The Idea of Africa: Queer Visual Arts, Time, and the Postcolonial Archive

A musician costumed as a mosquito plays the organ in an empty church, against the backdrop of Yoruba ritual drumming and chants. An academic book on gender and sexuality affirms the existence of sexual diversity in precolonial Nigeria. Glimpses of life outside the church pinpoint the resistant underground lives in postcolonial Nigeria of queer Nigerians and indigenous Nigerian religions. In the central aisle of the church a woman captures the musician with a net. A second woman joins the first woman in an interpretive dance where they both wield African grass brooms. A big rainbow flag, assembled from six geles (headdresses), makes its way across the central aisle of the church. These fragments from the short film AfroOdyssey IV: 100 Years Later (2014) by Nigerian-American multidisciplinary visual artist Adejoke Tugbiyele evince the film’s queer investment in time and temporality and illustrate the turn to archival activism in African queer visual arts. Tugbiyele’s film itself functions as a counterarchive: it assembles and recontextualizes heterogeneous archival materials—an academic book on gender and sexuality, excerpts from the speeches of British colonial administrator and first Governor General of Nigeria Lord Frederik Lugard,1 Yoruba ritual practices— to dispute heteronormative historiographies of Nigeria. By physically staging these materials within the colonial space of the church while queer life persists outside its walls, Tugbiyele figures the archive not as a neutral repository but as a contested terrain in which queerness is written in and out of history. Her archival activism coincides with the mobilization of the archive by scholars and activists of queer Africa (see, for instance, Macharia 2015, Migraine-George and Currier 2016). Tugbiyele belongs to a growing group of African visual artists who develop curatorial archival practices and uphold queer temporalities that respond to anti-LGBTQ legislations on the continent.2 Her work joins that of Ugandan sculptor Leilah Babirye on queer Ugandan royal ancestors, Nigerian-American drawing portraitist Toyin Ojih Odutola on queer Nigerian aristocracies, and Ghanaian performance artist Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi on queer Ghanaians in confronting the hauntologies or colonial specters that trouble hegemonic postcolonial African temporalities and prescribe the anti-LGBTQ legislations in Uganda, Nigeria, and Ghana. This essay brings in conversation African visual artists and anti-LGBTQ legislations to examine the different deployments of time and temporality at work in the landscape of postcolonial discourses about sexual diversity in Africa. It locates the queer as a site of postcolonial hauntology, a chronotopic or spatiotemporal battleground, and, ultimately, an organizing narrative principle for postcolonial ideas of Africa. In showing how these ideas of Africa simultaneously conjoin and disjoin antagonist discourses, the essay elucidates the queer as a point of entanglement between postcolonial African articulations of the idea of Africa and the questions of time and temporality.My consideration of how queerness mediates postcolonial ideas of Africa along a temporal axis expands on Rahul Rao’s (2020: 9) examination of “the manner in which contemporary struggles over queer freedoms return to the scene of the colonial and the work that such ‘returns’ seek to accomplish.” Like Rao, I am interested in returns to the colonial scene, but not just for what they accomplish. I am specifically interested in what postcolonial returns to the colonial scene do to time and do with time. My essay is invested in how these competing “doings” enter in dialogue, conflict, and agreement around the idea of Africa. These encounters defeat colonial chronotopias, engage postcolonial hauntologies, and produce new spatiotemporal configurations of the African past. To be clear, this essay does not claim that precolonial African societies were queer utopias. Neither do the four artists examined in this essay. At issue here are the gaps and silences around queer existences in precolonial African societies. In thinking through the competing chronotopes of Africa that animate discourses around LGBTQ rights on the continent, I am also thinking alongside Stella Nyanzi (2013, 2014; Nyanzi and Karamagi 2015) and Sylvia Tamale (2013, 2014, 2020), whose analyses of the heteronormative historical revisionism performed by the Ugandan 2009 Anti-Homosexuality Bill and 2014 Anti-Homosexuality Act address the temporal stakes of LGBTQ rights on the continent.If postcolonial ideas of Africa are fought over on a temporal terrain, they are also fought over on an archival one. Following Achille Mbembe (2002), the archive is not a neutral storehouse of documents but a material and symbolic apparatus of the state that regulates what can be remembered, forgotten, and claimed as tradition. It is both a building and an institution, but also the selective process through which certain traces are elevated to the status of evidence while others are discarded or rendered unintelligible. Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s (1995) insistence that power enters at every moment of historical production—from the making of sources to their enshrinement in the archive and their later narration—further underscores that archival silences around African queer pasts are not accidental gaps but effects of heteronormative governance. Africana and Black feminist work has sharpened this insight by theorizing both the violence and the limits of the archive. Saidiya Hartman’s (2008) method of “critical fabulation” and Tina Campt’s (2017) turn to minor and quotidian visual archives elaborate practices of working with and against archival violence. These practices refuse to accept the archive’s lacunae as final while also refusing the fantasy of a fully recoverable past. Read through these lenses, African anti-LGBTQ legislations appear as projects of archival capture that seek to secure state custody over the postcolonial archive of sexuality, while the practices of artists such as Tugbiyele, Babirye, Odutola, and Fiatsi emerge as counter-archival labors that reassemble suppressed lineages, minor visualities, and speculative genealogies into alternative chronotopes of Africanness.Throughout this essay, I use the terms “counterarchive” and “living archive” to name the ways in which African queer artistic practices both contest and rework the temporal and epistemic regimes of the postcolonial archive. By counterarchive I mean practices that confront the state’s custodial power over documents and narratives not simply by adding suppressed materials to an existing repository, but by unsettling its organizing principles: what counts as evidence, who qualifies as a subject of history, and which temporalities can be claimed as “African.” Living archive emphasizes the generative, embodied, and iterative character of these practices. For instances, the archives fashioned by Tugbiyele, Babirye, Odutola, and Fiatsi unfold through performance, speculation, visual seriality, and quotidian practice rather than through static preservation. In dialogue with Hartman’s “critical fabulation” and Campt’s attention to minor visual archives, I treat these works as ongoing processes of rearchiving that expose the colonial and postcolonial hauntologies sedimented in official records while assembling alternative chronotopes of Africanness.My use of counterarchive and living archive thus names both a critique of the heteronormative postcolonial archive and a methodological commitment to reading African queer arts as sites where temporal orders are being reimagined and the idea of Africa is being rewritten.Reading African anti-LGBTQ legislations and queer visual arts through these Africana theories of the archive allows me to treat both law and art as competing archival regimes. The bills in Uganda, Nigeria, and Ghana do not simply reference tradition: they claim custodianship of the postcolonial archive, arrogating to themselves the power to decide which sexual histories count as “African” and which must be disavowed. By contrast, the practices of Adejoke Tugbiyele, Leilah Babirye, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi constitute queer counterarchives and living archives. These archives take the form of curatorial, speculative, and performance-based practices that reassemble discarded materials, suppressed lineages, and marginal bodies into alternative chronotopes of Africanness. In dialogue with Mbembe, Trouillot, Hartman, and Campt, I approach these works as forms of archival activism that do not merely supplement the national archive but contest its power to define the temporal horizons of African queerness and of Africa itself.Leilah Babirye was outed in a local newspaper following the passage of Uganda’s 2014 Anti-Homosexuality Act. Babirye fled the country and found refuge in New York, where she is now pursuing her artistic practice. A trademark of Babirye’s work is her insertion of a queer lineage in the different clans of Uganda, including Ugandan royal families, to dispute accounts of an imported African homosexuality. 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At the the of indigenous and outside of the church and on the of postcolonial Nigerian to the of the of the colonial scene of the church by the who the and the of the African These emerge from the of or what by which “the of of to both and is Tugbiyele’s symbolic use of the in AfroOdyssey and her work to and work the of a in the of temporalities in the postcolonial and these temporalities along a a point of and the hauntologies by colonial and specters to queer the postcolonial of precolonial African sexual and the as a the is a with and The has in around the as a of the of postcolonial and the of These by in in the of and a is in Tugbiyele’s use of the queer in these new and rights in these contemporary The artist as on the temporal regimes from colonial a of queer the the way for by space for new postcolonial temporal regimes. that the grass and of the to with in this as with the the artist the in of her postcolonial ideas of Africa from colonial discourses of with and the space for by the of the rainbow Like her of the Tugbiyele here the by Nigerian This not the between sexual and but also the colonial