Dissident performances of black queer & trans desire in Zimbabwe

Abstract

Desire is felt by all, yet undesired for all. Some bodies are allowed to feel and express desire while others have been written off as unqualified for it. In Zimbabwe, queer and trans people are considered undesirable in and by themselves, and their expressions of desire a crime. What then becomes of the desire that is held and perched intricately in the bodies of these undesirable bodies, especially in repressive contexts? This question forges an entry point to a conversation about black queer and trans desires and how they find expression in the form of embodied languages such as theater. Three theatre projects, namely Young Desires, Nhanho and Hweva that I facilitated in Harare, Zimbabwe are the main creative repositories from which I draw to make an argument around how black Zimbabwean queer desire finds expression in a repressive context.

Keywords

Zimbabwe Transgender African queer theory queer desire popular participatory theatre

Desirable beginnings?

I think of desire as a story waiting to be told. A site of latent possibilities. Expressions of desire then become a form of storytelling. The body, the mind and soul altogether telling stories of the past, present and future, stories of joy, pain, triumph and losses. Perhaps then, a story is a more desirable way to begin this paper on black queer desire. I love stories and storytelling because in/through stories, we live and breathe (Okri, 2014). Yet I also know that stories, particularly those told by people from the South, have historically been considered not interesting, rigorous or scientific enough in the realm of global knowledge systems. Thus, the decision to start the conversation I am attempting to have in this article, with a story, is both political and conceptual.

Desire as a concept generally speaks to notions of wants, wishes and aspirations that one holds (Zeigler-Hill and Shackelford, 2020). It has always been my political desire to make space for stories, particularly black (queer) stories in academic spaces for the mere reason that historically the voice, wisdom and knowledges of our ancestors were relegated to mere banter read ‘oral narratives’ in scientific discourse. Among other complexities and nuances, stories make room for feelings and emotions which are often obliterated in academic writing. These feelings and emotions are what I am after. There is an inherent desire here too, to free myself as a scholar from the confines of academic boundaries that are not always necessarily useful. Call it a praxis of black queer and trans desires. Black queer and trans stories, I contend, have for long been hidden in the body. I am deliberate about the term hidden, because black queer and trans people have not been afforded space to tell their stories. In Zimbabwe, queer stories are censored in public discourses. There is also a penchant for punishing queer and trans people who continue to tell their hidden stories anyways, through their bodies as they occupy and navigate repressive physical, socio-political spaces.

If desire is a story as I have framed, then consider that queer desires have been denied expression. While some bodies are allowed to feel and express desire, queer and trans people have been written off as unqualified for it, in Zimbabwe and the world over. Because it is that desire that marks the point of their human nullity. It is that desire that relegates them to the condition of the undesirable other. It might be that queer and trans bodies evidently defy heteronormativity or that they desire ‘wrong’ bodies. Most homo/trans phobic comments predominantly attack the make and behavior of queer and trans bodies. It is a gift and a curse that social media is facilitating more visibility for Zimbabwean queer and trans people. The homo/transphobia online is palpable and documented in the form of negative posts and comments that are readily available for all to read (Moyo and Ndhlovu, 2024). For example, Donald Trump’s speech in which he launched his anti-transgender campaign went viral on TikTok (January 2025) and elicited to a larger extent, global applause.

I conceptualize this as Chimurenga chemuviri [war on bodies] to invoke the moniker given to the historical wars of liberation against British colonial invasion which led to Zimbabwe’s Independence. This Chimurenga chemuviri [war on bodies] peregrinates along with the three Chimurenga’s in one way or the other. The first two Chimurengas were all incited by the dispossession of land, and other forms of oppression against black Zimbabwean people. Felix Ndlovu (2021:90), considers the Third Chimurenga as a sequel that pursued the unfinished business around land acquisition, land redistribution and economic empowerment of indigenous Zimbabweans who were victims of colonial injustices. The black queer and trans Zimbabwean people also have had to carry another layer of prejudice based on gender and sexuality, more so in the ‘postcolonial’ nation. They are often bundled together with colonial and imperialist forces and as a result considered outsiders who should be ‘chopped off the nation’. This war on bodies exists to date. So, one wonders, what happens to stories when the repository is under threat? What happens to the stories that lie in the loins of those whose bodies are at threat? While we ponder on this, I want to go back to the start. Where I wanted to tell a story about desire.

