Before They Told Us Who We Were

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A think piece on ancient Yoruba sexuality, colonial erasure, and the memory we were taught to forget

Before you start reading this, I am not a member of the LGBTQ+ community but I do not stand for whitewashed history.

I wrote this recalling a conversation with my paternal granny where she schooled me on sexual behaviors in her days. It fuelled me to dig deeper.

You can now consume.

There is a sentence that has been repeated so many times it has begun to feel like fact. You have heard it at dinner tables, from pulpits, from the mouths of politicians who wrap themselves in the flag of culture when it is convenient. The sentence goes like this: “homosexuality is un-African. Transgenderism is a Western import. These things are foreign to us. They do not belong here.”

It is a confident sentence. It is also, when you follow the evidence back far enough, almost entirely wrong.

This is not a comfortable argument to make. It will disturb people who have built their sense of tradition on the assumption that the way things are now is the way they have always been. But the archive does not lie, even when we have been taught to look away from it. And if we are serious about culture, serious about history, serious about the Yoruba people specifically, then we owe ourselves the full picture, not just the version that was handed to us by the people who colonized our ancestors and then told those same ancestors that their oldest ways of living were sinful.

What the Language Knew

Let us begin with a fact so fundamental that it should reorganize everything that follows.

Before colonization, the Yoruba language had no gendered terms for children, siblings, or occupations. There were no words equivalent to son and daughter, no language for brother or sister, no gender markers attached to roles. Sociologist Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí documented this exhaustively in her landmark 1997 work, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Yoruba society was hierarchically organized, but the ranking of individuals depended on seniority or age, not on gender. Social identity was relational and not genderized.

Read that again. Not genderized.

In pre-colonial Yoruba society, identity was fluid, constantly shifting under the influence of who the person was interacting with at a given time. Social relationships were influenced by social factors, and anatomy did not determine who could rule and who could trade in the market. Neither family nor other social structures depended on anatomy.

This is not a minor footnote. This is the entire foundation of the conversation. A society that did not organize itself around biological sex as the primary category of personhood is a society that, by definition, had a fundamentally different relationship to gender and sexuality than the one we have inherited. The question was never what body you were born into. The question was how long you had lived, what you had earned, where you stood in relation to the community around you.

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British colonial rule imposed a rigid gender binary on Yorùbá society. British administrators redefined Yorùbá society through laws and records that fixed people into categories of “men” and “women,” concentrating property rights and inheritance in male hands through patrilineal succession. These redefinitions served concrete colonial objectives by creating clear, enforceable hierarchies of ownership and authority that enabled land seizure, taxation, and tighter administrative control.

The binary was not tradition. It was an administrative tool.

What the Orishas Already Knew

If you want to understand what a people believe at the deepest level, look at who they worship and how they imagine the divine. The Yoruba Orisha tradition, one of the oldest living spiritual systems in the world, is a cosmology saturated with gender fluidity, and it has been since long before any European arrived on the continent to tell us what was natural.

The Yoruba worldview is one of ontological wholeness, culminating in the supreme being Olodumare. Genderless, or possessing all possible gender expressions simultaneously, Olodumare’s plenitude is permeated by ashe, the divine energy and power that brings things into existence. The supreme force behind all creation does not have a gender. It contains all of them. That is where everything begins.

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Then there is Eshu Elegba, the orisha of crossroads and thresholds, the divine messenger who stands at the gate between the human world and the spirit world. Eshu is at once both male and female. Although his masculinity is depicted as visually and graphically overwhelming, his equally expressive femininity renders his enormous sexuality ambiguous, contrary, and genderless. Eshu is not a curiosity in the pantheon. He is one of the most important figures in the entire tradition. You salute him before you call on anyone else.

Inle, the divine hunter, fisher, and healer god, is referred to as the patron of homosexuals. He is most commonly characterized by his androgyny and fluidity. This is not a fringe interpretation. This is an ancient description of an ancient deity, embedded in the oral tradition for generations.

Orisha Ogun dresses in a stereotypically feminine way, wearing skirts made of palm fronds, and Esu is considered to be an ungendered Orisha.

And then there is the practice that scholar J. Lorand Matory documented in his study of the Oyo Yoruba: Shango’s possession priests include the awe-inspiring male elegun who dress as women. All possession priests, whether male or female, are called “wife of the orisha.” Both males and females possessed by an orisha are said to be “mounted,” the term also used for the passive role in sex. Initiates undergoing affiliation with an orisha are called “iyawó,” which also means “bride,” regardless of the initiate’s gender.

Male priests dressed as women, called brides, carrying out sacred rituals that the entire community participated in and affirmed. This was not transgression. This was tradition. This was the cosmology expressing itself through human bodies, and no one in the pre-colonial Yoruba world thought to call it foreign or unnatural because it was neither.

What the Oral Literature Confirmed

The spiritual tradition is not the only archive. In 2013, scholar George Olusola Ajibade published a peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Homosexuality in which he examined Yoruba oral literature specifically to investigate whether same-sex intimacy had any presence in the historical record. The study concludes that the representation of lesbianism and same-sex culture in diverse oral literature, as the repertoire of people’s experiences and worldview, confirmed its presence and practices in Yorùbá society.

