Abstract
The launch of this journal roughly coincided with my personal engagement with the study of sexualities. I had just landed in Zimbabwe at a moment when sexuality was re-emerging as a hot political issue. It had been very hot indeed in the middling days of colonial rule. Then, black Zimbabweans’ anxieties about the impacts of cash, urbanization, and the large-scale influx of male migrant labourers from Malawi, and white settlers’ fears of black male lust for white women were characteristic features of public discourse that helped to shape the form that the colonial state took (Jeater, 1993). The tone of that discourse tended towards moralistic, paternalistic, and often overtly racist.
The liberation struggle, the dream of national development, and the shifting etiquette of scholarly enquiry, put sexuality talk largely off the main agenda in the 1970s and 80s. By the early 1990s, however, sexual mores were coming back in a big way as an area of political concern. The HIV/AIDS epidemic was spiralling out of control, and unequal gender relations expressed in normative sexuality were quite evidently a contributing factor to the calamity. What to do about that was complicated by a tendency in the media and among Western donors to pathologize/otherize ‘African sexuality.’ That tendency was in some ways reminiscent of, and to some as infuriating as, in the colonial age. African critiques of the ‘westocentrism,’ and gender or ‘queer imperialism’ in Western responses to the HIV/AIDS pandemic - at times astute, at times angry, at times hyperbolic – struck a chord that beckoned for more sensitive, nuanced research (see Achmat, 1993; Ahlberg, 1994; Arnfred, 2004; McFadden, 1992, for example).
Debates about where to take the research, and how to intervene to promote public health and women’s and sexual minorities’ ‘empowerment’, hinged on radically different conceptualizations of the problem. To some, sexual inequality and gender-based violence were primarily elements of patriarchal tradition that could be reformed out of existence with education and ‘women in development’ projects, some of which in Zimbabwe had indisputably achieved significant progress for women in the 1980s. Westocentrism in feminist research could be addressed by better methodology. To others, however, reform was a mirage and a more radical tack was needed. Indeed, in this view, gender inequality was getting worse precisely in relation with economic reforms. This was manifest in a political backlash against women’s earlier gains and in neo-traditional responses to the brutal economic structural adjustment programme that Zimbabwe, like most African countries, was then undergoing. Dark rumours and lurid speculation swirled in popular culture about the perceived decline in sexual morality linked to the economic crisis, including, the purported rise of prostitution, abortion, husband-taming herbs, incest, and even bestiality by women. A vibrant feminist movement brought many of these secrets into public scrutiny, linking them to poor governance and skewed donor priorities like debt repayment and market fundamentalism.
A series of related debates sparked by the president of Zimbabwe attracted my main attention at that time. While these had a very contemporary focus (the growing visibility of Zimbabwean gays and lesbians and their demands for human rights and dignity), they drew upon a powerful historical narrative. Then President Robert Mugabe notoriously dismissed demands for sexual minority rights at an event devoted to the theme of human rights, in part by claiming that homosexuals were foreign to Africa. The present-day existence of black homosexuals in this view testified to a history of white perversion imported through colonialism. This he reiterated constantly over the two-plus decades since, and he has been joined in that time by a long list of African political, religious and cultural leaders around the continent. The rhetoric has been accompanied in many cases by hardening laws and vigilante violence against sexual minorities and their allies (Nyeck and Epprecht, 2013).
African sexual minorities and their allies have responded to these assaults by asserting a widening range of arguments and evidence to support their claims, including arguments based on scientific, public health, economic and moral/theological grounds, in addition to memoirs and artistic representations of their lives (Duiker, 2001; GALZ 2002 [1995]; Ikpo, 2017 and Muholi, 2010, for example). I am proud to have played a small role in this and, while cognizant of serious weaknesses in the movement for sexual minority rights and of the fragility of legal frameworks, I see noteworthy progress made over 20 years. Cabo Verde and Mozambique have now joined South Africa in decriminalizing sodomy, for example, and several other countries have begun to distance themselves from colonial-era discriminatory laws. In 2014, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights passed a resolution calling for an end to violence against sexual minorities. It now requests member states to report on the measures they are taking ‘to address acts of torture or ill-treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex persons and also provide effective redress to such victims.’ Many of even the most vocally homophobic states now allow, for pragmatic reasons, discreet public health initiatives to reach men who have sex with men (Beyrer et al., 2011).