Right at the beginning of my TikTok binging phase, I came across a video of two lesbian women, one Zimbabwean and the other South African, kissing and fondling each other’s breasts in what seemed to be a public space. I quickly scrolled past, and then back again. Are these Africans in Africa? I kept asking myself. I scrolled back and forth for a while before palpitations took over. I could not stomach the video. I spent the day trying to figure out why my body reacted to the video in the same ways it does when it has ingested something foreign to it. I kept thinking about this TikTok for days on end. I thought it was beautiful and repulsive at the same time. How could something so beautiful eke me in that way? There was so much joy written on the couple’s faces and their joy seemed to have bothered me.

It was not long after my encounter with this TikTok that I typed into the search box, “queer couples in Africa” and I was ushered into a huge repository of content. At this point my curiosity outweighed my repulsion. In fact I was coming to terms with the fact that my repulsion could have been both a naturalized reaction owed to my socialization as a Zimbabwean, and envy. The visuals from TikTok might have brought me face to face with my secret desires, fantasies and passions. Ones I have no courage to live. Especially the erotic desires I have not had the freedom, courage and space to express, share and live. Ones I paint in between the pages of my heart instead.

The TikTok video stayed with me longer than it should have. I interrogated my discomforts further and realized that it had been the first time I was seeing a queer Zimbabwean lesbian woman on screen. This is how much queer people have been kept at bay in Zimbabwean public discourse. Section 73 of the Zimbabwe (2006) Criminal Law (Codification and Reform Act) Act No.1 of 2013. in Zimbabwe does not criminalize woman to woman relationships and erotic desire. It overtly speaks to men:

(1) Any male person who, with the consent of another male person, knowingly performs with that other person anal sexual intercourse, or any act involving physical contact other than anal sexual intercourse that would be regarded by a reasonable person to be an indecent act, shall be guilty of sodomy and liable to a fine up to or exceeding level fourteen or imprisonment for a period not exceeding one year or both.

It is clear from this prescript that in Zimbabwe consensual queer male relationships, erotics and pleasure automatically qualify as sodomy hence a punishable offense. Being gay may not necessarily be illegal, but expressing erotic desire is outrightly outlawed. Despite these legal gaps and/or ambiguities, the entire LGBTIQ+ community has internalized the idea that their being is criminalized with queer women included. There seems to be a natural law in Zimbabwe that follows this legal provision to consider queerness and transness in their various manifestations as criminal. I have no scope to pursue this conversation beyond this point, but the omission of women from the Act is not necessarily a positive one. It is possibly a commentary on the suggested incapabilities of women to desire and pleasure each other outside the 'alpha' penis. This is a phallic fallacy. These legal prescriptions and their (mis)readings cause anxieties among LBTIQ + people in Zimbabwe. To borrow Asante’s (2020: 114) words, “punitive laws and social taboos place certain limitations on the expressions of sexual agency to love, desire, “feel,” and be “felt”.

Inevitably, therefore, any content on queerness and transness is inherently not in line with Zimbabwe’s moral codes. As a theatre practitioner, I also know full well that my artistic desires should be limited to the heteronormative canvas and anything outside that, is an act of dissidence and disobedience that might attract punishment. This how I arrive at framing my artistic practice as Theatre of/for Disobedience. In this article, I analyse three theatre of/for disobedience projects that I facilitated in Harare, Zimbabwe. Young Desires (2013) , Nhanho (2014) and Hweva (2020) are the main creative repositories from which I draw to make an argument around how black Zimbabwean queer and trans desire finds expression in a repressive context. The stage, I argue, is a site where this queer dissidence plays out and I draw on discourse analysis of the three plays. Most of the data is drawn from the playmaking process, performance and post-performance discussions that I documented. All three are part of my ongoing experiments with theatre as a site within which gender and sexualities in Africa can be engaged, discussed, critiqued and even transformed. Moreso, as a space for queer and trans Zimbabweans to tell their stories. Give the context within which all three of these projects were carried out, I frame them as acts of dissidence.

