African Intimacies

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 African Intimacies
Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization

Neville Hoad

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis • London
Portions of chapter 4 previously appeared as “Between the White Man’s Burden and
the White Man’s Disease: Tracking Lesbian and Gay Human Rights in South Africa,”
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 5, no. 4 (1999): 558–82; reprinted with
permission from Duke University Press. Portions of chapter 5 previously appeared as
“Thabo Mbeki’s AIDS Blues: The Intellectual, the Archive, and the Pandemic,” Public
Culture 17, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 101–28; reprinted with permission from Duke
University Press. Portions of chapter 6 previously appeared as “Welcome to Our
Hillbrow: An Elegy for African Cosmopolitanism,” in Urbanization and African
Cultures, edited by Toyin Falola and Steve Salm (Durham: Carolina Academic Press,
2005); reprinted by permission of Carolina Academic Press, Durham, North Carolina.

Copyright 2007 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the
publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

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Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hoad, Neville Wallace, 1966–
African intimacies : race, homosexuality, and globalization / Neville Hoad.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4915-0 (hc/j : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8166-4915-4 (hc/j : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4916-7 (pb : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8166-4916-2 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Homosexuality—Africa. 2. Gays—Africa—History. 3. Africa—
Social life and customs. 4. Africa—Politics and government.
5. AIDS (Disease)—Africa. 6. HIV infection—Africa. I. Title.
HQ76.3.A356H63 2006
306.76ⴕ60967—dc22
2006012661

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

12 11 10 09 08 07 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction xi

1. African Sodomy in the Missionary Position:

Corporeal Intimacies and Signifying Regimes 1

2. Decolonizing the Body:

The African and African American in
Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters 21

3. Neoliberalism and the Church:

The World Conference of Anglican Bishops 48

4. White Man’s Burden, White Man’s Disease:

Tracking Lesbian and Gay Human Rights 68

5. The Intellectual, the Archive, and the Pandemic:

Thabo Mbeki’s AIDS Blues 90

6. An Elegy for African Cosmopolitanism:

Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow 113

Notes 127

Bibliography 165

Index 179
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 Acknowledgments

To begin, a Wildean aphorism: “A little sincerity is dangerous, a great

deal of it, absolutely fatal.” Read on at your peril. This book has been
a long time in coming. It took more than a village and the project is
ongoing. Since I am both peripatetic and mostly fairly affable, I have
solicited much more help along the way than I can repay.
African Intimacies began life when I was the postdoctoral fellow at
the Sawyer Seminar “Sexual Identities, Identity Politics: Cross-
Cultural Investigations” at the Chicago Humanities Institute at the Uni-
versity of Chicago in 1997–98. I thank the organizers of the seminar,
George Chauncey and Beth Povinelli, for the extraordinary intellectual
environment they created and for the continuing provocation of their
work. I also wish to thank the participants of the seminar, especially
David Churchill, who became and remains an intellectual lodestar and
an excellent friend. The seminar also brought me the camaraderie and
always scintillating conversation of Dennis Altman. Jens Rydstrom
took the bus with me to the reliable fleshpots of North Halstead Street
and is my informant on all things Swedish.
At Chicago, John and Jean Comaroff ran a spectacular African stud-
ies workshop, and I can only hope that this book reflects some of what
I learned there. I thank all the members of that workshop, as well as
the members of the Lesbian and Gay Studies Workshop, where drafts
of chapters 1, 3, and 4 were first presented. Loren Kruger is the pre-
eminent theater historian of South Africa, and I thank her for her sus-
tained intellectual engagement with my thought as it unfolded and for
keeping Johannesburg in the forefront of my consciousness. I thank
Kelly Gillespie for her friendship, beauty, wit, and for graduating high
school at St. Cyprians in Cape Town. Hylton White helped me to see
what responsible ethnography could look like. Anne-Maria Makhulu
continues to help me to negotiate the difficult terrain of African stud-
ies in the United States as a much-loved colleague and friend. Gretchen
Long, Neda Ulaby, and Sharon Hayashi, along with David Churchill,
made Chicago another home. As the title of this book would suggest,
I thank Lauren Berlant for making “intimacy” a good word to think
with, and Candace Vogler has—among too many virtues to enumer-
ate—the best understanding of the pleasure of a cigarette since Oscar
Wilde. Chapter 5 would have been much weaker without her careful

