"An anxiety that historians discern in the historical record is how uncomfortable European travellers, and later anthropological accounts, were with the idea that their gendered worldview didn’t easily map onto the societies they encountered. “There is among the Angolan pagan much sodomy,” wrote one Portuguese soldier in 1681, “sharing one with the other their dirtiness and filth, dressing as women. And they call them by the name of the land, quimbandas.”
In another story, the inquisition in Brazil had heard complaints about Francisco Manicongo, one of the “negro sodomites who serve as passive women,” a jinbandaa from Central Africa, who had to be punished for being a deviant (in the eyes of Christians). Europeans, averse to what they called “sodomy,” expressed distress towards the idea that some people whom they perceived as men would dare be considered by their societies as women."
– Mohammed Elnaiem, "The “Deviant” African Genders That Colonialism Condemned"
https://daily.jstor.org/the-deviant-african-genders-that-colonialism-condemned/