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Jidenna has been sharing his views about a lot of controversial social issues while doing press for his new album 85 to Africa, and now the proud Nigerian-American singer is pushing back against contentions within the Black diaspora that homosexuality is a derivative of European culture.
Monday, while visiting Sway’s Universe to promote his latest project, the “Classic Man” rapper very succinctly broke down why some of the limited ideas about same-sex relationships in the Black community come down to nothing more than misinformation and homophobia but aren’t actually supported by history.
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“The whole idea that Black people, and our tradition to be Black… You hear these African leaders who are dressed in three-piece suits, got an iPhone, speaking in English and not their native tongue are saying, ‘it’s unafrican to be homosexual, it’s unafrican… we don’t have it. That was brought as a European import.’ It’s not true. It’s not true at all,” said Jidenna, a Stanford graduate who spent the first ten years of his life in Nigeria.
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“You got Uganda, the kingdom of Buganda at the time… Before Uganda, there was an openly gay king,” he reveals, much to everyone’s surprise. “If you go to Zimbabwe… the bushmen as they call them, you’ll see homosexual acts in the Cape paintings. If you go to different communities in Africa, there was different rights of passage where if a woman was with a woman, or a man was with a man, they were thought to be more powerful.”
“There was never a time where this didn’t exist,” he concludes. “Or where it was just hands down that homosexuals were wrong. That’s not actual an African thing, which means it’s not a Black thing.”