Dancing with decolonial praxis: LBQ women and non-binary people’s subcultures in Lusaka, Zambia

ABSTRACT

This article explores the subcultures and experiences of LBQ (lesbian, bisexual, and queer) women and non-binary individuals in Lusaka, Zambia, against the backdrop of draconian anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and rising homophobia in Africa. Drawing upon decolonial feminist methodology, the study investigates how these marginalised communities navigate hostile environments where their sexual orientation is criminalised and stigmatised by both the state and society. It begins by discussing the intersection of colonialism, religious influence, and cultural contexts in perpetuating discriminatory trends. It delves into the clandestine world of queer parties and activism in Lusaka, examining the everyday practices of decoloniality undertaken. The research methodology employed intellectual decolonisation to engage participants in the co-creation of knowledge and alternative narratives of Zambian citizenship and womanhood. By showcasing the resilience and resistance of LBQ women and non-binary individuals who form supportive networks, the article challenges the dominant construction of Zambia as a nation built on cisgender heteronormative and conservative religious values. It illuminates the vibrant subcultures and community formations that emerge despite legal barriers and patriarchal interpretations of traditional culture. The article contributes to a living archive of queer African experiences and expands the understanding of Zambian identities beyond conventional norms. It underscores the transformative potential of decolonial methodologies in challenging exclusionary notions of nationhood and fostering a more inclusive and diverse society.

Cet article examine les sous-cultures et les expériences des femmes LBQ (lesbiennes, bisexuelles et queers (allosexuelles)) et des personnes non binaires à Lusaka, en Zambie, avec comme toile de fond une législation anti-LGBTQ+ draconienne et une homophobie croissante en Afrique. Cette étude s'appuie sur la méthodologie féministe décoloniale pour examiner la manière dont ces communautés marginalisées naviguent dans des environnements hostiles au sein desquels leur orientation sexuelle est criminalisée et stigmatisée par l'État ainsi que la société. Il traite dans un premier temps de l'intersection entre le colonialisme, l'influence de la religion et les contextes culturels au moment de pérenniser les tendances discriminatoires. Il plonge dans le monde clandestin des fêtes et de l'activisme queers à Lusaka, et examine les pratiques quotidiennes de décolonialité entreprises. La méthodologie de recherche a utilisé la décolonialisation intellectuelle pour motiver les participants à co-créer des connaissances et d'autres fils narratifs possibles concernant la citoyenneté et la féminité zambiennes. En mettant en avant la résilience et la résistance des femmes LBQ et des personnes non binaires qui forment des réseaux solidaires, cet article met en question la construction dominante de la Zambie comme une nation bâtie sur la base de valeurs hétéronormatives cisgenres et religieuses conservatrices. Il éclaire les sous-cultures et formations communautaires dynamiques qui font leur apparition malgré les barrières juridiques et les interprétations patriarcales de la culture traditionnelle. Cet article contribue à la création d'une archive vivante des expériences africaines queers et élargit la compréhension des identités zambiennes au-delà des normes conventionnelles. Il souligne le potentiel transformateur des méthodologies décoloniales au moment de mettre en question les notions « exclusionnaires » de nation et d'encourager une société plus inclusive et plus diverse.

Teniendo como telón de fondo la draconiana legislación anti-LGBTQ+ y la creciente homofobia en África, el presente artículo explora las subculturas y experiencias de mujeres LBQ (lesbianas, bisexuales y queer) y de personas no binarias en Lusaka (Zambia). Con este propósito, y empleando una metodología feminista decolonial, el estudio investiga la forma en que estas comunidades marginadas se abren camino en entornos hostiles, en los que su orientación sexual es criminalizada y estigmatizada tanto por el Estado como por la sociedad. Así, comienza analizando cómo la intersección de colonialismo, incidencia religiosa y contextos culturales abona a la perpetuación de tendencias discriminatorias. Asimismo, examina el mundo clandestino de las fiestas y el activismo queer en Lusaka, explorando el ejercicio de prácticas cotidianas de decolonialidad. La metodología de investigación utilizó la descolonización intelectual para implicar a las participantes en la cocreación de conocimientos y narrativas alternativas sobre la ciudadanía y la feminidad zambianas. En la medida en que da cuenta de la resiliencia y la resistencia de mujeres LBQ y de personas no binarias que conforman redes de apoyo, el artículo impugna la construcción dominante según la cual Zambia es una nación edificada sobre valores religiosos conservadores y heteronormativos cisgénero. Con esta intención ilumina las vibrantes subculturas y formaciones comunitarias que surgen a pesar de las barreras legales y de las interpretaciones patriarcales inherentes a la cultura tradicional. Asimismo, contribuye a constituir un archivo vivo de experiencias africanas queer y amplía la comprensión de las identidades zambianas más allá de las normas convencionales. Subraya el potencial transformador de las metodologías decoloniales para cuestionar las nociones excluyentes de nación y fomentar la construcción de una sociedad más inclusiva y diversa.

