I enter Kenyan, Christian, Queer, first, as a self-identified queer Ghanaian man who continues to wrestle with Christianity, the religion into which I was socialized. And, second, as a scholar invested in the emerging field of critical queer African studies, to which Adriaan van Klinken's book makes a vital contribution. The book's emphasis on the vexatious intersections between Africanness, religion and queerness couldn't be timelier. Intellectually, theologically and ethnographically valuable, the book assembles an array of narratives and experiences contiguous with my own experience of what it means to be Christian, queer and Ghanaian.

In that respect, I engage with the book as an intellectual who embraces, unapologetically, the zeal of the personal. Van Klinken glaringly makes his personal presence palpably felt by embedding himself in the project, albeit with a great sense of unease. The book has many strengths, one of which is the author's reinforcement of how the personal is political in the lives of Kenyan queers who are coterminously Christian. Undeniably, the author translates this African Atlantic feminist dictum into a bodily principle, refusing to leave it in the realm of abstraction. I am drawn to Van Klinken's engagement with the situated knowledges of his interlocutors. These knowledges are indubitably vital and vibrant sites of creativity for queer subjects, and in ways that resist the temptation to see being African, Christian and queer as bereft of contiguity. Poignantly, too, the methodological canvass that stimulates the work illuminates how methodologies are situated. In that spirit, if knowledges are situated, then the author, in a nourishing fashion, reveals that methodologies are, too.

Early on in the book, Van Klinken makes it clear where the book's allegiances lie. ‘This book is particularly interested in the role of religious belief and practice in what I call Kenyan Queer “arts of resistance” and it presents four case studies that analyze how religion, specifically Christianity, is drawn upon in lgbt activism in contemporary Kenya’ (p. 4). What can be gleaned from the author's provocation here is how Kenyan queers engage in the ‘arts of resistance’ in a nation that panoptically disciplines queer bodies. The ‘arts of resistance’ unreservedly make being Kenyan, Christian, and Queer possible. The portrait we get, throughout the book, is how non-heteronormative subjects reinterpret the official lexicon of oppression to legitimate their presence within the nation state. The Kenyan queer subjects animating the text innovatively politicize the aesthetic through literary, visual, sonic and spiritual registers to articulate notions of citizenship often adamantly rejected by the homonegative apparatuses of the nation state and Christianity.

One of the central elements of the book is its ability to bristle against the antithetical juxtaposition of Christianity and queer Africanness. Van Klinken achieves this by inviting us to explore the strange dalliances these formations share, using the queer Kenyan body as a critical medium. Not only are we given ethno-glimpses of the cast of queer characters whose lives distress the heteronormative terms set out by the Kenyan nation state, but these very characters, through the richness of their lives and existence, undermine official narratives of African homophobia parroted in LGBT human rights discourses by Western LGBT organizations and their African auxiliaries. Through queer Kenyan Christian lives, the book jettisons binaries of the secular and religious by revealing how these terms get turned upside down when trafficked to Africa.

From the late award-winning Kenyan literary artist Binyavanga Wainaina, to collectives of queer Kenyans, who, unlike Wainaina, remain hidden from the script of celebritydom and live uncertain lives that imbricate with Christian formations, we are given a panoply of queer life that yields what the author provocatively describes as an African queer theology. Embracing strands that are often imagined as opposed, much like the ones evoked by the title Kenyan, Christian, Queer, the sense of the creativity emanating from the buffet of contradictions and messiness in queer life is made apparent in the book. Queer politics in Africa is a thorny, undulating project, the author reveals, when posing the following question: ‘Beyond simple opposition, how are religious beliefs and practices negotiated, appropriated, and transformed?’ (p. 13).

What reprieve can be afforded by the author's instructive gesture towards an African queer theology? African. Queer. Theology. An interesting twist – these three analytics, never construed as entangled, share such productive affinity. The queer Kenyan Christian body appears to have some answers to why this relationship is plausible through time. In other words, an Afroqueer futurity is underlined by the author, a future that mobilizes the frictions between Kenyan, Christian and queer to engender an African queer theology.

My question for the author is twofold. If the arts of resistance are sites where an African queer theology is made possible, do they perform what Keguro Macharia, the Kenyan queer literary theorist, captures as ‘frottage’ in his recent book?Footnote ¹ Second, how are the arts of resistance deployed by Kenyan queers reminiscent of what the queer of colour theorist José Esteban Muñoz calls disidentification?Footnote ²

To conclude, the book persuasively invokes how queer Kenyans engage in a ‘double re-reading’ by exploiting the paradoxes generated by the contexts in which they are embedded. This double re-reading is arguably a critical decolonizing strategy; whether that entails re-reading Christian theological precepts through HIV and AIDS; re-reading Africa as anti-homosexual; and re-reading the Pavlovian idea that being queer is un-African, decolonial praxis is present in the arts of resistance. The arts of resistance are synonymous with the refusal to be evacuated from being Kenyan, Christian and queer at the same time.