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

reading. I would not have survived the Chicago years without the love,
kindness, and generosity of Carroll Joynes; the friendship of Julius
Lewis, Gabriel Gomez, Willard Dumas, and Vince Bertolini; and Jim
Beam and Diet Cokes and intimacy with Chip Reid. Jaime Hovey kept
me thinking, encouraged me, and was truly generous with much-
needed intellectual and emotional support.
In London, where much of the research for chapter 1 was done, I
thank Nigel Wrench, whom I first met on a beach in Port St. Johns in
the Transkei some twenty years ago, for his enduring friendship, his
hospitality, his courage, and his brilliance. Rachel Holmes shares my
intellectual interests, and I am grateful for the exhilaration of reading
her work. She and Jerry Brotton (and the phantasmatic Trevor) wel-
comed the impecunious houseguest with visa trouble for much longer
than anyone should. Jerry dragged me to the British Library when my
mind really was elsewhere and indulged my tirades against Cape na-
tionalism. They have my heartfelt thanks.
In Austin, where this book was completed, Barbara Harlow is all
one could want in a senior colleague, and I thank her, Bernth Lindfors,
and Toyin Falola for making the University of Texas a vibrant and chal-
lenging (in the best sense of that word) place for African studies. The
pioneering Ethnic and Third World Literature Interest Group in the
English Department at Texas has prompted the rethinking of cos-
mopolitanism in this book, and I wish to thank my colleagues Kim
Alidio, Sam Baker, the much missed Joanna Brooks and Jim Lee, Mia
Carter, Brian Doherty, Gerry Heng, Domino Perez, Jennifer Wilks, and
Helena Woodard. That Lisa Moore has the office next to mine is an in-
centive to go to work when I would rather not. Karen Engle and the
extraordinary Center for Human Rights and Justice that she leads keep
me honest about the utility of the law. Gretchen Ritter, Janet Steiger,
Ann Cvetkovich, Lisa Moore, Jill Dolan, Stacy Wolf, and Yolanda
Padilla work harder than they should to make the University of Texas
a hospitable place for sexuality studies. Ann Cvetkovich and the Pub-
lic Feelings Project have greatly improved this book in getting me to
take questions of affect seriously, and I wish to express my gratitude,
respect, and affection for Ann publicly. I wish to thank my former
graduate students and continuing friends: Casey McKittrick for stellar
help with the bibliography and for buying me more drinks at Charlie’s
than he should have, and Shaka McGlotten for starting to live up to the
promise of his first name and for reading my stuff. Without the mate-
rial support of a Dean’s Fellowship from the College of Liberal Arts at
the University of Texas at Austin, this book would have taken much
longer. Gabriela Redwine made making the index almost fun.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