KEYWORDS:

• LGBTQ+ activism
• Zambia
• queer socialities
• decolonial praxis
• lesbian bisexual and queer communities
• decolonial feminism

Introduction

While writing this article about Zambia (one of the countries I am from), draconian anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in the form of the Promotion of Appropriate Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill moved closer to being ratified, in Ghana (my other country of origin) (Adombila and Akorlie 2023). The rising prevalence of these laws across Africa, which fuse homegrown local homophobia with foreign evangelical funding and ideology (Namubiru and Khatondi 2023) was one of the driving factors to investigate the circumstances of LBQ (lesbian, bisexual, and queer) women or non-binary people, particularly in hostile environments where their sexual orientation is criminalised by the state and denigrated by society.

If, as I have suggested elsewhere, we are living through evolving neocolonialism in Africa (see Chela 2023) and decoloniality is a counterforce to colonialism (past and present), how can we understand the religious roots of this trend as it intersects with specific cultural contexts? What forms of everyday decoloniality are marginalised communities doing?

This article dances with the answers to these questions by looking at female and non-binary subjectivities in Lusaka and their surreptitious queer world-making parties and activism. In turn, the methodology used for this research relied on ‘intellectual decolonisation’ (Sondarjee and Andrews 2023, 13) to unearth the participants’ knowledge with them and create living archives which oppose cissexist and heterosexist dominant narratives of Zambian citizenship and womanhood. It opens with some historical background on Zambia, explores methodology then moves to three major findings that emanated from the data before concluding.

Zambia is a Southern African country with an estimated population of 19 million in 2022 (Zambia Statistics Agency). Lusaka, its capital, is home to around 2.9 million people (World Population Review 2021) but the diffusely populated nature of the city gives it the atmosphere of a smaller town. The colonisation of Zambia commenced in the 1890s with the arrival of the British South Africa Company run by Cecil John Rhodes (Carey 2003). Disappointed by finding no gold or diamonds in the area, in 1924 he handed Northern Rhodesia, as it was named, over to the British government and it became a formal settler colony (Bhagavan 1978). Black Zambians were economically disadvantaged and subject to an ‘industrial colour bar’ (Williams et al. 2023) which segregated workplaces as well as an informal colour bar which divided social life (Banda 2010). British common law became the law of the land with customary or traditional forms of law losing a sizeable amount of power.

One of the ways ‘western values’ (Garvey 1994, 196) gained prominence in Zambian society was through education. From 1885 to 1945, ‘nearly two dozen different missionary societies’ (Posner 2003, 130) were established by denominations such as Protestant and Roman Catholic; the majority of them had affiliated religious mission schools. Being educated in these institutions enabled black Zambians to access better socioeconomic opportunities and opened up possibilities of class ascension and through Christian teachings at school, white settler morality, the English language, and British ideas of respectability proliferated.¹

Although Zambia gained independence from the British in 1964, post-independence, the legacies of settler colonialism remained intact in the law and the kinds of sexualities that are viewed as socially acceptable. Currently, three sections of the Zambian penal code criminalise same-sex activity: Section 155 Unnatural Offences, Section 156 Attempt to Commit Unnatural Offences, and Section 158 Indecent Practices Between Persons of the Same Sex (Phiri 2017; Zambia | Human Dignity Trust 2020). Law enforcement, the judiciary, and social norms enforce these laws, colour LBQ life, and affect community formation.

Decolonial feminist methodology in action

Owing to the criminalisation of homosexuality in Zambia it was difficult to find many people who felt comfortable speaking to me about this topic, especially as I could not conduct interviews in person. However, my positionality as a Zambian bisexual woman enabled valuable trust and mutual understanding between us owing to shared sexual orientations and nationality. Interviews were conducted in 2020 and 2021 with six participants, five women and one non-binary person who described themselves as being female-bodied (Table 1).

Table 1. Demographics of research participants

Pseudonym^a	Age	Gender	Pronouns	Sexual orientation	Class	Level of education	Relationship status
Zelipa	29	Non-binary person	She/they	Queer	Middle class	Master’s degree	In a relationship
Musonda	29	Woman	She/her	Lesbian	Working class	Bachelor’s degree	In a relationship
Sampa	30	Woman	She/her	Bisexual	Middle class	Professional certification	Single
Namakau	25	Woman	She/her	Bisexual	Middle class	Tertiary-level professional certification	In a relationship
Chanda	20	Woman	She/her	Lesbian	Middle class	Undergraduate university student	In a relationship
Katendi	33	Woman	She/her	Bisexual	Middle class	Master’s degree	Single

^a All participants were assigned common Zambian first names to conceal their identity.

