In this episode of Rich Queer Aunties, Christabel and Kachi go down the rabbit hole: how far back does Western influence actually go in Igbo land, and what does that mean for the way we talk about “African culture” today?

Christabel went down a research rabbit hole after someone on Instagram told her that Africans must have been beating their children long before colonialism, otherwise why is it so widespread today? She went looking. What she found should make every person of African descent pause.

In this episode, Christabel and Kachi trace the actual timeline: 500 years of colonial contact, a British model of child-rearing that was explicitly theological, and an Igbo cosmology in which children were revered as reincarnated ancestors sacred beings you could lose if you struck them too hard. This is not ancient African tradition. It is colonial management practice, repackaged as culture and handed down as inheritance.

They also get into what it costs us today: hiding tattoos from parents who are themselves 500 years removed from knowing any better, calling queerness un-African, policing each other's bodies, performing respectability for a version of culture that was installed by the people who beat the original one out of us.

And the question that sits underneath all of it: if not our generation, who is actually doing the work of re-indigenization?

This is the first of many conversations on what it looks like to come home.

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Catch you in the next one.

XO, 

Christabel & Kachi.