In Johannesburg, my debts run deeper. My parents and grandpar-

ents loved and supported me when they (and I) had no clue what I
was doing. My sisters gave me the first and enduring experience of
nonhierarchical, cross-gender solidarity. I am still learning. All and any
thanks feel trivial, but I make them anyway. My longstanding friends
Philippa Garson and Nina Romm hold, guide, and inspire me. I have
laughed with, fought with, and been impressed by Martin Scherzinger
since I was eight years old.
Mark Gevisser got me thinking about Thabo Mbeki in a more inter-
esting way. Graeme Reid and Karen Martin were coconspirators on an-
other project that deeply informed this one and guided me through the
remarkable Gay and Lesbian Archive (GALA) in Johannesburg. Gerrit
Olivier has had the burden of being a role model for me since I was a
first year student in his Afrikaans literature class.
Wendy Boxer and Jeanne Newhouse kept me sane—or close
enough—over the years.
“Harry” Sean Jacobs is my favorite partner in crime and nagged me
about finishing this book in ways that I could hear. The friendship,
support, and spirited engagement of Zilla-Jane Goodman sustains me
in everything I do.
Richard Morrison has been an excellent editor (and a patient one),
and I thank him and the staff at the University of Minnesota Press,
along with my beneficent and most helpful anonymous readers.
My deepest intellectual and professional debts (along with some
significant personal ones) are to Henry Abelove, Joseph Sherman, and
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who, in their different ways, mentored me
with kinds of care, flair, and integrity that I was too callow to under-
stand fully at the time. Thank you. In graduate school at Columbia, Ed-
ward Said, Anne McClintock, Gauri Viswanathan, and Jennifer Wicke
helped lay intellectual foundations, and I was lucky enough to have an
extraordinary group of graduate student peers. Qadri Ismail, Fenella
Macfarlane, Tim Watson, Chandan Reddy, Lecia Rosenthal, and espe-
cially Peter Susser and Caleb Crain have my thanks.
Joseph Andoni Massad works on a similar set of questions in the
Arab world and I greatly look forward to his Desiring Arabs. He re-
mains my most important intellectual interlocutor, as well as a friend
of unsurpassed generosity and loyalty. Without him, much of me
would not be possible.
Joseph Victor McWherter is a saint and an angel, even when he
isn’t. And I cannot thank him enough.
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 Introduction

The impetus for this book comes from two major strands of public dis-
course, separated by roughly one hundred years, concerning the rela-
tionship between homosexuality and African politics.
In 1886, the last indigenous ruler of Buganda, the kabaka (king)
Mwanga, executes over thirty pages at his royal court, apparently for
refusing to have sex with him following their recent conversion to
Christianity. The reinscribing of certain corporeal intimacies between
king and subject as sex (and “homosexual” sex at that), in tandem
with the more usual suspects (trade and Christianity), effectively dele-
gitimized local political institutions. The kabaka lost his absolute
power, and the office of the katikoro (prime minister/major domo)
grew in importance. In addition, local chiefs could find legitimacy from
the missionaries. These events created new forms of African agency
and facilitated the implementation of colonial rule. In chapter 1, I pro-
duce a polemic that identifies African sodomy in this moment as a kind
of primary anticolonial resistance.
A century later, controversy arose in many sub-Saharan African
countries about the un-African nature of homosexuality. This contro-
versy arguably began with President Robert Mugabe’s expulsion of
GALZ (Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe) from the Zimbabwean Inter-
national Book Fair in 1995. Calling homosexuals “sodomists” [sic] and
“sexual perverts,” the president banned the exhibit, though the Zim-
babwe Supreme Court ruled that GALZ should be allowed to exhibit;
in subsequent book fairs, GALZ has done so. Some days later at a He-
roes Day rally for veterans of the Zimbabwe liberation struggle in
Harare, President Mugabe made his now notorious pronouncement:
“If dogs and pigs don’t do it, why must human beings? Can human be-
ings be human beings if they do worse than pigs?”1
Worldwide controversy ensued over this remark. Seventy members of
the U.S. Congress sent President Mugabe a letter of protest accusing him
of bigotry. Later that year, while traveling in the United Kingdom, South
Africa, and the Netherlands, Mugabe was frequently greeted by demon-
strations; upon his return to Harare, he remarked, “They can demon-
strate, but if they come here [to Zimbabwe] we will throw them in jail.”2
The difference between “here” and “there” suggests that tolerance of
homosexuality is becoming, among other things, a strategy for marking

