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continent, is painted as intolerant and dangerous for the previous list of people. It is pushed to
therefore model itself after the West as a champion for individual rights but in a more drastic form of
social, legal, and cultural transition. It becomes impossible to resist Western imperialism without
resisting what is defined as progress. In the same way that this analysis is not meant to condone
rights violations like anti‐gay legislation, it is also not meant to condemn the LGBT rights frameworks
of all Western states. I, as someone who is deeply passionate about gay rights, simply posit that
these frameworks may not be structurally suited to non‐Western states.
The need for new methodologies
As I make these statements about the discourses of tolerance and backwardness, I want to
highlight how rarely such statements are considered. Western academia can still serve the Western
imperative that upholds the colonial dichotomy of the West as progressive and Africa as backward.
But how can academia remain out of the loop when the evidence is there? Nanjala Nyabola, a
Kenyan Harvard Rhodes scholar, notes that after the murder of activist David Kato in Uganda,
representations of Africa in the Western media “grossly misrepresent[ed] the various communities’
interaction with homosexuality, and the story was told of ‘homophobic Africa’, intolerant enough to
advocate or support the violent murder of a young man…” 10 She states that “African societies are
neither ‘tolerant’ nor ‘homophobic’, in part, because ‘phobia’ and ‘tolerance’ are not logical binaries;
neither adequately resolves the tension in the other,” where “the silent majority in many African
communities is struggling to articulate its position on a phenomenon that is consistently presented
in… all‐or‐nothing language,” a Western language, “with limited patience or understanding of the…
societies in question.” 11 She summarizes the key issue as follows:
Trying to negotiate the complexities of modern societies, many individuals find
themselves keeping up the appearance of a wholesale embrace of either ‘Western’ or
‘traditional’ values while dipping in and out of the other at will. This isn’t by any measure a
bad thing. It’s a reflection of the incredible capacity of individuals to make sense of life at
its most complex. The point is that as in many other ways, ‘Africa’ is a complex place, and
when trying to get a handle on the status of various phenomena across the continent, it is
important to take a more longitudinal view. 12
Surely prejudice still plays a role in why statements like Nyabola’s remain unheard. One thing that
can be done to support and shed light on these statements is putting an autobiographical emphasis
on social science research methodologies. For myself, analysing autobiographical work as an
evidence based methodology is one answer to Nyabola’s call for a more longitudinal view.
Autobiographical work here could refer to various media, but I am specifically referring to narrative,
which has a long history in sociology, anthropology, and other fields.
Donald Polkinghorne points out that “narrative inquiry refers to a subset of qualitative research
designs in which stories are used to describe human action,” where “narrative is the linguistic form
uniquely suited for displaying human existence as situated action [and] human activity as purposeful
engagement in the world.” 13 Narrative is becoming a norm in qualitative research, a kind of data
once shrugged off as un‐scholarly now heralded as integral.
Black Bull,ancestors, and me: The power and authenticity of autobiographical voice
Social researchers and anthropologists in particular are in the business of “writing culture.” 14 In
my own research I have the interesting and arguably contradictory role of interrogating how
knowledge is produced while also producing knowledge myself as a writer. The most useful sources I
have come across are autobiographical work, written by people who use the act of writing to convey
their stories. There are surely questions we can raise about the authenticity of autobiographical work
that is co‐written and/or translated. But these questions, while important, are less of a signifier that