Towards a Theology of Disruption: a Critique of Heteronormativity in post-Colonial African Consciousness

Abstract

Contemporary Africa struggles to make sense of its own rich heritage as a result of the colonial traumas it faces. These traumas have held Africa’s collective imagination captive and thus produced a form of politics of memory that makes Africa unable to reclaim its pre-colonial past. In Africa’s precolonial past, lies a rich expression of queerness and its link to the fecundity of life in which all beings participate in. A failure to retrieve this heritage has led to many Africans believing that queerness is fundamentally alien to the African way of life. It ought to be noted that this attitude, on the part of Africans, is linked to colonialism itself. It is the very nature of colonialism to erase a people’s memory of self and to usher in new matrices for meaning making and even value systems. This work intentionally makes the claim that Africa ought to embrace a decolonial approach to reclaiming its pre-colonial heritage, and to foster a theology of acceptance of Africa’s gay and queer members.