Shoga: An Indigenous African Identity That Predates By Centuries the Laws That Criminalize It

The shoga of the East African coast, a man accepted as a member of women’s society, did not emerge from a vacuum nor from the imposition of outside influence. She was born from the long encounter between Bantu-speaking Africans and Muslim traders from the Arabian Peninsula.

Unlike medieval Christianity, which not only condemned “Sodomites” but sought to prosecute and exterminate them, the posture of classical Islam was categorically different. Liwat [anal intercourse between men] was prohibited, but in practice Islamic jurisprudence was less interested in policing private lives than its Christian counterpart. That was left to Allah’s judgment. Sin may have required repentance, but not necessarily prosecution.

This created a de facto tolerance for discrete same-sex relationships throughout the Muslim world. And not always that discrete. The beloved youth – the ghulam or amrad – appears throughout classical Arabic and Persian poetry, not as a scandalous figure but as a positively conventional object of male desire.

It is into this Islamic cultural framework, transplanted to the East African coast over centuries of trade, settlement, and intermarriage, that the figure of the shoga first appears. The Swahili world was not an African world that Islam touched lightly. It was a world in which Islam was constitutive—shaping law, poetry, architecture, commerce, and domestic life. Kiswahili reflects this: some thirty percent of its vocabulary derives directly from Arabic. To understand the shoga is to understand how an Islamic cultural tolerance for gender difference was absorbed, transformed, and ultimately owned by the African women who gave the role its name.

Kiswahili-speaking women used the term shoga [pl. mashoga], roughly equivalent to “girlfriend,” as a term of endearment. At some point—we do not know how or when—this term was applied to Swahili men who dressed as women, performed women’s tasks, and were accepted into women’s society. It wasn’t the men who named and defined the shoga. It was the women. This is crucial and makes any presumed Western equivalent inadequate or misleading. Western women had little influence on societal perceptions of transvestites, sodomites, inverts, or male homosexuals and did not make room for them in female-only spaces.

Furthermore, mashoga were recognized for the social roles they played and were not defined by same-sex desire, either coming from or directed towards them. (This is very hard for modern gays to grasp.) How did the shoga develop? How did she find her place in society? Written non-Western sources are silent on the subject. Early Arabic travelers and geographers wrote about commerce, politics, and religious practice, not about the interior arrangements of women’s domestic spaces. The shoga was part of the women’s world—sometimes with special ritual or societal functions—smoothly and unproblematically integrated into the whole. What was there to say?

Plenty—once the Europeans started meddling in Swahili affairs. The judgments and pejorative terms—none of them accurate—followed in predictable train. Johann Krapf, a German missionary working outside of Mombasa, compiled the first comprehensive dictionary of the Swahili language, published posthumously in 1882, in which the secondary meanings of shoga are defined as 1) A "catamite" or passive homosexual partner, and 2) an "impotent" or feminized male.

A "catamite”? [A boy kept for sexual purposes by an older man] So much to unpack here, but let us not go down the inviting rabbit hole of pederasty, man-boy love, and paideia. We see again the Western insistence on defining variant male gender identity not through integrated and accepted social roles but through sexual desire and sexual acts. Well, as the saying goes, when you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

The hammer in this case was Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, drafted by Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1860 for the British colonial administration. This punished “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” with up to life imprisonment. Since all people of color were equally degraded and immoral, British administrators exported this provision to their African colonies without qualm, even if some of them were boinking their young charges on the sly. (More than half of the world’s remaining sodomy laws are relics of British colonial rule across 17 African countries.) 

Colonialism didn’t bring same-sex desire and gender variance to sub-Saharan Africa—the historical and anthropological evidence is irrefutable on that point—but it did introduce homophobia. Criminalized now, mashoga had to go underground or into hiding. They were never in control of their own narrative, and generations of missionaries, anthropologists, administrators, and “observers” forced upon them whatever Western sexual-deviant theory was in vogue at the time.

And just when it seemed that the mashoga could be permanently dismissed or explained away, they were resuscitated and transformed beyond recognition by theories of essentialism imported from the gay liberation movements of the West. They were “born this way” and needed to band together in order to reclaim their humanity. “Shoga” was now translated into English as “gay” or replaced by a new word, gei [pl. magei] that LGBTQ Swahilis, both men and women, used to describe themselves with something approaching pride.

Heterosexual Africans who had coexisted, often without difficulty, with the shoga, hated this new identity. The Pride marches, the public declarations, the demands for recognition and legal equality—that was what “homosexuality” came to mean for them. They saw it as an alien imposition, and were they not right? What they were rejecting was not African same-sex practice or gender variance. What they were rejecting was a Western political identity organized around a Western sexual ontology. Of course, the barbarous homophobia of the American fundamentalist Christians who flooded into Africa after their domestic defeats on gay rights was equally alien. And now the culture wars of America are torching the social fabric of Africa.

And where is the shoga in all of this? Gone… long gone. She was destroyed twice: first by colonial law and the missionary exegesis that preceded it, then by the liberation movements that sought to replace colonial stigma with Western-style pride. She was never allowed to speak for herself, and we’ll never know what she had to say.

— Dr. Robert Philipson

Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in An Earring in Tanzania.

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