Queer-ing black queer & trans desires

Queer and trans desires are complex and layered. African Queer Theory seems to be the most desirable lens to unpack the multifacetedness of queer and trans desires. Other theories such as African feminisms and Decoloniality might have tenets that are fundamental to this conversation, but I fear that they might be too attached to the heterosexual matrix to provide a desirable foundation for this paper.

African Queer Theory is “a multifaceted domain, deeply material (visceral, embodied, and politicised), and, like gender, informed by interlocking political, social, class, religious, cultural, and economic interests” (Matebeni et al., 2018: 1). Matebeni et al. further recognise that besides being multifaceted African non-heterosexual sexualities and gender diversities are dynamic, multifarious, and resilient” (2018: 2). In the same ways queer and trans desires can best be understood as this wide spectrum of wants, needs, yearnings and wishes that knows no borders but stands as a powerful force of life. Stella Nyanzi (2014: 68) calls it a “canvas of possibilities”.

There are two major storylines of desire vis a vis queer and trans people in Africa. One follows the common trajectory that queer desire “undermines the grip of colonial heteropatriarchy” (Asante 2020: 113). The other, centres erotic desire and its revolutionary impulses. Both are necessary, the former lays the context of how queer desire is considered undesirable, and the latter is a rebuttal that considers the ‘power of the erotic’ as a socio-political tool for black queer radical being or potential site for decolonization (Asante 2020: 114). In fact, the latter is critical. This is why I began this story with an anecdote of erotic desire. However, I argue that there are many ways to think, write, do queer and trans desires in Africa that go beyond the capture/policing of desire and the valorization of the erotic. It might be imperative at this point for me to explain why I started with the erotic.

Erotic desire is the very obsession of those that police queer and trans people in Zimbabwe. It is often that people use sex as the reference point of homophobic and transphobic violence. My research on queer and trans narratives in digital spaces over the past years has revealed that same sex and same gender sex is the premise of homophobia and transphobia. Tiffany Kagure Mugo (2021: 2298) also notes that “problematic myths are birthed in the imagination of the actual logistics of how queer people have sex”. You will get comments on social media reiterating the mechanics of queer sex as preposterous, and how particular organs are (in)compatible on moral, religious and cultural grounds among other justifications. If queer and trans erotic desires are the centre of rebuke and condemnation, one can begin to take the widespread obsessions to police them, apart. This context is important to consider and lay down.

I also began with the TikTok anecdote to reveal the political potency of queer and trans expressions of erotic desire outside their primary functions. Seeing the lesbian TikTok couple fondling and kissing represented some form of freedom and possibilities that no textual argument can render accurately. Having said that, I am also aware that queer and trans desires have been so sexualised that the erotic becomes the only way to imagine queer and trans being. To limit queer and trans desires to the erotic I argue, is to perpetuate ideas that designate queer and trans relationships only through an erotic often hypersexualized lens. The erotic is indeed a critical part of queer and trans desire, and as Audre Lorde (2012) argues, a resource, a source of power and act of resistance. Scholars argue that pleasure for example as an aspect of erotica has not featured much in Global North narratives about African queer and trans people, hence enacting and documenting it is a fundamental libertarian twist to the trajectory (Munro, 2018; Nyanzi, 2014). Indeed, I contend too that pleasure awakens the nerves in one’s body that they never knew existed and reminds them that they are still alive in a world that continues to overkill queer and trans people. However, I maintain that it is not the only desire that is held, expressed and shared.

Black queer and trans desires constitute a vast array of yearnings, wants, needs and imaginations beyond the erotic. Fundamentally, especially when thinking about black queer and trans people in Zimbabwe, there is a huge desire to be seen as fully human. Queerness in transness is read outside common frames of “munhu/umuntu”. Munhu/umuntu literally translates to a person, but the term also carries a deeper meaning in Zimbabwean culture. Neo Musangi (2018) has not only established the difficulties of these translation woes when trying to render contextually specific concepts into English, she also shows us that it might be necessary to indulge the labour of unpacking the terms. The work is tiring but I am willing to try and explain so that the message lands to the communities I write about/for. Those I write for include black and African siblings whom I can only converse with in the English language because our vernacular tongues do not always meet. The labour of translation is certainly worth it especially in the context of this conversation where I am desperate to retain the meaning of munhu/umuntu to stand my argument. Better yet, let me draw on Molly Manyonganise’s assertion that contextualises munhu especially among the Shona people, who are the largest ethnic group in Zimbabwe. She avers that:

