Add Queer History to African Studies class

Hi, my name is Kingsley Aaron-Onuigbo. I am a student at the African Leadership Academy (ALA). One of the core subjects at ALA is African studies, where we read academic texts ranging from African philosophical theory to critiques of colonial underdevelopment of the continent. 
I have learned so much in the ten months I have been here. I have learned how colonialism distorted traditional systems of indigenous pre-colonial African societies; I have learned about centralized and decentralized systems that promoted trade amongst African societies before colonialism, and I have learned about the preservation of coloniality in post-colonial Africa. 
As much as I learned about Africa's socio-political and economic state, when it was time to speak of African genders and sexuality, we quickly sped through it in a watered-down analysis of an essay by Oyeronke Oyewumi. My teachers carried out this unfair study under the guise of having too many topics to cover that term. Yet we studied three different texts about the pre-colonial African Economy and its underdevelopment: we spent three days studying Samir Amin and three on Walter Rodney and Issa Shivji's economic developmental theories.
While I understand the importance of understanding coloniality in pre-colonial African trade, economy, and political societies, I believe it is crucial to link coloniality to the suppression and control of African sexuality. Westerners distorted the way we perceive gender to mirror the binary processes of western gender ideologies. How can we speak of decolonization when we continue to implicitly promote academic spaces that do not fully explore the complexities of African lives and behavior? Unless we genuinely wish to continue to maintain systems under capitalist patriarchy, I believe it would be essential to retrieve stories of the Queer Africans and study them through the same Academic style as we study African economy and policies.

Kingsley Aaron-Onuigbo    Contact the author of the petition