xi
xii INTRODUCTION

national and civilizational specificity. Zimbabwe has anti-sodomy laws

on its statute books from its colonial past (“here” and “there” were once
closer), and there have been incidents of police harassment of self-iden-
tified gay individuals and groups. The 1998 trial of Canaan Banana, the
former president of Zimbabwe, and its ensuing scandal were as much
about sexual harassment as homosexuality.3 An old subcontinental joke
goes, “There is no homosexuality in African culture, well, except for
Canaan Banana.”
The 1990s controversies spread quickly. While national nuances to
the ensuing debates clearly exist, a highlight reel of statements by na-
tional leaders, particularly heads of state, can establish a set of common
themes across considerable ideological diversity, ranging from states like
Uganda, which have embraced free-market principles, to those like Zim-
babwe, which espouse various forms of African socialism.
Kenya: In September 1999, Daniel arap Moi, then president of
Kenya, announced: “It is not right that a man should go with another
man or a woman with another woman. It is against African tradition
and Biblical teachings. I will not shy away from warning Kenyans
against the dangers of the scourge.”4
Uganda: In July 1998, President Yoseri Museveni told reporters,
“When I was in America some time ago, I saw a rally of 300,000 ho-
mosexuals. If you have a rally of 30 homosexuals here, I would dis-
perse it.”5 Museveni was further quoted in the state-owned newspaper
New Vision as saying: “I have told the CID [Criminal Investigations De-
partment] to look for homosexuals, lock them up, and charge them.”
The statement followed press reports (apparently false) of a marriage
ceremony between two gay men in a suburb of Kampala.6
Namibia: President Nujoma, while addressing students at the Uni-
versity of Namibia in 1996, said, “The Republic of Namibia does not
allow homosexuality [or] lesbianism here. We will combat this with
vigor. We will make sure that Namibia will get rid of lesbianism and
homosexuality. . . . Police are ordered to arrest you and deport you and
imprison you. . . . Those who are practicing homosexuality in Namibia
are destroying the nation. . . . It is the devil at work.”7
Accounting for these remarks and many like them by President Mu-
gabe and other African leaders is difficult. Some contend that Presi-
dent Mugabe’s statements were an attempt to deflect attention from
the collapsing Zimbabwean economy and his increasingly autocratic
rule and that homosexuals were merely a convenient scapegoat for the
failures of decolonization. Given the timing of these remarks, it may
be possible to read homophobic strands in African nationalisms as dis-
placed resistance to perceived and real encroachments on neocolonial
 INTRODUCTION xiii

national sovereignty by economic and cultural globalization. In chap-

ter 4, I will speculate that President Mugabe’s remarks may have been
a response to the inclusion of a “no discrimination on the grounds of
sexual orientation” clause in the postapartheid South African consti-
tution of 1993 (ratified 1996).
The end of apartheid meant that South Africa emerged from world
pariah status, and its position as economic superpower in the region
acquired a new moral authority. Namibia or Zimbabwe could cite the
South African constitution’s assertion of equal rights for those of di-
vergent sexual orientations as evidence that they, and not the more
racially hybrid giant to the South, still laid claim to the region’s au-
thentic African moral leadership, which they had occupied as mem-
bers of the so-called Frontline States at the forefront of the fight against
apartheid.8 I think this deployment of rhetorics linking questions of
homosexuality to African identity may have produced a corresponding
need for postapartheid South African leaders to assert authentic
Africanness, as observed in the otherwise incoherent pronouncements
and policies of South African President Thabo Mbeki on the HIV/AIDS
pandemic, which will be extensively discussed in chapter 5.
The only definite assertions are that questions of homosexuality
and homophobia are overdetermined and that pathologizing individ-
ual leaders does little to further understanding. The Euro-American
politics of moral outrage that only lingers long enough to establish
shared “gayness” and does not care enough to learn the worldings of
those it purports to help does little more than shore up the moral cre-
dentials of the outraged.
This highlight reel has been seized upon by international human
rights activists, but it is salutary to remember that while most leaders of
states in North America and Western Europe are quite careful about
what they say in public, it is very easy to find public officials in the os-
tensibly more tolerant Western world expressing very similar senti-
ments. In the United States, Senator Rick Santorum’s comparison of
“man on man” sex to “man on dog”9 sex is an obvious case in point.
The risk of such a highlight reel is that one only lingers long enough to
establish “homophobia.” However, this book’s goal is to present a ge-
nealogy of the ideas of race, sex, and nation that move beneath these ut-
terances; while from a certain perspective “homophobia” may be the tip
of the iceberg, the iceberg is not just iceberg all the way down. In the
moment of writing, the emergence of an international public sphere
dedicated to finding and making “homosexuals” in parts of the world
that have not seen public articulations of such persons may further al-
low “homosexuality” to be seen as an ongoing imperial project.10
xiv INTRODUCTION