It is possible for the Shona to describe an individual as being not a person because he or she exhibits negative behaviour (‘haasi munhu’ because he/she does not have unhu’) or munhu chaiye, meaning the individual is a good person. This is applicable to persons who have chosen to deviate from the societal set norms of what is wrong and what is right. (2015: 1)

In lieu of this explanation, a queer and trans person in Zimbabwe automatically does not qualify as munhu. There seems to be a deep desire to challenge this narrative and this is evident in the many stories that queer and trans Zimbabweans tell whenever they get the opportunity. I will share in the forthcoming sections examples of how these desires are expressed. This desire to be seen as ‘munhu’ also comes with the fervent desire to claim/enjoy the status and privileges of being a Zimbabwean. Sibanda and Ncube (2023: 186) note in their study that Zimbabwean TikTokers use the social media platform to “insist on the existence of queer people in Zimbabwe and the desire, thereof, to reclaim a national identity and space which they have been denied since the modern-day state was founded”.

One might argue that there is no need for queer and trans people to negotiate or desire to be part of the fold or imaginations of the nation because the very notion of being queer suggests that one defies normativity and herd politics. Certainly, queer and trans people owe no one and do not need to seek permission to exist, but it is also true that we come to be in community with others. There is a desire to be seen, embraced, acknowledged, counted and witnessed. The desire to belong. I want to invoke the Ubuntu philosophy here, “I am because we are, since we are therefore I am” (Mbiti, 1990: 108). This has of course been weaponized in heteronormative exclusionary discourses but it could be used equally to justify the need to see the human in each other outside other designations such as sexuality, gender, ethnicity among others. It is this knowledge I contend, that queer and trans people continue to fight for their Zimbabwean identity. It is not just a matter of seeking validation (it might be for some) but a need and nod, borne of the core idea that “I am who I am as a consequence of my relationships with other people” (Epprecht, 2013, 66 cited in Bongmba 2016: 30).

I have alluded to one fundamental desire here. There are several others. In this paper I consider taking these multiple forms of desire into account as a form of queer-ing queer and trans desires. The erotic is important but to make that the only story is as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2009) warns, dangerous. In fact we have seen how queer erotic desire has been used severally to designate queers and trans people as carriers of disease and the reason for natural disasters and famine among other ills.

Staging dissident desires: findings & analysis

Young Desires: Desire to be seen

As the title suggests, the main theme of the play, Young Desires was to explore the desires of young women studying at the University of Zimbabwe in 2013, with regards to sexual reproductive health issues. The play was part of a bigger project called the Stepping Out Youth project which was conceptualised by Ngonidzashe Muwonwa and myself at the University of Zimbabwe in 2013. Muwonwa was doing his PhD with a focus on youth sexualities in Zimbabwe and how these are/can be expressed via multimedia approaches. He appointed me, research assistant and Director of the project as I was already involved in using theatre to unpack issues around gender and sexuality in Zimbabwe in my capacity as a sexual reproductive health ambassador under an organisation called SAfAIDS (a regional non-governmental organisation) in Zimbabwe. The initial idea was to come up with a stage series, that is an ongoing story that is staged once a week that unpacks the notion of desire among female students on campus. Due to pressing commitments on my end and that of the students I was working with, we ended up doing one full play. The play was first staged at the Jacaranda Young Women’s Festival, and then to an audience of university students and staff members at the Beit Hall, University of Zimbabwe.

The Beit Hall is a historical site where practitioners like Robert McLaren experimented with radical theatre performance that deviated from the then mainstream western theatre trajectory. As an example, Nkululeko Sibanda (2013) notes how Robert McLaren once placed the audience on the proscenium and the performers in the auditorium for his play, Mavambo (1985). Having a Shona title during this era where theatre was thought of as possible only if written in English, was subversive. The design of the production which reversed established theatre decorum, also reveals how Beit Hall is a critical historical site in so far as decolonizing theatre is concerned. Young Desires was staged in this historical theatre and although it followed the proscenium stage conventions, its content was largely provocative and the first of its kind.

