| Sumario: | This article asks what it means to discover Africans through our sexual desires, and how that might shape the way the West knows both women and queer people. I closely read Wendy Belcher's interpretations of the sexual life of Wälättä P̣eṭros, a seventeenth-century Ethiopian female saint. While the article draws on postcolonial, African feminist and queer scholarship, it takes a cue from Saidiya Hartman's "Venus in Two Acts" to raise speculative questions related to the opacity of the text. I argue that Belcher's interpretation of carnal desire produces the saint as a hysterical subject, and attaches to the saint's life the claim of discovering queer people in pre-colonial Africa. I argue that this interpretation assimilates the saint into our contemporary ideas of sexuality and thereby invents a modern subject through a reading that is divorced from historical and geographic specificities. The article also explores the benevolent intentions of discovering pre-colonial queer Africans for the cause of present-day struggles against persecution. It is not my intention here to discount the translation of the hagiography, nor is it to dispute the possibilities of reading same-sex intimacies. I am interested in thinking about the presentist preoccupations of the interpretation.
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