, kept over fifty chibados in her royal court and was said to have taken them as concubines.^[62] Jesuit and Inquisition records from 1606 and 1681 describe quimbandas as initiated through ceremonies involving spiritual possession by female entities, after which they lived as women and entered unions with men.^[63][64] As Portuguese colonial control expanded, the chibados disappeared from the record. James Sweet argues that once colonial rule dismantled the institutional structures that sustained the chibados' collective religious authority, their power was effectively diluted: "the institutional foundation that gave this collection of transvested homosexuals religious power all but disappeared. Because they could no longer meet collectively to share knowledge and affirm their religious power, their powers were effectively diluted." ^[63]

Hausa (northern Nigeria)

Among the Hausa of northern Nigeria, a category of feminine men known as Yan daudu (singular dan daudu) has been documented as a distinct social presence within Hausaland.^[65][66] The term derives from an old spirit in pre-Islamic Hausa animism, indicating its roots predate the Islamisation of the region.^[67][68] Hausa elites in the pre-colonial period regarded the yan daudu, along with the sexually suggestive dancing associated with the Bori spirit possession cult, as a remnant of the pagan past.^[69][70]

Yan daudu self-identified as men who act like women (kamar mata).^[71][72] They used stereotypically feminine speech and gestures and performed women's work, cooking and selling food, they presented themselves as 'womanlike' without adopting women's clothing or hairstyles, and were most frequently addressed as men.^[73][74]At nightclubs and outdoor festivities where traditional Hausa music was played, 'yan daudu' and 'karuwai' (independent women, who exchanged sex for money) danced publicly before large crowds of male visitors.^[75][76]Yan daudu also acted as intermediaries between male patrons and karuwai, receiving payment in return, which accounts for their widespread reputation as kawalai (pimps). The venues functioned as meeting points for men who sought other men sexually, referred to as masu harka ("those who do the business") and who could socialise and find partners under cover of the mixed crowds without revealing their sexuality to outsiders.^[77][78]

Yan daudu and their masculine-identified partners reproduced the structure of heterosexual Hausa relationships in their own arrangements. Yan daudu referred to each other using feminine names, pronouns, and adjectives, cast themselves in the role of mata (wife) or karuwa and called their male sexual partners miji (husband) or saurayi (boyfriend). The masculine partner was expected to take the insertive role in anal intercourse and to provide his dan daudu partner with regular gifts of money, clothing and travel. A second relational type involved an older wealthier man called k'wazo who sought a younger male or dan daudu partner, and referred to them as his haja (goods, merchandise), with the same insertive/receptive sexual expectations attached. Sex between yan daudu of equal social standing was called kifi (lesbianism) and was generally looked down upon within the subculture, although it did happen. Partners in such arrangements were said to yi canji (do an EXCHANGE) switching between insertive and receptive roles.^[79][80]

yan daudu were openly womanlike in behaviour, but they still remained discreet about their specific sexual involvements with men. Most married women and had children at some point, fulfilling Hausa Muslim obligations around marriage, which was understood as a social and religious duty. Same-sex activity was described in terms of wasa (play) or iskanci (craziness) framed as frivolous rather than serious which allowed it to coexist with a public identity as husband, father, and Muslim. A colonial-era text on the yan daudu existed in both Hausa and English. In the Hausa version there was little moral condemnation and open acknowledgement that yan daudu had sex with men, while in the English translation this was downplayed.^[81][82]

Mossi of present-day Burkina Faso

Among the Mossi of present-day Burkina Faso , same-sex relations were documented within the hierarchical structure of the royal court and the chieftaincy system. The primary source is Louis Tauxier, a French colonial administrator and ethnographer who served at Ouagadougou from 1908 to 1910 and published his observations in *Le Noir du Soudan: Pays Mossi et Gourounsi* in 1912.^[83]

The Mossi court was structured around a complex hierarchy of officials and attendants. Among those surrounding the Moro-Naba, the paramount ruler, was a class of attendants known as soronés, translated by Tauxier as "pages." The Baloum-Naba, one of the five chief ministers, held the specific title of chief of the soronés and functioned as a kind of commander of the interior of the palace. Soronés were found not only at the Moro-Naba's court but throughout the Mossi hierarchy, with ministers, dignitaries, canton chiefs, and even village chiefs.^[84]