I drew on feminist methodology which aims to minimise harm to participants and gather data in a way that supports non-hierarchical structures (DeVault 1996). I implemented this practically by being open with my participants about my relationship status, my journey to conceiving my own sexuality, and my own experiences with Zambian culture. Because our interviews were free-flowing and I allowed the participants to access my personal social media platforms, the ‘status’ of researcher was dissolved and familiarity increased. I was permitted access to their secret Facebook groups where they created digital ‘counterpublics’ to support each other in the face of online and offline homophobia (McLean and Mugo 2015) (see Chela 2022). Many of them were curious and took the opportunity to interview me back, which created a more even-footed dynamic. This was helpful and led to further paths of inquiry and a deeper understanding of participant responses.

A small study like this cannot be entirely representative of all queer perspectives in Lusaka and the sample displays a lack of class diversity. Participants were asked to self-identify the class to which they felt they belonged and only one identified as working class. It is possible that the large proportion of middle-class interlocuters reflects the dominant class of people working in activist spaces in Lusaka or those with the economic means and social networks to attend secret queer events. It could also be attributed to the fact that wealth in the country is clustered around the mineral-rich Copperbelt towns and Lusaka, the capital. With this in mind, the applicability of these findings might be limited to a subset of a larger LGBTQ+ community.

Physical travel to the region was prevented by the COVID-19 pandemic so interviews took place over Zoom and WhatsApp video calls. They averaged 140 minutes each initially and follow-up questionnaires via email and further interviews over the phone were conducted for any additional verification. Interviews were recorded and transcribed by the author using Descript AI software, then manually coded. At first, the digital format led to stilted interactions but in subsequent conversations, both parties’ disclosures were less guarded.

The overall research process was positive and life changing. In its best moments, it felt like a homecoming of sorts but, occasionally unexpected feelings arose. For instance, I felt guilty about the queerphobic discrimination my informants received which I do not encounter commonly, as I live in South Africa where human rights protecting LGBTQ+ people are enshrined in the Constitution. Listening to their turn of phrase and accents made me feel homesick for Zambia, despite the difficulties of life there, as well.

I was inspired to create an archive detailing the lives and experiences of this group after reading Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (2003). Since Zambia was a former British colony, the official government archive like many others in Africa is ‘shaped by the heteronormative and gendered gaze of the (post)colonial state and its exclusionary political cultures’ (De Araújo and Roy 2022, 255; Macharia 2015). I was unable to access the national archives in Lusaka, which are not digitalised, due to restricted travel during the pandemic. However, even if I had been able to review them, it is unlikely I would have found records relating to these subjectivities who have been maligned or erased over time.

Cvetkovich recognises the same limitations of archives in the US so her atypical archive grounded in the viewpoint of lesbian cultures (Cvetkovich 2003, 3) is packed with slippery entries (like feelings) and unconventional sources (such as personal diaries), to foreground ‘alternative modes of knowledge’ (Cvetkovich 2003, 4). This practice struck me as one aligned with the objectives of decoloniality, which are many but include the disruption of the coloniality of power by denouncing and providing alternatives to ‘Western hegemonic knowledge’ (Sondarjee and Andrews 2023, 13). More specifically in queer African Studies, decolonisation tries to recover what is being suppressed or destroyed by the sexual prescriptiveness of colonialism (Arnfred 2006) and I would argue neocolonialism in the post-colony.

In light of this, three conclusions emanated from the data analysis: first, colonial legislation, religion, and patriarchal culture enact epistemic violence against Zambian LBQ people and, second, they engage in ‘intimate everyday resistance’ (Lugones 2010, 743) as a form of decoloniality. Third, this scholarship creates decoloniality of knowledge by documenting alternative possibilities for Zambian citizenship and womanhood.

‘That’s where the problem comes in, because everyone has decided that this is wrong’: religious, cultural, and colonial hostilities

The quote that titles this section comes from Namakau (she/her), a 25-year-old bisexual woman who opened up to me. Her responses were often deadpan but she lit up when talking about her girlfriend. This section exposes the ‘everyone’ in her quote and the dimensions of their negative attitudes towards LGBTQ+ communities. The epistemic violence that LBQ Zambians face is created by the religious and cultural context of the country and it shapes the standard to which they are held – ideal Zambian womanhood. Christianity is a dominant feature of Zambian public and private life, and it arrived in the country through colonial intrusion by British missionaries in the 1880s (Carey 2003). Estimates from 2021 indicate that 95.5 per cent of the population (US Department of State 2022) is Christian with offshoots like Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism experiencing popularity (van Klinken 2017).

