“Nigeria Can Do without Such Perverts”: Sexual Anxiety and Political Crisis in Postcolonial Nigeria

Recent political homophobia in Nigeria, including vigilante violence and repressive legislation, is often imagined to be a reaction to outside forces: religious movements like evangelical Christianity and reform-ist Islam or the spread of Western homosexual identities. This article suggests this is unlikely and that understanding recent patterns of homophobia requires understanding local cultures of same-sex practice and the anxieties underlying political attempts to regulate sexuality. The article also makes some preliminary suggestions for how such an account might be attempted by looking at long-standing contradictions in systems for evaluating sexual morality in northern Nigeria and how those might help inform recent discussions of sexual immorality.