Sabelo Ndlovu Gatsheni, Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa: Myths of Decolonisation (CODESRIA, 2013), 32. The colonial matrices of power may be conceived as a set of transhistorically adaptive hierarchical and heterarchical governing structures—operative on varying levels of abstraction, from the conceptual planes of ontology and epistemology to the more concrete, material registers of political economy—that have subjected the African continent, as well as Asia and Latin America, to five centuries of Euro-American domination. This text performs a continuous interrogative movement along these planes. See also Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, and Praxis (Duke University Press, 2018); Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2 (April 2007); and Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards The Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003).
The term “necropolitics” is borrowed from Achille Mbembe, who defines it as the sovereign’s “power and capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die.” This power, of course, is bound to a racialized calculus of which lives matter and which do not. See Necropolitics (Duke University Press, 2019).
Many of these bills make same-sex intimacy punishable by death or with decades/life-long imprisonment. Some examples include Uganda’s “Anti-Homosexuality Act,” passed in 2023; Ghana’s “Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill,” passed in 2023; and Nigeria’s “Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act,” passed in 2014. At present, queerness is formally criminalized in just over two-thirds of the countries that make up the African continent.
Sokari Ekine and Hakima Abbas, introduction to Queer African Reader (Pambazuka Press, 2013), 81. Ekine and Abbas also point out that such analyses are insufficient in accounting for queerphobic legislation in African countries colonized by other European powers such as France and Portugal, who didn’t impose such colonial penal codes.
Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (University of California Press, 2001), 46.
Thomas Sankara, the assassinated Pan-African socialist revolutionary and the first president of Burkina Faso, might have been one exception. In Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle, Sankara writes, “The transformation of mentalities would be incomplete if the new woman had to live with the old kind of man.”
Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 124–27.
Oyěwùmí, Invention of Women, 126. Oyěwùmí’s observations on the omnipotence of colonial state power resonate with Mbembe’s notion of “commandement,” which unveils the “colonial rationality” that guides the postcolonial state’s arbitrary, authoritarian exercises of power. See Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 24–65.
The references to Nzegwu and Amadiume are provided in footnote 23. See also Peter Ekeh, “Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa: A Theoretical Statement,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 17, no. 1 (January 1975).
See Keguro Macharia, “Ethnicity as Frottage in Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya,” in Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora (NYU Press, 2019). See also Ekine and Abbas, introduction to Queer African Reader.
M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Duke University Press, 2006), 25–27. I am referring here to contradictory yet equally denigrating colonial projections of African masculinity and African sexuality. In the first case, Black African men are emasculated through their infantilized rendering as “boys” in need of civilizational maturation. In the second case, both African men and women are constructed as beastly, hypersexualized entities unable to control their fleshly desires due to their diminished mental capacity for “reason”—a further justification for their domination.
Katherine McKittrick tethers her description of the “demonic” to its less ecclesiastical ascriptions in the fields of mathematics, physics, and computer science, stating that “the demonic, then, is a non-deterministic schema: it is a process that is hinged on uncertainty and non-linearity because the organizing principle cannot predict the future. This schema calls into question ‘the always non-arbitrary pre-prescribed’ parameters of sequential and classificatory linearity.” While my use of the term aligns with the above definition, I am also interested in what is implied by the original ecclesiastical ascription, and what it says about Christian theology’s entanglement with the logic of colonial modernity—in other words, that the term’s reference to one’s possession by spirits (a defining characteristic of plural non-Western cosmologies) betrays an anxiety over the sovereign disintegration of the individuated modern subject. See Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xxiv.
See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (Pantheon Books, 1978).
Kwame Edwin Otu, Amphibious Subjects: Sasso and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana (University of California Press, 2022), 7–8. Otu discusses how LGBT+ human rights groups assimilate and flatten indigenous social classifications such as “sasso,” which in the Ghanian context designates “self-identified effeminate men, men and women who engaged in homoerotic sex, and men who act effeminately (but are not self-identified effeminate men) and women who act masculinely.”
Rahul Rao, Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (Oxford University Press, 2020), 11.
Rao, Out of Time, 25, 136.
Otu, Amphibious Subjects, 79.