Former President Fredrick Chiluba, whose tenure started in 1991, ‘declared Zambia a Christian nation only a few months after his election’ and this was enshrined in the amended Constitution in 1996 (van Klinken 2017, 12). Negative responses today to LGBTQ+ people draw on several themes: homosexuality is viewed as a Western agenda being pushed by international NGOs (Phiri 2017, 11), same-sex practices go against Zambian culture and Christianity (Kaunda et al. 2020, 129), and LGBTQ+ individuals have no place in Zambian society (van Klinken 2015, 5).

Namakau was outed by relatives who saw pictures on Facebook of her and her girlfriend (whom I interviewed as well) holding hands and embracing. She described the new dynamic she experienced with friends and family after she was outed:

Yes, remember my friends? One of them actually said, ‘We will be praying for you’, which really hurt me … And my mom, when we had our conversation, she said, ‘You know we are Christian. You know this is wrong.’ (Conversation between author in South Africa and respondent in Zambia, 7 June 2020)

This reaction made Namakau feel depressed and her relationship with her mother is still under strain. Tuck and Yang describe how setter colonial relations in the US determined the fates of Indigenous people and who was included, controlled, and disappeared by the state. In my research context, the religious climate in Zambia ‘disappears’ LBQ Zambians from national discourses (Tuck and Yang 2012, 9) and delegitimises their romantic relationships rendering them sinful; ‘it denies their existence by robbing them of validity’ (Lugones 2010, 749). In the Zambian consciousness, male homosexuality tends to take centre stage and LBQ women are invisibilised to a large extent. While gay men are vilified, their female and non-binary counterparts tend to be erased completely; their love for each other assumed to be an impossibility. In this way, coloniality expresses itself as ‘denial’ (Lugones 2010, 749), denial that female and non-binary queer intimacies and identities exist.

Furthermore, the strong ties between nationalism and Christianity entrench homophobia, making it difficult to uproot. The country’s motto, ‘One Zambia, One Nation’ was created by founding President Kenneth Kaunda to prevent tribalism and division between Zambia’s many ethnic groups in the post-independence era (Oliver et al. 2021). In a 2023 speech, President Hakainde Hichilema linked ‘gay and lesbian practice’ to disunity in the country and called on the clergy to ensure unity prevailed (Mwebantu 2023). Clearly in the national psyche, romantic rebellion holds significant gravity and can be viewed as a spiritual and national threat.

Closely allied to the country’s fiercely held identity as a Christian nation is idealised Zambian femininity which constrains LBQ people’s behaviour. Traditional Zambian femininity has its roots in widely held traditional cultural values. Zambia is home to around 70 different ethnic groups divided into seven main language groups: Bemba, Nyanja, Tonga, Lozi (Barotse), Kaonde, Lunda, and Luvale (Erdmann 2007). While there are no substantial archival records on pre-colonial homosexuality and gender variance in Zambia, Yaliwe Clarke’s work describes the phenomenon of Lunda women who are in the present day referred to as ‘husbands’ by virtue of marrying into a family (Clarke 2021, 578).

Lozi families are organised according to a ‘matrifocal logic … juxtaposed with a structural system of the patrilineal right to succession’ (Matakala 2020, 45). In practice, Lozi women held a lot of power in society; their first royal leader was Mbuyuwamwamba, a woman. But matriarchal traditions were weakened by colonial conquest and the integration of the Barotse kingdom into Northern Rhodesia in the 1890s (Matakala 2020). These examples show that there were rich and flexible attitudes to gender roles, particularly for women, but this heritage has been buried and sidelined by centuries of ‘the imposition of settler heterosexuality’ – heteronormative and patriarchal mores (Morgensen 2011). Further, Nigerian sociologist Oyèrónke Oyĕwùmí describes how colonialism across sub-Saharan Africa entailed the ‘inferiorization of females’ (Oyěwùmí 1997, 152), effects we can see in the Zambian context to this day and which are explored below.

Evidence of diverse and accepting attitudes towards sexual minorities before the advent of European colonialism exists in other countries in the region including Zimbabwe (Epprecht 1998), Lesotho (Kendall 1998), Nambia (Khaxas 2006), and Botswana (Carrier and Murray 1998). None of the participants were able to name words for lesbian or gay in Zambia’s many indigenous languages which speaks to the depth of colonial erasure in this context.

