Bernardine Evaristo writing in the Guardian:
Its existed for a very long while:Africa has 54 countries and more than a billion people. One of the most ridiculous myths about it is that homosexuality did not exist in the continent until white men imported it. Robert Mugabe is one such propagator, calling homosexuality "un-African" and a "white disease".
Photograph: See-ming Lee via UN
Two trailblazing studies in the field – Boy Wives and Female Husbands edited by Stephen O Murray and Will Roscoe, and Heterosexual Africa? by Marc Epprecht – demolish the revisionist arguments about Africa's sexual history. From the 16th century onwards, homosexuality has been recorded in Africa by European missionaries, adventurers and officials who used it to reinforce ideas of African societies in need of Christian cleansing.More here
The Portuguese were among the first Europeans to explore the continent. They noted the range of gender relations in African societies and referred to the "unnatural damnation" of male-to-male sex in Congo. Andrew Battell, an English traveller in the 1590s, wrote this of the Imbangala of Angola: "They are beastly in their living, for they have men in women's apparel, whom they keep among their wives."