Chiefs acquired soronés through a specific mechanism: any man whose marriage a chief had arranged owed that chief his firstborn son as a soroné, and his firstborn daughter to be married off to someone who would in turn supply future soronés, keeping the cycle running across generations.^[85]

Soronés were boys and adolescents selected between the ages of seven or eight and fifteen, generally chosen for their physical appearance, Tauxier notes they were selected from among the most attractive children, and with their women's hairstyles were sometimes described as extremely beautiful. They wore heavy copper bracelets on their wrists and ankles, the same ornaments worn by women. Tauxier states that they were coiffed as women and that according to accounts, they not only took on women's attributes but sometimes played the sexual role of women with the chiefs. He notes that Mossi men were bound by a religious rule prohibiting sexual relations with women on Fridays, but that this rule made no mention of soronés.^[86]

Tauxier is explicit that this was strictly a practice of the chiefly class. Ordinary Mossi men did not have the means to keep soronés, and Tauxier frames it as confined entirely to chiefs.^[87]

Soronés were also required to remain chaste with respect to women. According to Moulins, a colonial official also cited by Tauxier, an annual chastity verification was performed, soronés were invited to look at their reflection in a calabash filled with water, and based on how their image appeared, were declared pure or found to have violated their chastity, which before French occupation was punishable by immediate death. The rationale given was that soronés, as confidants of the Naba and keepers of state secrets, had to remain above the distractions of heterosexual love.^[88]

When a soroné reached adulthood, the Naba gave him a wife and released him. His firstborn son from that union belonged to the Naba, who would make him a soroné in turn; his firstborn daughter the Naba alone could give in marriage.^[89]

Wolof (Senegal/Gambia

The Wolof people of present-day Senegal and Gambia, had effeminate men known in Wolof as *gor-digen*, meaning "men-women", they were documented in the early twentieth century. Most accounts come from the British writer and traveller Geoffrey Gorer, who observed Wolof society in the early 1930s and published his observations in 'Africa Dances (1935)'.^[90]

Gorer describes gor-digen as a recognisable social category, saying that they did their best to live up to the epithet through their mannerisms, dress, and make-up, with some dressing their hair in the style of women. He records that they did not suffer socially, on the contrary, they were sought after as the best conversationalists and the best dancers. The only social consequence he highlighted was that Mohammedans refused them religious burial.^[91]

Gorer records that homosexuality was said to be relatively recent among the Wolof, or at least infrequent, but that it had by his time received "extremely august and almost publicly exhibited patronage", a reference to high-ranking figures whose identity he does not explicitly name such that pathics had become a common sight. He notes that the phase was often transitory, ending when the European patron keeping the boy departed, but that a number continued their practices by taste, interest, or economic reasons, and that by his time there was "quite a large pederastic society."^[92]

Dahomey (present-day Benin)

Fon of the Kingdom of Dahomey in present-day Benin, had a documented marriage institution that allowed wealthy women to formally take other women as wives. The primary account comes from American anthropologist Melville Herskovits, who conducted fieldwork in Abomey in the late 1920s and published his findings in *Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom* (1938).^[93]

Herskovits documented a marriage category known as gbosi dang gbosi, which means "giving the goat to the buck",which was available primarily to women of wealth and high status, and was very common among royalty. Under this arrangement, an economically independent woman would formally marry another woman, paying bridewealth and assuming all the obligations that a male husband would normally discharge toward the wife's family. The woman who married was addressed as 'husband' by her wife, and she established a separate house for her near her own compound.^[94]

Herskovits is says that this institution was primarily an economic and lineage mechanism, a means by which a wealthy woman without male heirs could establish and perpetuate her own compound. The female husband would choose a man from among her acquaintances to cohabit with her wife and father children. All children born of these unions belonged to the female husband and came under the control of her heirs after her death. The man chosen had no obligations, no payments, no duties toward the girl's family as all of these had already been discharged by the woman who had contracted the marriage.^[95]

HERSKOVITS also noted directly: "This fact does not imply a homosexual relationship, although it is not to be doubted that occasionally homosexual women who have inherited wealth or have prospered economically establish compounds of their own and utilize their relationship to the women they 'marry' to satisfy themselves." The institution was therefore not exclusively same-sex in nature but provided a structural vehicle through which same-sex relations could be formalised within Dahomean social order.^[96]

