ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter has been to advocate for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, or otherwise queer (LGBTIQ) rights in Africa through the perspective of critical realism. Critical realism is a philosophical perspective which holds that the world is a real and knowable place and that through critical study and cross-cultural dialogues we can more accurately describe constituent aspects of human beings, and from that information sketch out what is usually required for human wellbeing and happiness. However, we have qualified argument for LGBTIQ rights by acknowledging that LGBTIQ rights in African need not adopt, wholesale, Western LGBTIQ political agendas. The theoretical weakness of our argument, of course, is that we make these points as people informed by Western values but we offer these to promote dialogue with opposing perspectives. The debate over sexual and gender diversities, then, is a particular matter with which many cultures wrestle.