and postcolonial temporal of and The Babirye’s use of African out the of and Babirye her of African in a her first at the of where she her in and dialogue with from the African work of Tugbiyele’s coincides with use of the speculative to postcolonial with precolonial queer The speculative Tugbiyele’s and work on a and temporality by The speculative to hauntologies and the temporality of queerness by a of the that not and the that be take of what the speculative a temporal and chronotopic through an of from and to the To this Odutola, Tugbiyele, makes on sexual but to LGBTQ rights and By the of her queer Odutola a temporality of African and by colonial and violence. The and of and queerness queerness in and in with the of queer in Africa in the of the African and and in the African African and the of the African queerness as that sexual and to and African rather than seek to into The African for a by of African which the for a of lives outside of and and is to ways of being which for at of and an of and queerness The of in work thus material to queer of queerness and into a joins in Tugbiyele and Babirye’s use of the and African to claim space for African Babirye’s a of of queerness and through her trademark use of the of and to her queer The of discarded material to her queer is a of postcolonial The of and by of and is a of and through colonial while is a practice of and work that a new from the of Babirye’s queer are and their as The of the queer of Babirye, Tugbiyele, and Odutola in their African and postcolonial the of these histories from the postcolonial of for queer in the African and postcolonial into a practice of in the work of multidisciplinary performance artist Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi is a whose Odutola, Babirye and to anti-LGBTQ the Fiatsi lives and works in she also artistic practice of queer her to living in Ghana and not seek in Fiatsi her through a and practice of I am here of as the and of power and as the of the to around power in an Ghanaian elucidates her practice of a of that to power and that The artist queerness in by her in the of the in The in into the of gender practices in the and the of the practice of space in of this space of gender to work into the central of the symbolic of and and in a across the Fiatsi (2014) her to a a in of a of and I of the royal a of as an to the ancestors, and the her use of the and in Fiatsi her on the it to contest and with both the and the of the Ghanaian affirms the existence of queer by and African Her practice of space is a practice of and that makes African queerness with the African Her of and her African queerness as not by the queer and the quotidian In Campt’s these to the of do not but a of Black and queer in the minor of By to with these Fiatsi a living archive of African queer quotidian life that both the of postcolonial legislations and the of rights Odutola, whose also a scene, the to African queerness and queerness into the narrative in a way that it and The is just ritual of her with the for this practice of queer bodies In these the artists these of of the as of the through the on the and the of for the of the The the in their queerness and reading of visual arts and the of art in the and of law and, by the of African artistic as archival practices in their on African queer artistic activism has African thus the status of Africa in of LGBTQ rights in Africa. the first African country to for LGBTQ has as both the of rights on the and the of queer arts. The four artists examined in this essay queer in Africa by forms of artistic activism African and by on the of the archive to The of these practices in to legislations the of interpretive and archival space by the postcolonial bills that to themselves the to decide what counts as African sexual histories and to a heteronormative African in law and in the archive, the artists counterarchives of queer ancestors, lineages, and In their different Tugbiyele, Babirye, Odutola, and Fiatsi refuse both the archival of African queerness by postcolonial legislations and the colonial that queer with works expose anti-LGBTQ as projects of archival capture that to precolonial and colonial histories of sexual diversity and to queerness in a or a the temporal and archival of these artists a of queer returns to the colonial scene that the temporality of the Tugbiyele’s of the and the flag, Babirye’s queer ancestors, speculative aristocracies, and queer forms of archival and chronotopic colonial and postcolonial queerness into the precolonial archive, and sexual to projects of and African In they rather than the of colonial violence and the queer not as a of but as a of African to these queer archives and counterarchives that LGBTQ rights in Africa are not marginal or but sites where African are being and legislations the archive in to within a temporal that queer and queer African visual arts respond by alternative archival practices that between and queerness and new chronotopes of In out the of time and temporality in both legislations and their artistic this essay has that queer and the sites where postcolonial ideas of Africa are being and and where African are being the of colonial and postcolonial