Maale people of southern Ethiopia

Among Maale people of southern Ethiopia, a recognised gender category called ashtime was documented by American anthropologist Donald Donham in his book Work and Power in Maale, Ethiopia. Ashtime were biological males who crossed over to feminine roles, dressing like women, performing female tasks, maintaining their own houses, and having sexual relations with men.^[97][98]

Donham did an interview with an ashtime who described his status in as a distinct third gender conception, saying: "The Divinity created me wobo, crooked. If I had been a man, I could have taken a wife and begotten children. If I had been a woman, I could have married and borne children. But I am wobo; I can do neither." Donham knew only one ashtime personally, Maale men told him that more had existed in the nineteenth century, and that part of the Maale king's traditional installation ceremony had consisted of a ritual ordination of an ashtime.^[99][100]

Donham argues that rather than discrete binary gender categories, the Maale recognised a continuous gradation of maleness, from the ritual king, understood as the male principle incarnate, downward through the hierarchy. Because women of childbearing age were barred entirely from the royal compound, domestic labour ordinarily performed by women was carried out instead by ashtime. In traditional times they were gathered and protected by the kings. On nights before royal rituals, when the king was prohibited from sexual relations with women, sexual relations with an ashtime were not prohibited. Donham made the conclusion that ashtime constituted "part of the generativity of maleness in Maale."^[101][102]

By 1975, the Maale considered ashtime "abnormal" a shift Donham attributes to the disruption of the traditional political and ritual structure following the abolition of the Maale kingship by the Ethiopian revolutionary government that year.^[103][104]

Konso (Ethiopia)

The Konso people of southern Ethiopia, a Cushitic-speaking people, were documented by British anthropologist C. R. Christopher Robert Hallpike , who conducted fieldwork among them and published his findings in *The Konso of Ethiopia* (1972).^[105]

The Konso had at least four distinct words for effeminate men, sagéda, miteeza, palandeza, and a fourth Hallpike noted but was never recorded, compared to only two words each for penis, vagina, and sexual intercourse. Hallpike observed this linguistic density as evidence of a particular cultural preoccupation with the category, while careful that the terms covered a broad range of effeminate behaviour and were not straightforwardly equivalent to homosexual.^[105]

Men who never married, weak or cowardly men, and men who wore skirts were called sagéda or one of the equivalent terms.

Men who actually wore skirts were few. Hallpike knew one personally in the town of Gaho, who earned his living curing skins, a female occupation. He was described as very effeminate in voice and manner and was subject to bullying, it was said of him that he would not retaliate if his food was taken from him or if he was knocked down. Sagéda who were effeminate in manner were bullied and ridiculed but were permitted to live inside the towns and were not expelled.^[106]

Hallpike was told that sagéda preferred to play the passive role in sodomy, and stated that the account he was given of the manner in which a sagéda would solicit a man for this in the night was too detailed to have been invented. He concluded that sodomy was not confined to relations between sagéda and other men, but was practised among ordinary men as well. He recorded an incident at Biso in which a group of men were joking with an elderly man known to have the reputation of a sagéda, telling him they would take him into the fields and rape him. Hallpike judged, on the basis of such incidents, the conduct of transvestites, and the sexual constraints placed on men by Konso society, that men sought relief in homosexual intercourse on occasion.^[107]

The Konso regarded such relations as sterile, unnatural, and deplorable. This view was embedded in their ritual numerology: the number five, understood as the sum of three and two, symbolised normal procreation, while six, the sum of three and three, was seen as the union of two males sterile, unnatural, and hostile to women. Six was an inauspicious number, and having five children of one sex and one of the other was considered dangerous. Hallpike treated this as evidence that homosexuality was a problem of which the Konso were keenly and structurally aware.^[108]

Basotho people(Lesotho)

Within the Basotho people of Lesotho, an institutionalised same-sex friendship practice among adolescent girls and women was documented by American anthropologist Judith Gay, who conducted fieldwork in a rural Lesotho village in 1976–77 and published her findings in the article *"Mummies and Babies" and Friends and Lovers in Lesotho* (1985).^[109]

The practice centred on dyadic relationships between girls of different ages, referred to in English as mummies and babies, the older girl taking the role of mummy, the younger the baby. Judith Gay documented that sexual intimacy was a recognised and expected component of these relationships, distinguishing them from ordinary friendship. One informant explained: "Friends may visit, love each other, even give gifts now and then. But between mummies and babies it is like an affair, a romance, and being alone together to hug and kiss each other is always a part of it."^[110]

