Remembering Ɔkomfo Kwabena: ‘Motherhood’, Spirituality, and Queer Leadership in Ghana

Abstract

This article examines how members of a community of queer men in Ghana known as Saso people remember one of their important leaders, ɔkomfo Kwabena. Based on ethnographic research in a town in the Central Region, I show how in drawing upon local Ghanaian cultural resources, including traditional leadership roles, indigenous religious practices, socially sanctioned practices of gender non-conformity, and a local practice of sexual initiation, ɔkomfo Kwabena sought to develop Saso people and provide spaces for the affirmation of queer sexuality as he challenged post-colonial discourses that mark queer sexuality as exogenous to and incompatible with Ghanaian and African identity and cultural traditions. Ɔkomfo Kwabena was referred to as the Nana Hemaa (queen mother) of this community, and he is remembered as someone who provided advice, guidance, and discipline, especially to those Saso people who he considered his ‘children’. The intellectual, emotional, and financial support he provided was facilitated by his charisma and popularity. He was also remembered as someone who used his spiritual abilities as an indigenous religious priest to help Saso people, and his association with the indigenous priesthood allowed him to publicly and boldly articulate a socially acceptable feminine gender performance within the town. As the leading indigenous religious priest in the town, the respect and high status he was accorded enabled him to more effectively provide leadership to Saso people. Furthermore, through his participation in a local form of sexual initiation, he also promoted sexual diversity and challenged the hegemony of Ghanaian heteronormativity, while offering Ghanaian men membership into alternative forms of community.