Young Desires, follows the story of five young women who are studying at the University of Zimbabwe. All five share a small, rented room close to campus. Although the characters have one common objective - to finish their studies and graduate, each character in the play also has personal desires. Generally, the core theme was to explore the notion of desire and sexuality in a context where conversations on desire and sexuality are often veiled in secrecy. Writing on this play, Muwonwa (2017: 186) observes how “the socialisation of young women demands that they “desire men” through a focalization on marriage”. This desire to marry, either socialised or not, indeed plays itself out in the lives of the four women in the room, except for one.

Delilah, the character of interest in this paper, a young queer woman’s burning desire in the play is to be seen and accepted as a woman, and most importantly a full human being. She is masculine presenting and as such there is an expectation on her to behave completely like a man in the house such that whenever she expresses what could be read as feminine behaviour, she gets shamed. In scene 2 of the play, the girls claim that there is an odour in the house. The immediate suspicion is that Amanda, who is portrayed as a slay queen who often brings multiple boyfriends into the space, might have aborted and hidden a fetus in the room. They embark on a spring-cleaning exercise and stumble upon used sanitary pads under the mattress which only Delilah used. It emerges that Delilah is the culprit. The following conversation ensues:

Debra: Hehehehe saka munotoendawo kumwedzi nhai Bambo? [heheh so you also menstruate, daddy]

Delilah: Kondepapi pandakamboti ndirimurume ini, usade kundifarisira [when did I ever say that I am a man, dont’ mess with me]

All four burst into endless laughter

Delilah’s hiding of the sanitary pads must be taken in context; a lot of female students in Zimbabwean tertiary institutions at the time (perhaps even now) were struggling with sanitary towel disposal for various reasons such as the lack of sanitary bins, cultural beliefs around disposing off your blood, among others. It was therefore a contextually relevant aspect in a play that also was calling on the school administration to have more sanitary bins in place. Going back to the hiding of the sanitary pads. The idea was not so much to portray Delilah as a filthy character. Rather the core idea was on how she is forced to hide parts of herself that she feels are not palatable for the people around her. One can argue that she also hides them because she does not feel safe enough to discuss issues of sanitary waste disposal with her roommates who apparently do not expect her to menstruate like other women. This action can be read to imply a desire to be seen and accepted as a woman regardless of how she presents. There is also an inherent desire to be free from gender stereotypes particularly around menstruation. When she is confronted by Debra about the used sanitary pads, she as indicated above, does not succumb to the queer shaming, rather she speaks back to the idea that she has never considered herself to be a man.

Another possibility is that Delilah may have been at odds with herself. It is possible that she was having an internal conflict because “one common aspect of masculinity is rejecting anything perceived as womanly or feminine” (Chrisler et al., 2016: 1240). Again, I note a desire for freedom here, that is not necessarily uttered but implied. The freedom from societal expectations that make it hard for her masculine body to be that of a menstruator. In their article on queer periods, Chrisler et al. (2016) give reference to the film Boys Don’t Cry where a transgender man hides tampons under the mattress to avoid detection. Noone in our production team had ever watched this film when we came up with Delilah’s character. It was based on a story that I had heard from a friend of mine who identified as butch. Perhaps indicating that, it is a common occurrence. Chrisler et al. (2016) further note that negative attitudes towards menstruation and a desire to stigma associated with being a menstruator has seen other masculine presenting women and trans men alike using hormonal therapy to suppress the period.

What is also particularly interesting in the play is that Delilah does not express any form of erotic desire throughout the play. If we are to follow dominant portrayals of queer women in media spaces, the immediate desire for a queer woman like Delilah who is sharing a one roomed house with four other girls would have been to pursue love or solicit sex from one of them. In repressive settings where queerness is prohibited and thus kept behind the scenes, Nigeria for example, stories that feature lesbian characters often do so to expose a moral issue. The frames are also very simplistic and focused on romance and sex. If we were to follow these dominant portrayals, the immediate desire for a lesbian woman like Delilah would have been to pursue love or solicit sex from one of the girls. However, in this story, her motives and actions range from building friendship, kinship negotiating belonging and full acceptance from her peers. One could sum it up as a desire for intimacy. I am open to desires of intimacy as they relate to closeness and friendship, outside the sexual. Here I think of intimacy with the people, cultures and objects and places that make us feel whole.