Gay identified three levels of physical intimacy documented among Basotho women. The first was public greeting kissing on the lips between friends or relatives of either sex after absence, and sharing beds in crowded households. The second, specific to the mummy-baby relations, involved private kissing, embracing, and resting together, referred to in Sesotho as ho sunana and ho tsoarana. A third, more explicitly genital level was acknowledged to exist by some informants, particularly younger women, although others said they disapproved of it and regarded it as distinct from the normal mummy-baby practice. Judith Gay notes the ambiguity in responses may reflect both genuinely different attitudes and different interpretations of her questions.^[111]

The relationships were not considered to be in conflict with heterosexuality. Most women maintained mummy-baby relationships alongside courtship and marriage, and many older women described how the relationships had provided an emotional and material support through marriage, widowhood, and migration to towns. Gay argues that the relationships point to "the normality of adolescent homosexuality" and that the Basotho pattern challenges the Western insistence on polarising homosexuality and heterosexuality. A Mosotho woman summarised the attitude of many informants: "It's not wrong. It's just another part of life."^[112]

Gay traced the institution's roots to older Sesotho terminology for female affective partnerships called, ho ratana (to love one another), sethaka (a relationship between agemates), and mechaufa (a love affair between girls) — suggesting that formalised same-sex intimacy among women predated the modern school culture in which the mummy-baby form became most visible.^[113]

The practice appeared most widespread in secondary schools and towns. Parents generally tolerated it as a way of postponing heterosexual affairs, while mission school nuns and matrons strongly disapproved and attempted to suppress it.^[114]

Nandi people of modern khenya

The Nandi people of present-day Kenya, had formal institution known as woman-woman marriage, it was documented by American anthropologist Regina Smith Oboler, who conducted fieldwork in Nandi and published her findings in *Women, Power and Economic Change: The Nandi of Kenya* (1985).^[115]

Under this institution, a postmenopausal woman without a living son could use a portion of her house property to pay bridewealth for a younger woman, formally marrying her and assuming the social and legal status of her husband. The older woman was described as having been promoted to male status, in Nandi it's referred to as kagotogosta komostab murenik, meaning "she has gone up to the side of the men." She stopped having sexual intercourse with men, and all children borne by her wife belonged to her and were considered her legal children, inheriting property that had originally been her male husband's.^[116]

Oboler explicitly says that there is no evidence that the relationship between the two women was sexual. The wife was free to engage in sexual liaisons with men of her own choosing, and the female husband formerly had the right to arrange a regular male consort for her wife, typically an agnate of the female husband's own male husband. Today, sexual freedom for the wife is cited as one of the advantages of such a marriage.^[117]

The Woman-woman marriage was not rare. Among the two oldest age sets surveyed by Oboler, between 27 and 39 percent of sonless women had taken wives, and 3.5 percent of all households in her research community were headed by female husbands. The institution was described as stable and not declining, Oboler suggests it was more likely increasing. An alternative to woman-woman marriage was "marrying the house" (tunisiet ab got), where a sonless woman's youngest daughter was retained at home and her "husband" was declared to be the house itself, with her sons inheriting accordingly, but this one remained less popular than woman-woman marriage.^[118]

The institution was primarily a property and lineage mechanism rather than a sexual one. But the structural position it created of a woman holding full male social and legal status over another woman was a formally recognised feature of Nandi society predating colonial contact.^[119]

Mombasa (Kenya)

In Mombasa, Kenya, same-sex relations among the Swahili Muslim population were documented by British anthropologist Gill Shepherd, who conducted fieldwork among Comorians in Mombasa in the 1970s and published her findings in the chapter "Rank, Gender, and Homosexuality: Mombasa as a Key to Understanding Sexual Options" in *The Cultural Construction of Sexuality* (1987).^[120]

Shepherd estimated that of roughly 50,000 Swahili in Mombasa, approximately 5,000 were homosexual at the time of her fieldwork, with a higher proportion having been and lived homosexually at some point in their lives, given that many men and women shifted between homosexual and heterosexual relationships over a lifetime.^[121]

References

Category:Sexual orientations Category:LGBTQ in Africa Category:LGBTQ history in Africa Category:Transgender topics in Africa