The article argues that the preconceived obscenity of lesbianism and homosexuality among the Yorùbá hinges on the culture of silence within the cultural milieu of the people, not on any evidence of ancient prohibition. Silence is not the same as absence. A thing can be present and unspoken. In many traditional societies, what happened between adults was not the community’s business to narrate or categorize. The oral literature, however, preserved the traces regardless.

Baum’s ethnographic survey of 50 African cultures established the incidence of three types of homosexual behavior in traditional African societies: transgenerational, transgender, and egalitarian relationships. The transgenerational and transgender patterns of homosexual behaviors are of great significance in many traditional African belief systems.

Fifty cultures. Three distinct patterns. Documented across the continent, not imported from abroad.

What the British Brought Instead

Now we arrive at the turn that changes everything. Because if these things were present, why does the dominant narrative insist they were never here? And why do Yoruba people today, many of them, speak about homosexuality and transgenderism with the kind of visceral disgust that feels ancient, even though the evidence suggests the disgust itself is the newer arrival?

Prior to colonization, many African societies had diverse attitudes toward same-sex relations, with some cultures even accepting or integrating such practices into their social norms. However, the arrival of colonial powers, particularly from Britain, France, and Portugal, brought with it Victorian-era moralities that criminalized same-sex acts. These colonial powers introduced laws that explicitly banned “unnatural offenses” or “sodomy,” often modeled after Section 377 of the British penal code, which was enacted in 1861.

The most notable of these laws was the Criminal Code Act of 1916, which made it a crime for “any person who has carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature.” These laws were retained after Nigeria gained independence in 1960, becoming part of the Nigerian Criminal Code.

No “native” ever participated in their making. Colonizers saw indigenous cultures as sexually corrupt. Where precolonial peoples had been permissive, sodomy laws would cure them and defend their new, white masters against moral contagion.

Sit with that for a moment. The laws that today feel like ancestral moral code were written by people who were not Yoruba, did not consult Yoruba people, and were explicitly designed as a corrective to what they perceived as indigenous permissiveness. The British came, looked at what was here, decided it was corrupt, and replaced it with Victorian Christianity’s particular terror of the body. And then left. And what they left behind stayed.

Nigeria became the first country in the modern world to constitutionally criminalize same-sex relationships with 14-years imprisonment, when the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act passed in 2014. The man who championed African nations against homosexuality in international forums, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, called same-sex relationships “un-Biblical, unnatural, and un-African.” He used the word un-African. About a law that was written in London. Based on a code developed for colonial India. Enforced by people who thought the Orisha tradition itself was satanic.

The irony would be funny if the consequences were not so devastating for the people living under these laws right now.

The Silence We Inherited

There is something particular about the way this erasure works. It does not feel like erasure from the inside. It feels like memory. It feels like something your grandmother knew, something your pastor confirmed, something the whole community agrees on. The colonial project was so thorough that it replaced the old knowledge with new certainty, and the new certainty forgot its own origins.

In the period of colonialism, those recording and studying behaviors tended to be anthropologists and ethnologists in the employ of the colonial state, which both ignored and peripheralized evidence of same-sex intimacies. The people who wrote the history were the same people who decided what the history was allowed to contain. What they did not want to see, they did not write down. And several generations later, we treat the gaps in their records as proof that nothing was there.

But the Orishas remember. The oral tradition remembers. The researchers who go looking for what the archive left out keep finding it, in the poetry, in the priesthood, in the language itself.

What We Do With This

I am not making a simple argument that pre-colonial Yoruba society was a utopia of sexual liberation, because it was not that either and the historical record is too complicated for that kind of romantic simplification. What I am saying is something more specific and more verifiable.

The claim that same-sex love and gender variance are un-Yoruba, un-African, foreign inventions brought by the West is not supported by the evidence. It is, in fact, the opposite of the evidence. What the West brought was not homosexuality. What the West brought was the law that made it criminal, the theology that made it sinful, and the silence that made us forget we had ever known any different.

The Yoruba people who are today most loudly defending “tradition” by condemning queer people are, in many cases, defending a tradition that is barely a century old, one that was handed to their great-grandparents by the people who colonized them. The actual tradition, the one that goes back further, that lives in the cosmology, in the language, in the oral literature, that one is considerably less certain about all of this.

A man dressed as a bride to worship the thunder god, and the whole empire gathered to watch. An androgynous deity stood at every crossroads, simultaneously everything, refusing the binary. A language moved through centuries without needing to separate its children into two opposed categories.

That is the Yoruba inheritance too.

And it was here long before anyone arrived to tell us it was not.

Sources drawn from: Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women (1997); George Olusola Ajibade, “Same-Sex Relationships in Yorùbá Culture and Orature,” Journal of Homosexuality (2013); J. Lorand Matory, Sex and the Empire That Is No More (1994); Human Rights Watch, “This Alien Legacy: The Origins of Sodomy Laws in British Colonialism” (2008); Robert Baum, “Homosexuality and the Traditional Religions of the Americas and Africa” (1993); African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), “Cosmological Queerness Across the Yoruba Diaspora” (2018).