The hardest part of being a historian, for me, is not the research – scouring books and papers, visiting heritage sites and repositories, conducting oral history sessions with local historians, storytellers and experts. Rather, across the course of writing my first book, When We Ruled: The Rise and Fall of Twelve African Queens and Warriors, as the sun continuously rose and dipped over me and my laptop, the hardest part was knowing that my contribution is a disruption.

It was knowing that my goal was to trouble what we, particularly Africans far flung across the diaspora, believe (or hope) that African histories will entail.

Knowing that my examination of the ways that Christianity was weaponised across the continent by colonial missionaries as a tool of African subjection will sit uncomfortably for some Christians.

Knowing that my exploration of precolonial queerness – among the Yorùbá and Hausa people, among Dahomey’s agooɖojĭè, from Zulu sangomas to North Sudanese royalty – will disgust those who want to believe that Africans are impervious to the ‘western import’ of homosexuality.