Nhanho (Strides): The desire to be and to breathe

Nhanho means Strides, and this project was named by a group of 6 LGBTIQ + youths that I met during my outreach campaigns around the country as an SRHR ambassador. One of the young people I met, Chesai challenged me to do a play with him that addresses issues of what he called GID (gender identity disorder) in my plays, this is after he had been bullied by his schoolmates for ‘behaving and speaking like a girl’ in one of my sessions (see Sibanda, 2015; Young-Jahangeer and Sibanda, 2018). This was the only way he could make sense of his sexuality then, as I would later learn that he wanted me to do a play that touches on queer youths because they were also part of the constituency that the Young for Real Project was targeting. It took me 2 years to them brave the idea of staging an entire queer play. I was scared. Talking publicly about queerness in 2013, in Zimbabwe was a non-starter, let alone staging a play that talks about queerness with queer people as performers. Adding a queer character to Young Desires before attempting Nhanho, was in a way my mental preparation for project Nhanho.

I together with 6 queer youths in Zimbabwe staged a play that highlighted experiences of being a queer Zimbabwean, with the objective of inciting dialogue with members of the leadership who often are implicated in homophobia and transphobia in Zimbabwe. The play took the form of popular participatory theatre, a form that centres dialogue as an intervention for social change and often is co-created and performed by the community itself (Young-Jahangeer, 2020). We performed as part of the SAfAIDS’ leadership training workshops as both a logistical strategy and safety net. We performed for different leaders among them, traditional, religious, political, community and youth leaders from civic society organisations. Nhanho also took the form of theatre of testimony (Maedza, 2013) in that it was a representation of the real life experiences of the queer youth that I worked with. As such the joys, fears, anxieties and desires expressed in the play spoke to the performers’ lived experiences.

A major theme that recurs throughout the play is the desire to belong. In the first scene, the protagonist Tendai, is demonised in the church by his pastor and immediately censured for exhibiting feminine traits and gestures. This story was derived from Chesai Moyo and Themba’s experiences of being censured from church where they were serving as praise and worship members. During our playmaking process, the performers indicated that it was their heartfelt desire to be accepted in church because they love serving. Most Zimbabwean queer people are still attached to their Christian identity such that being censured becomes a painful reality. The second scene sees Tendai being excluded from the school traditional dance team that is set to tour Europe because of his effeminate dance variations. Having been excluded in two social spaces that are very fundamental to Tendai as a person, he sits with his friend and shares his desires to be fully accepted as a gay christian boy. As they sympathise with each other, they sing a popular hymn albeit with alterations to suit the context, hatina musha panyika:

Hatina musha panyika [we do not have a home on Earth] Hatifari kuva pano [we are not happy to be here] Zvinofadza mweya yedu [what makes our spirit happy]

Kutsvaga musha urikure [is to seek a faraway home - heaven] Mai vangarega here [seriously why would a mother fail] Kuchengeta mwana wavooo [to protect her child?]

Kana mai vacharega [if mothers abandon us their children]

Ini ndinokutondera [It makes us want to go to that far away home

Song as a medium serves many functions among them an outlet or expression of desire. Although not overtly, Tendai and his friend express the desire to be loved and accepted through hatina musha panyika. This scene also establishes a desire for kinship and family. Both were not only spelt out in the play but forged during the playmaking process. Once could think of it as a desire expressed and lived. One of the key things the performers mentioned after the project was the familial atmosphere that was built among them during the rehearsal process. The rehearsal space became a home where we built lasting friendships and kinships that exist to date. The Whatsapp group that was formed in 2013 exists to date. Post the project people share stories, advice and laugh together.

