On Loving an African Homeland That Won’t Let Me In

On Loving an African Homeland That Won’t Let Me In

I have carried Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegal inside me for as long as I can remember, long before I ever had the language for what that longing meant. They live in the rhythm of my grandmother’s stories, in the foods that found their way onto our table across an ocean and centuries, in the resilience I recognize in myself when I look honestly at where it comes from. To be a person of African descent in the United States is to carry a map of a homeland you were never allowed to fully know. I have always wanted to close that distance. I have always wanted to stand on that ground and feel, for once, unquestionably placed.

But I am a trans woman, and that fact alone closes the door before I ever reach it.

The laws that would greet me in Accra, in Lagos, in Dakar were not written by the ancestors I long to meet. They were written by British and French colonial administrators, men who arrived with Victorian sensibilities and left behind penal codes that criminalized identities and desires their own societies barely understood, let alone the societies they were imposing them on. Precolonial West Africa held far more room for gender and sexual variance than the laws now enforced in its name. What I face today is not African tradition. It is a colonial residue, still doing its damage a century after the empires that authored it began to fall.

There is a particular grief in this. It is one thing to be excluded by a place that never claimed you. It is another to be excluded by the place you have always claimed as your own, using rules that place never wrote for itself. I think about the version of me who might have walked freely through those markets and along those coastlines, welcomed simply as a daughter of the diaspora coming home. That version of me exists in a timeline where colonization interrupted less, where the fluidity that existed before conquest was allowed to persist rather than be legislated into shame.

I do not think my claim to Africa depends on any government’s permission. My blood and my history do not require a stamped visa of approval. But I would be lying if I said it doesn’t hurt to love a homeland that, as currently governed, would not let me set foot in it as myself. I hold onto the belief that the Africa I long for, the one older and wiser than any colonial code, still exists underneath the laws. I have not given up on meeting it.