The similar descriptions of womanhood speak to how deeply the concept is embedded in this society. Namakau describes it as follows:

Their idea of Zambian woman, a good Zambian woman, is a wife. She shouldn’t drink so much. She should always be home, ready to open for her husband and make sure his meal is hot and ready to be eaten. You put bathing water in the morning [for him] and just such ridiculous nonsense. I think that’s what the ideal Zambian woman is because even when you look at the people who they say are people we should look up to, these are women who are married. These are women who go to church. These are women who have children. They are working, yes, but they focus on their family more than they focus on their work, which I hate. I think that’s a very flawed concept, I hate it. (Conversation between author in South Africa and respondent in Zambia, 7 June 2020)

Katendi (she/they), a 33-year-old bisexual business consultant, fleshes out more of the personality traits and behaviour that make up this idealised femininity:

… an ideal woman is a child … An ideal woman is infantilised. You are supposed to be seen and not heard. You’re supposed to be the pride of your husband’s eye and you should look pretty all the time, well put together, you don’t raise your voice, you know you don’t demand your own sexual pleasure, you don’t have any ideas of your own. (Conversation between author in South Africa and respondent in Zambia, 26 August 2020)

Maria Lugones describes the ‘coloniality of gender and power’ as ‘a process of active reduction of people, the dehumanization that fits them for classification’ which comes from violent colonial encounter with indigenous cultures (Lugones 2010, 747). The quotes above prove the limited life path designated for Zambian women, a life of service and little agency. Contemporary Zambian culture dictates that church, motherhood, and marriage are their telos and their womanhood is contingent on performing certain roles. We can see here ‘the incessant activity’ (Butler 2004, 1) they are expected to undertake to legitimatise their gender. Without marriage and reproduction there is little structural power Zambian women can wield or respect they can garner.

When members of this group find that their queerness is rendered more legible by their unconventional appearance, perhaps having short hair or favouring shorts, they are criticised, dehumanised, and subject to microaggressions. One of my interlocuters was Chanda, a 20-year-old lesbian who splits her time between studying in a university town about 140 km north of the capital and her family home in Lusaka. She described her appearance as ‘stemme’² – mostly presenting as a stud but sometimes wearing feminine clothing. Her personal style evokes the following responses in public spaces such as at salaula³ and the shops:

‘You! Are you male or female?’ Or ‘Why are you dressed like a boy can’t you dress more like a female.’ That type of thing. That’s most of the comments. ‘You’re a female dress like one.’ ‘Look at how she walks, she walks like a guy.’ (Conversation between author in South Africa and respondent in Zambia, 17 September 2020)

Implicit in these comments is how LBQ women who reject a typically feminine appearance are perceived as a threat by wider Zambian society. For butches or more masculine-presenting women, their demeanour and dress make their bodies a ‘site of discursive power and struggle’ (Matebeni 2011, 154). Other participants I interviewed were told of their presentation, ‘You’ll snap out of it eventually’, ‘You’re just a tomboy’, and ‘It’s a phase’.

Commonly LBQ people are subject to marriage pressure. Even though Zelipa (she/they), a 29-year-old non-binary activist, does not identify as a woman, it is unsafe for her to be open with her family about her gender identity. Zelipa recounted a huge argument with her father when she wanted to move out into a place with her girlfriend:

And my dad was livid – because I told him I’m moving out and he says no, a girl child – these were his exact words – ‘a girl child only leaves her father’s house to go to her husband’s house’. (Conversation between author in South Africa and respondent in Zambia, 19 December 2020)

Traditionally, a woman must be under her parents’ care until the burden of care is transferred to her husband when, not if, she gets married. Heterosexuality and its attendant institution of marriage are viewed as inevitable. In this case, Zelipa’s family erroneously reduced her to a child and a woman because they can only understand her through the lens of their prejudicial cultural beliefs. This stance combines a fear of the law and the denial of sexual minorities as true Zambian citizens which results in them being unable to acknowledge her humanity, adulthood and the breadth of her gender as a non-binary person.

The testimonies featured here mount a strong critique of the ‘racialized, colonial and … heterosexualist gender oppression’ rampant in the country (Lugones 2010, 746). All the participants were in support of the repealing of Sections 155, 156, and 158 which are ‘strategies of internal colonisation’ (Tuck and Yang 2012, 5). Those desires can be interpreted as a demand for full sincere decolonisation and a real investment in personal autonomy for all Zambians. Both demands would benefit more than solely the LGBTQ+ community as people living at the crossroads of various intersections of identity in Zambia also suffer from political repression.

On 5 March 2023, Sistah Sistah Foundation, an ecofeminist grassroots organisation, held a march ‘to protest sexual and gender-based violence against women and girls in Zambia’ (Sistah Sistah Foundation 2023). Zambia ranks poorly in the United Nation’s Gender Inequality Index at number 137 out of 162 countries and 42 per cent of women have suffered physical or sexual intimate partner violence in their lifetime (UN.org 2022). The state immediately accused the protestors of ‘promoting homosexuality’ (Short 2023), which served to caution others tempted to rebel against patriarchy, and delegitimise and silence feminist organising and expose protestors to violence. The police arrested three members of Sistah Sistah Foundation and one march attendee and detained them in police custody (Igual 2023). The overall repressive climate which curtails full political expression lowers Zambia’s performance in key indicators such as gender equality and good health and well-being. It can be argued that decolonisation could include the retrieval of aspects of traditional Zambian culture which empower women to flourish in an expansive range of roles apart from maternal and domestic ones.