The mother in the poem could also be read as the country of birth, Zimbabwe which continuously seeks to disown her queer children. As such the song is a longing and strong desire for belonging and finding home elsewhere, in death perhaps. It is the performers heavy sentiments on desiring to belong to their families, and to the nation that inspired the writing of, “Africa You Are My Mother” (2020), a poem that I wrote as part of my journal entries during the rehearsal period to document the notions of belonging as they were emerging in the play. While it is not within the scope of this paper to unpack the efficacy of the dissident performances of queer and trans desires in this paper, it is important that I refer to one comment during the post-performance discussion to reveal the transformative possibilities espoused by such dissident queer performances. The project revealed that performance has the capacity to negotiate space for queer desires to be expressed and shared with others. One of the audience members noted that:

I could not hold my tears when they sang ―hatina Musha Panyika [song title]. As a mother I began asking myself the question yekuti chii chatingaite sanamai kugadzirisa nyaya iyi? [What can we as mothers do to deal with this issue?] (post-performance discussion 15 September 2014 cited in Sibanda, 2015:166).

Attached to this is the desire for desirability in one’s own skin. Participants noted how important it was for them to move away from the characters that they play every day and connect with the self in the realm of play. Whereas the norm in drama and performance is that one abandons the self and takes on the life of the character, in this project, the performers abandoned the charade that makes up their everyday and connected with the real self. Due to homo/transphobic violence in the country, a majority of queer and transgender people live in hiding or seek to transform themselves into shapes and forms that are palatable for society, hence performing distant versions of self for survival. The play gave the queer youths the opportunity to not only speak to the desires but embody the desires. This included enacting the desirable life they want to live:

The best moments for me in this play was playing the girl that I have always wanted to be and getting appreciated for that, kuactor zvauri konakidza sha [acting the person you really are, is exciting my friend] (Ndaramayashe interview 27 April 2015).

I have never felt so much at home. Dai yairiyo world yandorarama everyday [if only this was the world I lived in everyday] (Tatelicious interview 15 April 2015).

I have never acted a play in which I portray my true identity. This is the first time I have had to act myself and it is liberating. Last time I struggled playing a very masculine character in some school play, and in this one I was just me (Sama Ranaka interview 24 April 2015) (in Sibanda, 2015: 139)

Notably, erotic desire was not considered significant enough to have in this play either. It was not an area of passion for the performers. However, in their journals, they expressed a desire for love, romance and intimacy. In the poems below, Chesai and Ndaramayashe play with notions of love and romance:

I smile

Deep down from the heart

I know my happiness shows And indeed I am happy

I love this person

The person loves me like I have never known What we have

Overrides the hate we face I’m folded and fitted

In this person’s warm heart I’m sure I will never leave

It feels like the only shelter I have I always feel like

Telling the world

But reality rings a bell My girlfriend is a boy

Shut up and listen

I have heard you talk

I have seen you staring and laughing And all I did was coil and burn inside

All I ever did was listen to you, watch you and weep But now I am saying

Shut up and listen!

You have already defined me before knowing me You harass me, call me names and it eats my person Unbearable pain is loaded in within

Will you let me, be me?

You have robbed me of my freedom Washed away my dignity

I cannot walk hand in hand with the one Who my heart longs for

I have dreams and hopes too A memorable wedding With my handsome spouse Countless walks in the park Loving and kissing

Without you persecuting us

I also want to talk about him you know Publicly declare he is mine, and I his Without fear nor hesitations

Shut up and listen to the lion that roars in me It is my time to speak!

Both these poems bring to fore the desire to express love freely and to be witnessed in love. For Chesai, marriage, which is prohibited by the Constitution of Zimbabwe (2013), Article 78(3), is his ultimate desire. In our Zimbabwean culture, ceremonies such as marriage and weddings are marked by being witnessed and held by the community, a privilege that queer and trans people have since been denied. There is also a clear indignation in Chesai’s poem that queer people’s denial to public displays of romance and intimacy is dehumanizing. It is in this context that public displays of queer love and romance by queer Zimbabweans in digital spaces such as TikTok become critical parallel dissident performances that talk back to the homo/transphobic establishment Sibanda and Ncube (2023).