Fani-Kayode’s father, a fixture of the political elite, was involved in the struggle for Nigeria’s independence. Following the formation of the First Republic in 1960 he was elected deputy premier, as well as minister of local affairs, of the Western Region (at the time, one of the three units of the federal administration). The artist’s father was also the Balogun of Ife (a ceremonial chieftaincy role), and so his family had custodial responsibilities over a shrine in Ife—a town of central importance to Yoruba history and mythology. In 1966, Fani-Kayode’s father was ousted from power by a military coup and, unlike most of his colleagues in senior political positions, was able to escape assassination. After a countercoup six months later, which kicked off the Nigerian Civil War, the Fani-Kayode family relocated to Brighton, a small seaside town in Britain, when the artist was eleven years old. Fani-Kayode attended various schools in the UK and eventually went to Georgetown University in Washington, DC, thereafter attended the Pratt institute in New York, and then settled in London in 1983, where he produced work for the final six years of his life.
Explicit references to gay Euro-American subcultures are made especially evident in photographs such as Nothing to Lose IX (Bodies of Experience) (1989), where the figure dons a leather bondage harness. These contemporary, sexualized garments appear alongside ritualized objects such as masks, altars, totems, and divining substances. Ian Bourland provides a detailed account of Fani-Kayode’s artistic formation vis-à-vis the countercultural movements of 1980s Britain in Bloodflowers: Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Photography, and the 1980s (Duke University Press, 2019).
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide (Routledge, 2014), 3–4.
Santos, Epistemologies of the South, 8.
Oyěwùmí, Invention of Women, 13–14.
For other decolonial feminist engagements that similarly cross this abyssal line, see: Maria Lugones, “Towards a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia 25, no. 4 (Fall 2010), as well as “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System,” Hypatia 22, no. 1 (Winter, 2007); Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (Zed Press, 1987); Nkiru Nzegwu, Family Matters: Feminist Concepts in African Philosophy of Culture (State University of New York Press, 2006); Françoise Vergès, A Decolonial Feminism, trans. Ashley J. Bohrer (Pluto Press, 2021).
Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, What Gender Is Motherhood? Changing Yorùbá Ideals of Power, Procreation and Identity in the Age of Modernity (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), 7.
Strongman offers J. Land Matory’s counterargument proposing gender as a “long-standing reality of Yorúbà social life.” Strongman cites Matory’s anthropological observation of “sacramental cross-dressing” where, for example, male Ṣàngó priests wear garments associated with the female gender. Matory’s thinking would seem to complement Fani-Kayode’s mention of “transexual priests” and Margaret Drewal’s theorization of Yoruba rituals as creating the conditions for improvised “gender play.” See Roberto Strongman, Queering Black Atlantic Religions: Transcorporeality in Candomblé, Santería, and Vodou (Duke University Press, 2019), 22. See also Rotimi Fani-Kayode, “Traces of Ecstasy” (1987), in Rotimi Fani-Kayode & Alex Hirst: Photographs (Autograph and Revue Noir, 1996), 9; and Margaret Thompson Drewal, Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency (Indiana University Press, 1992).
Knowing or fulfilling one’s destiny is a complicated matter, however, and is the point of consulting Ifá priests who perform divination rituals. Destiny is also not fixed and is co-constituted by ẹsẹ, variably known as “struggle” and “effort.” See Oludamini Ogunnaike, Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020), 243–44.
The Yoruba metaphysical conception of self finds strong affinities with the detailed accounts of other West African and Afro-diasporic philosophical traditions offered by Strongman, all of which, he argues, problematize and exceed post-Enlightenment Cartesian formulations. See Queering Black Atlantic Religions, 10, 19.
Babatunde Lawal, quoted in Oyěwùmí, What Gender Is Motherhood?, 66–67.
Distinguishing between same-sex desire and sexual identity, Fani-Kayode himself writes: “It is clear that enriching sexual relationships between members of the same sex have always existed. They are part of the human condition, even if the concept of sexual identity is a more recent notion.” Fani-Kayode, “Traces of Ecstasy,” 8.
Otu discusses how, among the sasso in Ghana, local negotiations of gender and sexuality vis-à-vis Global North LGBT+ interpellations give rise to shifting self-identifications dependent on context. Otu indigenizes this malleable mode of queer embodiment by drawing on philosopher Kwame Gyeke’s notion of “amphibious subjectivity” and his extensive study of Akan philosophy. Strongman also brings in Gyeke as well as Kwasi Wiredu (another Ghanaian philosopher) to discuss the tripartite Akan conception of the self and its queer possibilities. See Otu, Amphibious Subjects, 99, and Strongman, Queering Black Atlantic Religions, 11. See also Kwame Gyeke, An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme (Temple University Press, 1995); and Kwasi Wiredu, Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective (Indiana University Press, 1996).
