Image description: An illustration of a person standing in front of a mirror with their hands lifted up. They are dressed in a green hoodie that’s slightly folded and grey pants. They are also wearing beige sneakers and a maroon face cap and there’s a mirror behind them as well. In the mirror in front of them is a reflection of a feminine presenting person dressed in a mustard blouse, black short, and has black flowing hair. As a non-binary trans woman, my usual gender presentation does not attune with the typical ideas regarding feminity. I realized this a while ago while living in Tamboerskloof, an area in the center of Cape Town, South Africa. I was having a bad day and wanted to get some snacks from my local grocery store. I was wearing no make-up, a baggy band shirt, and a comfy pair of sweatpants. I made the five-minute walk down the road to get myself some ice cream and a bottle of wine. As I walked back to my apartment, two men followed me home, yelling transphobic slurs at me. Eventually, the two men cornered me outside my apartment and threatened to “fix me” with sexual violence. I made the same walk two weeks later in a dress and make-up with zero harassment. I learned a lesson that day. I was putting my life on the line if I ventured into the city center without appearing vaguely feminine. This forced me to start to think about African societal perceptions of womanhood and femininity and how much of what we tout to be African ideas of gender were set up and continue to be propped by colonialism and its many instruments. The misguided belief that queerness is wholly “un-African” is cited as the justification for assaults on trans identity. Yet these beliefs are a misrepresentation of Africa’s history and cultural identity. The anthropological and historical records show clear examples of analogues to queer identity that existed in African society before colonialism and the steady advance of Western imperialism. Records from the archives of the Portuguese Inquisition speak about an enslaved African called Antonio who took the female alias of Vitoria upon her arrival in Portugal from Benin. Her presentation was slightly ambiguous, but she styled herself and conducted herself as a woman. Vitoria earned a living as a sex worker on the streets of Lisbon and witnesses described her as using feminine gestures to draw her clients’ attention. For example, when she saw two Flemish men pass her house, she winked at them like a ‘woman’. Additionally, she was often seen walking from Lisbon’s riverfront with a water vessel on her head. This behavior was viewed as commonplace for women, as they often gathered water from the Chafariz de El-Rei (King’s Fountain). Vitoria’s neighbours gossiped and speculated about her actual sex. Some claimed she was a man, while others insisted that she was castrated. The reality was that it seemed like Vitoria concealed her penis by tucking it, albeit in a much more rudimentary fashion than what is done in the 21st century. She would tie a ribbon around her penis, pulling it back and binding it to her leg. Eventually, the Inquisition arrested Vitoria on charges of sodomy. Vitoria insisted that she was a woman and had the anatomy to prove it during her questioning. The Inquisitors did not believe her, demanding to know whether she created her female anatomy or whether it was the result of some illness. Vitoria answered that she was born with it and that many others in Benin were like her. Ultimately, the Inquisitors subjected her to a brutal, undignified medical examination. The medical report concluded that Vitoria had male genitalia. She was given a life sentence as an enslaved person in the king’s galleys for committing the “sin of sodomy”. Vitoria’s name was the first among a handful of transgender Africans who appeared in the records of the Portuguese Inquisition between 1550 and 1730. In Western history, their names are lost to the archival footnotes of a sweeping inquisition. The entries read as the simplistic persecution of the same-sex behaviours of transgender Africans. However, their names have significant cultural value in the context of queer identity in Africa. Their names are further proof of analogues to trans identity appearing within several pre-colonial African societies. What it meant to be a woman in many African pre-colonial societies was not rigid. Many African cultures had transgressive gender performances built into their cultural fabric. For example, during precolonial times, the mudoko dako, effeminate males among the Langi of northern Uganda, were treated as women and could marry men. The Mwami prophets of the Ila people in Zambia were men who dressed as women, went about traditional women’s work and slept with women without having sex with them.