Chibados

Both names reach English through Portuguese, and neither has an etymology anybody has recorded. What the sources record instead is a set of functions: divination, burial, counsel at court, and a distinct standing that put chibados into a caste of their own, whose elders addressed one another as Grandmother.

What the Portuguese actually recorded

The Dutch writer Olfert Dapper described the chibados as shamans who walk dressed like women. Portuguese priests and Jesuits, writing about the same people, recorded that chibados lived as women and married men without social sanction, and that those marriages were honoured and even prized. A later summary puts the religious content more directly: chibados were male diviners who channelled feminine spirits by taking on the manner of women.

The office and the presentation arrive together in every account. No source on file separates the dress from the divination or treats either as the ground of the other, and none records how a person came to be chibado, whether the standing was inherited, chosen or recognised.

Who the chibados served at court

The one figure the record attaches a number to is a royal household. Queen Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba, who lived from 1583 to 1663 and ruled from 1624, kept more than fifty chibados at her court. Wikipedia's article adds that they were said to have served her as concubines, in a construction that names no source for the saying, and a separate account records Nzinga marrying women.

That the office sat close to power is the part the sources agree on. Chibados were consulted on political and military decisions, which places them among the advisers of a kingdom fighting a long war against Portuguese expansion, and it explains why Portuguese soldiers, priests and inquisitors all had occasion to write about them.

Why the record comes from outside

Every description of the chibados in this material was written by the people who were dismantling the kingdoms they lived in. The tone is what that predicts. A Portuguese soldier wrote in 1681 that there was among the Angolan pagan much sodomy, sharing one with the other their dirtiness and filth, dressing like women. The same archive that preserves the practice preserves the hostility to it, and the two cannot be separated at this distance.

The Portuguese Inquisition tried Africans for living as women between 1550 and 1730, and the best documented of those cases is not a chibado at all. An enslaved man taken from Benin to Lisbon under the name Antonio lived there as a woman under the name Vitoria, worked as a sex worker, and was arrested on a charge of sodomy. Under questioning she said she had been born with the anatomy of a woman and that many others in Benin were like her; the inquisitors ordered a physical examination and sentenced her to life in the king's galleys. Cassandra Roxburgh, writing for Minority Africa in 2022, sets that case beside the chibados as evidence of the same archive doing the same work.

As Portuguese control extended, colonial law introduced and then hardened the criminalisation of what the chibados had been. No source on file records when the office ended, who the last chibados were, or what any of them said about themselves.

What the neighbouring records describe

The same colonial archive documents comparable positions elsewhere on the continent, and the sources here name several of them. Among the Langi of northern Uganda, mudoko dako, described as effeminate men, were treated as women and could marry men. The Mwami prophets of the Ila in Zambia were men who dressed as women and did work assigned to women. Among the Lugbara, mediums who crossed gender carried messages to the spirit world and were named for it: okule, like women, and agule, like men. Senegal has gor-digen.

Roxburgh's reading of that list is that the roles were spiritual before they were anything else, and that a dual gender was held to confer the power to speak with spirits. Sylvia Tamale, writing in 2014, supplies the other half of the argument: the claim that same-sex relations are foreign to Africa is a myth anchored in an old practice of selectively invoking African culture by those in power. Neither writer treats the chibados as an isolated case, and neither treats them as evidence for a single African pattern.

Why chibados resists the modern label

The word now circulates in English-language lists of the world's third genders, usually in one sentence and usually alongside Hijra, Mahu, Travesti and Two-Spirit. Roxburgh objects to the framing on historical grounds rather than political ones. Calling the chibados transgender is anachronistic, in her account, because it retrofits pre-colonial practice into categories built much later, and it drops the spiritual function that the Portuguese sources say was the point of the office.

That objection has a mirror image in the same article. The idea that queerness is foreign to Africa is itself a colonial inheritance, and the Portuguese record of the chibados is one of the documents that makes the inheritance visible, whatever it was written to prove. The sources describe an office in which the Third gender category and the priesthood were the same thing, and the modern labels each keep half of it.