Towards a trans politics of post-coloniality

Rahul Rao’s Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Post-Coloniality was one of my lockdown reads. As such I arrived at its pages in the same way I think many have since the moment of its publication: with a desperate desire for distraction and engagement. And it delivered. As many other readers and respondents have already noted, this book is written with immense care, generous thinking, and intellectual curiosity. It does the incredible theoretical melding and mixing that many scholars who are working from and thinking with projects in the Global South (myself included) prize. That is, centring the Global South while deftly tacking from the local to the global and back again. In doing so, one of the critical offerings Out of Time makes is troubling the narrative that has, seemingly, so easily become the hill on which debates and political organising regarding African sexualities have come to sacrifice themselves. A narrative that hinges on the question: what is unAfrican? Homophobia or homosexuality? Which of these is the culturally inauthentic interloper? Drawing on Uganda to provide a crucial example of the discursive constructions of homophobia and how this debate about so-called ‘unAfricaness’ unfolds in myriad directions, Out of Time not only notes the inconsistencies in this debate, but also does some hefty lifting in linking this debate to a global flow of people, capital, ideas and terms between fonrmer colonies and the colonial metropole. As part of this global flow, I write this response, in South Africa, on a public holiday – Freedom Day. It is a cruel reminder of how far we have yet to go that on the day before Freedom Day, queer and trans South Africans, across the country and despite COVID-19, felt it deeply necessary to march and gather publicly for two reasons. The first, a call to end what is being termed a ‘wave of hate crimes’ targeting queer and trans people after the brutal murders of Bonang Gaelae, Nonhlanhla Kunene, Lonwabo Jack, Lulu Ntuthela, Nathaniel Spokgoane Mbele, Khulekani Gomazi and Sphamandla Khoza. There will be three more names added to this list in the days to come. The second was to show solidarity with queer and trans refugees, predominantly from Uganda, a group who are quite clearly the outcome of some of the developments Out of Time sketches, living in Kakuma refugee camp, Kenya. This is in the wake of an arson attack that left one member of that community dead and several others severely injured. Unfortunately, much like in South Africa, there will be more violence, neglect and abjection in the days to come. Both of these events read to me as indicative of the ways that the underpinnings of the debate regarding ‘unAfricaness’ continue to inform conditions of life and death for those living on the African continent recognised or cast as queer. In this way, these events are very much linked to this discussion about what kinds of queer politics become possible in the aftermath of colonialism. Out of Time points to the coloniality of postcolonial African states in not only vehemently upholding laws that criminalise queer and trans people but in some cases, as with the Ugandan example, reinventing and re-inscribing those laws in terms far harsher than previously. Rao suggests that, in the scramble to say that ‘homophobia is a colonial import’, there has been a