While the coloniality of gender enforces a social rigidity which makes it difficult for the subjectivities in this study to be themselves with people in their community and thrive outside traditional expectations, they make ‘a practice of improvisation within [this] scene of constraint’ (Butler 2004, 1) which is explored in the next section.

Decolonial intimacies in queer nightlife

The ingenuity of the people I encountered delighted me in the way that mainstream accounts of Zambian LGBTQ+ life could not. Accounts of non-normative sexuality in the Zambian press focus on the criminal aspect often including demeaning details and hate speech from politicians. For instance, two men who were caught having sex at a lodge in 2017, and were sentenced to 15 years in jail at trial in 2019, were widely reported in the local media (Igual 2019). A year earlier, Lusaka Times reported that the police were investigating two women accused of being lesbians (Lusaka Times 2018), however, the conclusion of that investigation has yet to be reported on. This was the only instance of an arrest of LBQ women in the news I was able to find. Beneath these dark headlines, however, there is a spirited clandestine and nascent subcultural LBQ community in Lusaka.

Socialising around LBQ identities is undertaken with a measure of secrecy to avoid censure and this delicate balance has been trod successfully, so queer Zambians hosted Pride celebrations in 2018, 2019, and 2022, as well as a Queermas⁴ in 2019.

Lusaka has a lively nightlife scene with a mixture of pubs, bars, and nightclubs dotting the capital. Popular venues include Grandaddy’s Shoka Nyama, Keg and Lion, and Capones. However, there are no gay or lesbian clubs nor places that are gay friendly. Pride and other queer-friendly underground events are their only solace. Some of these events are for LBQ women and non-binary female-bodied people solely, like Pose, and others, like Pride, that included the whole LGBTQ community. Sampa (she/her), a 30-year-old bisexual teacher spoke to me about the first Pride at which she was a guest:

It was super fun. It was really just a small gathering. People hung out in groups. There was food, music, poetry. Very low key. I would definitely go to another one. I met someone there [i.e. another LBQ woman]. (Conversation between author in South Africa and respondent in Zambia, 9 September 2020)

For most of the interviewees, these events were the primary ways they encountered other LBQ women for the purpose of dating and without their existence they risked being isolated, which is something many of them were struggling with during the COVID-19 pandemic and mandated lockdowns.

Zelipa set up an NGO called Women’s Alliance for Equality (WAfE) in 2015 to ‘increase and improve the identification and participation of WSW [women who have sex with women], lesbian, bisexual and transgender women’ (Outofthemargins.co.uk 2020) in Zambia. It is the only organisation focused on this demographic in Zambia but they are prevented from registering formally as a non-profit entity because their activities serve a criminalised group. They shared the strategies used to pull off their events safely. They elaborate:

… we just try to educate people [i.e. party guests]: if we’re having a gathering and we share details like location don’t share them with anybody else … you can take pictures but share them after the event is over. We’ve worked for a number of years with some police officers that are [queer] friendly and some lawyers. So if we’re having a huge gathering we usually just give them a heads up. Then they can be ready in case we need some help … if anyone asks, it’s just a party. We’re just hanging out, chilling, it’s not a gay party. We usually try and send out those messages when we’re bringing people together. (Conversation between author in South Africa and respondent in Zambia, 19 December 2020)

Zelipa described how members are encouraged not to refer to the events as LBQ-focused to outsiders, even though in actuality they are. ‘We’re just hanging out, chilling, it’s not a gay party’ (emphasis added) indicates the kind of compromises that the respondents have adopted to survive in a homophobic context. The partygoers’ criminalised sexual orientation forces them to disavow the political and subversive nature of their gatherings. This strategic denial helps them to circumvent societal constraints on their behaviour and keep their ‘intimate everyday resistance’ going (Lugones 2010, 743).

An event hosted by WAfE based on the popular TV series Pose⁵ occurred two weeks before my initial interviews were conducted in 2020. The event was hosted at a youth play park with a constellation of swimming pools and a conference centre. The ball was held in one of the larger conference rooms and by all reports was a joyful occasion with around 100 guests. Attendees split themselves into ‘houses’, different teams that competed in categories like ‘Best Legs’, ‘Paris Runway’, ‘Face’, and ‘Vogue’. The winning walkers won trophies and all enjoyed the party, kissing, voguing, and dancing freestyle to music after the competitive portion of the evening was over.

The relaxed and queer-friendly atmosphere imbues the event with potentiality; things that would not ordinarily occur in other places in Lusaka are able to unfold. In Cruising Utopia, Muñoz argues we have a similar relationship to queerness as an asymptote has to a curved line, saying, ‘we may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as a warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality’ (Muñoz 2019, 1). This conception of queerness as a hopeful affect which is somewhat unattainable in the present, thus existing most fully in the future, reflects the current situation for LBQ people in Zambia. Through these events they engage in queer world-making, but the queer world of their dreams does not stretch past the borders of the event.

