Transgender, Trans-human, Trans-religious: The Decolonial Queer Possibilities of Ọgbanje and Other African Spirits

This article examines the writings of the Nigerian author Akwaeke Emezi, in particular their acclaimed semi-autobiographical novel Freshwater (2018), as a form of African queer and trans autotheorizing. It critically examines the theoretical significance of the indigenous Igbo concept of ọgbanje (spirit-child), which is central in Emezi’s self-writing and which serves to decenter and decolonize Western trans terminology. Reading Emezi in conversation with Stella Nyanzi’s argument about the queer possibilities of African understandings of spirits, the article argues that ọgbanje is an indigenous concept that allows for transing not just the category of gender, but also of religion and of the human. It further contends that Emezi, through the narrative epistemological frame of ọgbanje, performs a decolonial gesture that interrogates gender dualism, religious orthodoxy, secularity, and anthropocentric thought and that creatively reconceptualizes gender, religion, and, fundamentally, human personhood. Thus, this article advances debates about decolonization, religion, and (trans)gender in the fields of trans studies in religion and queer African studies, as well as in religious and trans/queer studies more broadly.