My main contributions to these developments have been as a historian, revealing how cultures in the region of southern Africa understood and responded to non-normative sexuality prior to colonialism, capitalism and Christianity, establishing how new types of sexual relationships and vocabularies emerged in the racial capitalist context, tracing the development of the ‘homosexuality is un-African’ rhetoric over time in relation to transnational factors such as scientific discourse and pan-African ideology, and charting aspects of the nascent sexual rights movement (Epprecht, 2004, 2008, 2013). My contribution to this journal has included the translation and analysis of an obscure, fictional representation of sexuality in pre-colonial Zimbabwe by the Marquis de Sade (yes, that one) and an article querying the presumption that sexuality research is inherently a career-inhibiting decision (Epprecht, 2007, 2014). I write now not to provide a systematic overview of this burgeoning field of study, but as an observer of trends in the scholarship since I started. Three very positive ones stand out.
First and foremost to my mind is the emergence of high quality scholarship by Africans, informed by and debating African theorists of gender and sexuality. Twenty years ago it was rare to find Africans willing to take on the subject at all, and those who did commonly protected themselves with an armoury of western intellectual references, Michel Foucault above all. This was entirely understandable on many grounds. It took a lot of courage to engage a topic so disparaged in popular culture and generally regarded as frivolous even by colleagues who did not share the overt sexism and homophobia of so much of the political class. Now, a growing crop of African researchers are able to position themselves theoretically and methodologically not with primary reference to the western canon but to African interpreters: Tamale (2011), Mathebeni (2015), Aderinto (2015), and Kaoma (2017) for example. This is important not only because African researchers are usually linguistically and culturally more closely attuned to the nuances of African cultural politics, but also as a striking rebuke to one of the staples of African conservatives’ claim that researching sexuality is a white person obsession, uninteresting or even offensive to Africans.
Second, two decades ago the range of topics being discussed in the social science scholarship was quite circumscribed both in geographic and ‘moral’ terms. The bulk of publications came from anglophone Africa, and particularly the former settler colonies of east and southern Africa. That remains the case but there has been a very notable rise in research from francophone, lusophone and arabophone Africa (Arnfred, 2011; Lobo and Miguel 2015; Gadelrab, 2016, and Jean-Baptiste, 2014, for example). With respect to moral circumscriptions – de facto taboos on research into certain disapproved or denied behaviours – these have fallen steadily. The Lancet, notably, broke its 25 years of silence around male-male sexuality in Africa in 2009 when it acknowledged this may be a more important factor than had hitherto been assumed by medical professionals in the fight against HIV (Smith et al., 2009). Helen Bradford (1991) first broached abortion in a ground-breaking article – now there is a monograph on the topic (Klausen, 2015). The tone has also changed in much of this scholarship. Where ‘female genital mutilation’ commonly generated breathless polemics and defensive if not furious reaction, female genital cutting or modification now attracts calm, rigorous and nuanced analysis (Bagnol and Mariano, 2012).
Finally, judging from the articles in this journal and western queer theory in general, Africa was and remains of little interest as a source of theory or comparative evidence. This may be changing, however, as empirical studies from Africa are increasingly bringing to the fore distinctive aspects of queer African culture and activism. As one important example, development, modernization, and urbanization are not necessarily bringing greater secularism and liberal values in Africa as, for the most part, happened in the western experience. On the contrary, the manifest failures of secular development have fuelled people’s search for meaning through faith, in many cases through fundamentalist expressions of Islam, Pentecostalism or charismatic Christianity. The rise of such fundamentalisms is closely tied to the emergence of political homophobia in places like Uganda, Nigeria and Ethiopia. And yet, many African LGBTI people are attracted to the otherwise affirming, even erotic messages and sense of community and hope that these faiths can bring (van Klinken and Chitando, 2016).
Global queer theory needs to pay attention to these findings, and this may be happening. I will end my contribution to this forum by noting a major forthcoming project in which I have been involved as an editor. The Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History (Chiang, forthcoming) will be a monumental achievement of a million or more words authored by many of the world’s leading scholars. Africa will be represented on an equal or perhaps even better footing than other continents. To be sure, ‘the West’ gets the better part of two regions (North America and Western Europe) but this still constitutes less than a quarter of the total entries. It will thus be difficult for readers to avoid encountering African and other Global South topics in the course of their research through the whole. That many of the authors are young, African and Africa-based is a sign of good health for the field as a whole. Whether this ever ‘trickles down’ to strengthen the effectiveness of local activism and policy advocacy in Africa remains to be seen. But it certainly undercuts many of the arguments put forward by those who would defend or promote discrimination or denialism in Africa. And it bodes well for the development of a truly global queer framework that avoids the pitfalls of ‘westocentrism’ or ‘queer imperialism’.