The claim by some African leaders that homosexuality is a Western export—used most recently by Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni to defend his country’s brutish legislation—doesn’t even pass the laugh test. But to get beyond guffaws, it helps to read Boy-Wives and Female Husbands, by Will Roscoe and Stephen O. Murray, published in 1998. The book, which draws in part on older ethnographic studies, catalogues so many varieties of indigenous African homosexuality that it makes the range of Western sexual identities seem positively narrow. The myriad examples of Boy-Wives and Female Husbands suggest that, of the competing forces of homosexuality and homophobia, only the latter could plausibly be an import.
» The Fante people of Ghana believed that people born with heavy souls—of either sex—would desire women, while those with light…