At the Pose party there was a woman selling sex toys, which are illegal in Zambia (Kaunda et al. 2020, 132), yet she felt safe enough to conduct business at the event, which is a testament to the liberatory nature of the evening. Several respondents reported that they would not display affection openly for their same-sex partners in most parts of Lusaka, but they felt comfortable kissing other queer people freely at these events. Although they are not sex parties, they are a safe space for LBQ women to socialise, be intimate with each other, express themselves and explore their sexuality. The private feelings between two people that are evoked and on display at these events become ‘public feelings’ (Cvetkovich 2003) that can be organised around politically.

hooks’ concept of ‘homeplace’ which she describes as ‘the one site where one [i.e. black women] could freely confront the issue of humanisation, where one could resist’ (hooks 1990, 42), provides a useful framework for an analysis of the Pose and Pride events. For hooks, homeplace was a haven, a place of healing and affirmation where black women engaged in domesticity to ward off despair and counteracted the damaging effects of racist American society across the centuries.

Despite the benefits of creating counterpublics and communities of resistance, it would be a mistake to assume this subculture is homogenous. At times, prejudices hinder unity and exclude certain members, such as bisexuals and non-binary lesbians (see Chela 2022). My research indicates that the LBQ community in Lusaka is complicated by differing beliefs and interpretations of various identities and class analyses and other potential axes of exclusion need to be investigated further.

Nevertheless, these homeplaces with their revelry and celebration are a ‘site of redress’ (Nash 2013, 15) for this affective community in Lusaka. The parties hosted by WAfE are a ‘necessary resistance’ (hooks 1990, 387), a temporary homeplace for the attendees, that is revived at every subsequent party. In the absence of an LGBTQ neighbourhood (à la The Castro, San Francisco or Green Point, Cape Town), these events gain even more primacy. Without a permanent physical site, the queer world created is more ephemeral and the traces of LBQ nightlife are barely legible to outsiders. Here invisibility is valued. It is wielded as strategic practice in opposition to the kind of disappearing enacted by the state and colonial history, in order to enable a ‘resistant subjectivity’ (Lugones 2010, 746) where LBQ people practise queer decolonial feminism through ‘intimate everyday resistance’ (Lugones 2010, 743).

This nightlife culture helps ameliorate the negative effects of internal colonisation that impact the well-being and self-esteem of the interlocuters. Internal colonisation is ‘the biopolitical and geopolitical management of people, land, flora and fauna within the “domestic” borders of the imperial nation’ and its strategies include ‘surveillance and criminalisation … both structural and interpersonal’ (Tuck and Yang 2012, 4–5). While internal colonisation was imposed by the British, post-independence many Africans continued to perpetuate it, often unconsciously by not questioning the status quo, and by enforcing the law and socio-cultural norms.

An incomplete decolonisation process in Zambia has meant that most of the country internalises and upholds colonial political and religious values despite 60 years of independence. As discussed earlier, the participants are subject to heavy informal surveillance. They all reported that gay men and transgender women seemed to face more immediate threats from law enforcement as opposed to LBQ women, but due to their weaker power and status, and infantilisation in a patriarchal context, the latter endure greater ‘policing’ by other civilians.

As the ‘coloniality of power and gender’ (Lugones 2010, 745) continues to warp interpersonal relationships in Lusaka, within this underground LBQ community they form new healthy bonds that eschew the validation of the law and heterosexist and cissexist society. They acknowledge each other and find comfort in being seen by others who value them and share their way of life. When the participants pursue non-normative relationships and remove themselves from heterosexual time and enter this queer world within a world, a world without time, they are ‘undoing gender’ (Butler 2004). They expand what it means to be a Zambian woman or citizen through the pursuit of alternative queer subjectivities and socialities.

Intellectual decolonisation

Performing a decoloniality of knowledge was a central part of this work and here I tease out the contradictions of this process and ‘the geopolitics of knowledge’ (Sondarjee and Andrews 2023, 13) as they relate to this article. As a Zambian-Ghanaian woman who lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, colonial inheritances in my home country means I could never have pursued this research path at a Zambian institution. I enrolled at a South African university and was awarded research funds from a deceased Republican American who gained vast wealth through the exploitation of petroleum reserves (Cannadine 2006, 79–80) and dispossession of indigenous Native Americans. These facts meant this work would be a dance with some complicated steps given that the perpetuation of colonialism gave rise to it, yet its content seeks to destroy legacies of colonialism. As the nature of this work could not eradicate the land-based conditions of dispossession and wealth structures that support colonialism, I attempted to practise ‘intellectual decolonisation’ (Sondarjee and Andrews 2023, 13) which was possible in various ways.