Fani-Kayode, “Traces of Ecstasy,” 6.
Though a delicate metaphysical point, I would like to clarify here a different orientation towards the spirit world, one in which this world is not conceived as purely transcendent—in other words, only existing remotely in a heavenly elsewhere, as in the Judeo-Christian conception. Rather, according to Yoruba, Akan, and other indigenous African/Afro-diasporic cosmologies, the invisible spirit world bears an entangled, proximate relation to the earthly world of the living. This sutured relation of the world of the living to that of the ancestors and the deities gives rise to an understanding of the cosmos as one composed from the interaction of visible and invisible forces. It is from this conception of reality, which acknowledges human-spirit sociality, that I use the term “animism.” See Murray Hofmeyr, “From Hauntology to a New Animism? Nature and Culture in Heinz Kimmerle’s Intercultural Philosophy,” TD: The Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa 3, no. 1 (July 2007).
Kobena Mercer, “Mortal Coil: Eros and Diaspora in the Photographs of Rotimi Fani-Kayode,” in Travel & See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s (Duke University Press, 2016), 116.
Mercer, “Mortal Coil,” 117.
Henry John Drewal, John Pemberton III, and Rowland Abiodun, Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought (Center for African Art, 1989), 22.
The term “spectropoetic” was coined by Derrida in Specters of Marx, but I have adapted it in my critical and curatorial practice to theorize, via experimental photographic and moving-image aesthetics, the conjunction of the paradigms of the hauntological and the postcolonial. I mobilize the term “decolonial spectropoetics” in two ways: first, to discuss artworks that materialize the inherent spectrality of the contemporary African postcolonial condition—the kaleidoscopic entanglement of the non-pastness of slavery and colonization with the non-arrived futurity of abolition and decolonization; and second, to discuss how such artworks reveal the structuring absences of Euro-centered formulations of hauntology through their structural incorporation of African indigenous systems of thought, many of which, I argue, are always already “hauntological.” See Living with Ghosts: A Reader, ed. KJ Abudu (Pace Publishing, 2022); and KJ Abudu, “Living with Ghosts: Decolonial Spectropoetics in Contemporary African Art” (unpublished master’s thesis, Columbia University, New York, 2022).
Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2019).
Mercer, “Mortal Coil,” 117.
Margaret Thompson Drewal, Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency (Indiana University Press, 1992), 174.
Drewal, Yoruba Ritual, 183.
Oyěwùmí, What Gender Is Motherhood?, 71.
Strongman, Queering Black Atlantic Religions, 3.
Fani-Kayode, “Traces of Ecstasy,” 1996.
Spiritual entities from the otherworld have historically been called upon for tactical wisdom and enduring strength in the Black Atlantic world, especially during moments of personal and collective crisis. We might recall the Haitian Revolution of 1791, wherein voodoo ritual became what C. L. R. James calls the “medium of conspiracy” for the counter-modern rebellion of the enslaved. See Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 147, 275.
Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 281.
Mercer, “Mortal Coil,” 118.
Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality (City Light Books, 1962), 170.
Bataille, Eroticism, 29; Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider, 54, italics mine →.
Strongman, Queering Black Atlantic Religions, 10, 19.
Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not A Luxury,” in Sister Outsider, 37.
Strongman, Queering Black Atlantic Religions, 2.
Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
See Ron Eglash, African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design (Rutgers University Press, 1999).
Da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, 82–83.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (Grove Press, 1963), 2.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 145–80.
Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” 53.
Otu, Amphibious Subjects, 21.
Influenced by Cedric J. Robinson and Charles H. Long, Carter unpacks “anarchy” etymologically as an-archē in Greek. Echoing Sylvia Wynter, Carter argues that colonial capitalist modernity is premised on the reproduction of a particular “Enlightenment archē,” a “specific foundation or principle of sovereignty or rule,” which came into being in the mid-fifteenth century. An-archē, then, which implies a fugitive movement away from racial capitalism’s archē, is embodied most fully by the Black radical tradition and its “spiritual vocation,” inclusive of all its African cosmological transferences. See J. Kameron Carter, The Anarchy of Black Religion: A Mystic Song (Duke University Press, 2023), 11.
Carter, The Anarchy of Black Religion, 19.