Hweva (Morning star): The desire for freedom

The third play that I analyse in this paper was part of my PhD where I played with popular participatory theatre again, to explore theatrically the experiences of being a sex worker in Zimbabwe. I co-created the play Hweva (morning star) with six sex workers constituting of three cis gender females and two trans gender women. While my research with sex workers got me to the conclusion that sex work, regardless of the worker’s gender is queer (Sibanda, 2021), in this paper I focus on the desires expressed by trans sex workers in the project. The overarching theme in the play was the desire for freedom. Freedom in this article follows Xavier Livermon’s conceptualisation that:
Freedom must be understood not as a set of political, economic, and legal rights that exist a priori waiting to be conferred on an abject population but as a sociocultural construct that is given meaning and contested in communities through citizens’ actions. Freedom in this context refers to the ability of black queer individuals to create forms of visibility that work to enable what Judith Butler calls “livable lives.” (2012: 300)

Trans people have the desire to be free from all forms of oppression. In the Zimbabwean context this is a lifelong desire because homophobia and transphobia have been part of the national agenda from as far as the 80’s and beyond (Dunton and Palmberg, 1996). In the opening scene of the play Hweva, Chamomei a trans gender woman can be seen standing on the roadside soliciting for clients. Chamomei is then harassed by a female sex worker on the pretext that she is not a woman and will never be one. The female sex worker, Que also accuses her of stealing and chasing clients away. Chamomei is then bullied to a nearby bathroom where her head is pushed into the toilet bowl and her expensive wig is confiscated. Que, and her friend Nesto remind Chamomei that they (cis gender heterosexual women) own the streets and as far as they were concerned homosexuality is a crime in Zimbabwe.

In the play, the desires expressed by sex workers as a broader group and trans women sex workers in particular were more around freedom. The freedom to walk and work freely on the streets of Zimbabwe. There was also an expression of the desire, on the part of trans women sex workers to be accepted and respected as women, as sex workers and as legitimate Zimbabweans. These scenes were derived from trans sex workers real life stories and they depict the status quo. Trans women sex workers in Zimbabwe are perennial victims of violence within the sex workers community and beyond (Sibanda 2021). Sex work is considered illegal in Zimbabwe, so is transness (by implication as discussed earlier) hence intersectional stigma renders them the unwanted bodies in Zimbabwe. This explains why their burning desire as expressed in Project Hweva, is to be free.

In ending

If being queer is a form of subversion, then performing queer desire on stage is a dissident praxis of desire. Here the stage includes but is limited to conventional theatre spaces. It includes any space where actors (humans) get to perform their everydayness. In this paper, I made a case for the stage as a play(ing) ground where queer people write embodied love letters to each other in ways that evade the structural and moral cuffs that seek to police them and expressions of their desires thereof. In the context of these plays, the stage also facilitated space for queer and trans people to “develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves.” (Freire, 2007:60).

The three case studies, in one way or the other bring to fore the burning desires that queer and trans communities have in Zimbabwe. What emerges strongly due to its non-mention in all three, is that erotic desire is not the alpha desire. Perhaps what this says is that, the erotic is more desirable when one feels at home in their own skin, their family, their country, their church spaces, in learning institutions and culture more broadly. Notions of belonging, acceptability, desirability, being seen and witnessed, freedom to express and be, are dominant emerging themes in the plays. These desires are contingent on each other, all equaling to a desire to be remembered and re-membered. The concept of re-membering as it is deployed by Sabelo Ndlovu Gatsheni denotes among other things, “a quest for wholeness. In this quest, there is a strong African desire for self-definition and attainment of sovereign subjectivity” (2018: 293). The Black African (Zimbabwean) queer and trans desire script reads like this quest too.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Princess A Sibanda

Princess A Sibanda is a scholar artivist whose work bridges performance, activism and research. Her specific research interests lie in participatory performance forms and their intersection with race, gender, sexualities and environmental justice in Africa. She holds a PhD in Drama & Performance Studies from the University of KwaZulu Natal and has curated various participatory theatre interventions across Zimbabwe and South Africa. In 2022 she held the first SARChI Chair in Sexualities, Genders & Queer Studies’ postdoctoral fellowship in South Africa and in 2023/24, the first Marie Jahoda Centre for International Gender Studies’ fellowship in Germany. Currently she is postdoctoral fellow under the SARChI Chair in Waste and Society at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa and a Humboldt research fellow at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany.

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