This part issue of the journal Africa broadly explores the idea of frontiers and pioneers in the study of queer African lives. We envisage frontiers as exploring new openings in the study of sexuality by putting forward the practices and experiences of people across the African continent. We propose to study queerness as part of broader quotidian realities so as to further theorize the study of sexualities and queerness. We propose the term ‘pioneer’ for the interlocutors in our studies: (self-identifying) women, men and queerying persons who courageously explore contradictory paths in their various contexts. As such, we encourage an imaginative employment of queer as indicating a horizon of curiosity and imprecision. In making queerness not an object of study but rather a subject of its own theorization based on everyday experience, this special journal issue explicitly and deliberately asserts the vernacular and the mundane as a locus of knowledge. One implication is especially pertinent: knowledge on queerness cannot be prefabricated or preassembled in theoretical laboratories with the aim of merely applying it to an African context. By doing so, Africa functions – as it always has – only as a variable in the study of cultural difference, one that is different from, by implication, a Euro-American centre. ‘Or, as is happening too often, queer African voices and experiences will be absorbed as “data” or “evidence,” not as modes of theory or as challenges to the conceptual assumptions that drive queer studies’ (Macharia 2016: 185). Foregrounding the mundane rather than the urbane (as in ‘suave’, for which queer theory has a strong penchant), we are not trying to ‘define’ African queer sexualities; rather, we seek to provoke conversations about the terms and agencies of their expansion through the prism of frontiers and pioneers.

《非洲》杂志的这一期期刊广泛探讨了非洲酷儿生活研究中的前沿思想和先驱思想。我们设想前沿将通过提出整个非洲大陆人民的实践和经验来探索性研究的新领域。我们建议将古怪性作为更广泛的quotidian现实的一部分进行研究，以便进一步对性与古怪性的研究进行理论化。我们为研究中的对话者提出​​“先锋”一词：（自我识别）女性，男性和查询在各种情况下勇于探索矛盾之路的人。因此，我们鼓励人们以富有想象力的方式使用酷儿，以表示好奇心和不精确性。通过使古怪不是研究的对象，而是根据日常经验进行的自身理论化的主题，这本特殊的期刊明确并蓄意地将白话和世俗作为知识的源泉。其中一个含义特别相关：关于奇特性的知识不能在理论实验室中预制或预先组装，而仅是将其应用于非洲。这样一来，非洲便像以往一样发挥着作用，只是在研究文化差异时起着变数的作用。“或者，就像经常发生的那样，非洲酷儿的声音和经验将被吸收为“数据”或“证据”，而不是作为理论模式或对推动酷儿研究的概念假设的挑战”（Macharia 2016：185）。我们以平凡而不是都市为基础（例如在“和ave”中，酷儿理论对此具有强烈的偏爱），我们不是在试图“定义”非洲酷儿的性行为。相反，我们试图通过边疆和先驱者的角度挑起有关其扩张的条件和机构的对话。