Popular gossip page, Instablog9ja, an Instagram account distinguished for its use of private lives and controversial updates as fodder to stir up hypocritical Nigerians into a blood lust whenever its administrators need a boost in their numbers, might seem like the last place where you’d expect to see validation about many of the things we’ve discussed on The Sexuality Blog. But that is exactly what happened when we stumbled on this update on the blog.
On the Sexuality Blog we’ve spoken at length about how gender and sex were two perfectly separate concepts to precolonial Nigerians, and people who were not heterosexual were accepted in those communities. In precolonial Nigerian customs (many of which have survived to this day) gender was simply a predetermined set of roles and expectations, usually attributed by sex but not limited exclusively to it. Like Mary Torkwase Antom, many women whose children and spouses died prematurely could become ‘men’ and marry women to carry on their birth lineages and keep property within the family. The patrilineal lineage of children sired by the wives of these female ‘men’, were never questioned or thrown out as illegitimate and their parents knew better to try to claim them. This changing of genders for economic reasons is well documented in pre-colonial Igbo land and it is refereshing to see it also still active in Benue state.
Perhaps this might motivate us to consider that sex and sexuality related issues are never as rigid as we like to convince ourselves.
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