One of the reasons I started this study was because I did not know any women like me who were Zambian and queer, and while reading scholarly work realised that white narratives from the global North dominated Queer Studies. In African Studies, the bulk of the scholarship prioritised heterosexual and cisgender subjectivities.⁶ Research about women’s sexuality was commonly narrowed to narratives of disease, transactional sex, and reproduction. These trends echo Xavier Livermon’s observation of ‘the racialization of the queer body as white and the sexualization of the black body [is] as straight’ (Livermon 2012, 302).

The ‘re-medicalization of African sexualities’ (Tamale 2014, 25), caused by the funding made available for HIV/AIDS research in the region from the 1980s onwards, has led to queer men’s stories being more numerous and nuanced than those about queer women. Thus, my research was an attempt to write an LBQ female or non-binary subjectivity into certain disciplines building on the work of Serena Owusu Dankwa (2009) and Ruth Morgan and Saskia Wieringa (2006), to name a few, to help fill in the gaps in the contemporary archive. To my knowledge there is no other published work that centres Zambian LBQ women and non-binary people as this article does.

To reject the medicalisation of African women in research, which lends itself to a one-dimensional view as well as, potentially, the colonial biopolitical management of people, I focused more on affect, pleasure, and joy. Following Tamale, I believe that one of decolonisation’s core goals is to ‘restor[e] the dignity of African people’ (Tamale 2020, 21) and that cannot be done by only showing their pain and suffering. Despite the difficulties experienced by the women and non-binary people who contributed their knowledge and theorisation, they regularly spoke fondly of the love, support, and affirmation they had received in their lives, more crucially they spoke of their queerness in positive terms despite its tensions with Zambianess. For instance, Sampa, who was single at the time of interviews, but had dated both men and women and reflected on the reciprocity and equality she felt when she first dated a woman, saying: ‘I just felt seen in a way I never had before with a man.’

Producing accurate and compassionate scholarship with the participants as a queer Zambian woman researcher was a form of decoloniality which provoked within me an internal evolution, and them as well. They let me on to their dancefloor, into their world, and I became a part of their dance. Several participants enjoyed the process and the opportunity for their full humanity to be validated. It made me attentive to opportunities for decolonisation which may not at first seem obvious and technologies of ‘everyday resistance’ (Vinthagen and Johansson 2013) which are subversive. In my view, there were two further decolonial processes that were carried out. One was forging transnational solidarities (from Zambia to South Africa) to fight against patriarchy and homophobia. The second was unearthing the truth of gender variance and sexual diversity in the post-colonial climates of denial and exclusionary myth-making. The participants’ insights and my engagement with them on an intellectual and personal level do both.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this article troubles the myth of Zambia as a cisgender heterosexual Christian nation; it shows gender and sexual diversity among Zambian women and non-binary people who form community around their identities despite the trifecta of religious intolerance, discriminatory legislation introduced by former colonial powers, and patriarchal renderings of traditional culture. Despite these obstacles, the people involved in the study danced joyfully, celebrated special occasions, resisted and subverted the exclusionary nature of Zambian nationhood through decolonial praxis and secret queer world-making. Using decolonial methodology we contributed to a living archive of queer African experiences and helped expand ideas of what it means to be a Zambian person who pursues alternative, that is, queer subjectivities and socialities.

Disclosure statement

In accordance with Taylor & Francis policy and my ethical obligation as a researcher, I am reporting that I received Andrew W. Mellon funding through the Governing Intimacies project at the University of the Witwatersrand to pursue the Master’s research on which this paper is based.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Efemia Chela

Efemia Chela is a researcher and an award-winning fiction writer living in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is an alumnus of the University of the Witswatersrand and Rhodes University. She holds a Master of Arts in Development Studies, achieved with distinction, from the former institution. Her current job is Researcher/Commissioning Editor at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Postal address: 18 Arundel Road, Westdene, Johannesburg, 2092, South Africa). Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 For similar findings in Southern Africa, see Thomas (2006).

2 ‘Stemme’ is a portmanteau of the words ‘stud’ (referring to a masculine black queer woman) and ‘femme’ (a feminine queer woman) (Wilson 2009). Stemmes have a fluctuating gender presentation (Reed et al. 2011, 753).

3 Open-air second-hand clothing market.

4 Queermas is an event that takes place near Christmas and is popular with LGBTQ communities across the world. As queer people often have difficult relationships with their families, the event celebrates chosen family with a Christmas dinner or lunch party setting with friends (ICONIQ 2019).

5 Pose is an American television show set in 1980s New York with a cast of queer men and trans women. The action centres on the voguing and underground gay balls the characters compete in, as well as how they manage their houses, earn a living through sex work, and grapple with the rising HIV/AIDS crisis.

6 Although this is changing – see Otu and van Klinken (2023).