The rhetorics of race, sex, and respectability that underpinned the

homosexuality debates took on new and urgent life in discussions of,
and responses to, the AIDS pandemic that made massive inroads in
sub-Saharan Africa and continues to be a public health crisis of poten-
tially genocidal proportions. The earlier “gay disease” characterization
of HIV/AIDS has meant that homosexual questions and attributions
continue to inform the African case despite overwhelming evidence of
predominantly heterosexual transmission in sub-Saharan Africa.11
A remark by President Museveni of Uganda reveals the necessity
and the difficulty of connecting the homosexuality debates and the
HIV/AIDS crisis. In accepting an award in 2004 from the Common-
wealth for initiatives that effectively cut Uganda’s infection rate from
28 percent to 10 percent over a little more than a decade (although
that success is currently in dispute),12 he said: “First, it goes through
unprotected sex. We don’t have homosexuals in Uganda so this is
mainly heterosexual transmission.”13 President Museveni’s frank (if
problematic) acknowledgment of the disease and the sexual nature of
its transmission can be usefully contrasted with the denials of South
Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki (discussed in chapter 5), making it
impossible to assert that leaders of countries that afford legal protec-
tions to “homosexuals” are more willing to address HIV/AIDS issues
or vice versa. Arguably, Museveni’s success in the HIV/AIDS arena
may have been helped by his insistence on removing homosexual
stigma from the stigma of being HIV-positive. The attribution in the
West of an African origin for HIV has further meant that responses
have to engage and reengage questions of racism along the vectors of
disease and sexuality.
Diverse local, international, and national understandings of the var-
ious possible meanings of both Africa and homosexuality, with their
shifting histories, have proved central to these unfolding events, and
not only in academic ways. The question emerges of how these terms
of particularity, Africa and homosexuality, with their varying histories
and modes of othering, may be read and represented. How might they
be connected in more than just identitarian ways? From the earliest
days of public discussion of the pandemic, there has been a critical
recognition that traditional representational frameworks have been
hopelessly inadequate in representing HIV/AIDS as a disease; a syn-
drome; an impossible concatenation of medical, social, and political
events; and a site where lines between cause and effect have been and
continue to be powerfully contested.14
While the strict cartographic designation of Africa remains constant
over the time-spaces discussed in this book, the meanings of Africa re-
 INTRODUCTION xv

veal themselves as both stubbornly persistent and continually revis-

able. Important shifts in time-space occur from the Euro-African colo-
nial theater of chapter 1 to the postindependence Black Atlantic of
chapter 2 to the post–Cold War, neoliberal moment of the Lambeth
Conference of chapter 3. Chapter 4 takes the reader into the constitu-
tional triumphalism of South Africa’s delayed entry into postcolonial-
ity in a wider moment of transnationalism, and the final two chapters
ponder the deep temporalities and geographic dispersions of the
HIV/AIDS pandemic within and beyond the frame of the “new” na-
tion. Nevertheless, my archive is focused on what can be termed An-
glophone sub-Saharan Africa.
I think what is at stake here, besides my range and expertise, are
significant questions about the history of colonialism and postcolonial
African sovereignties. A focus on Francophone and/or Arab Africa
would require another book and probably result in a different set of
conclusions and speculations. I hope my work in these areas can help
scholars see how a focus on homosexual questions can complicate
thinking about these shifts in time-space in relation to both local and
global imaginings of Africa. Within the time-spaces I discuss, at least
two strands of historiographic thought exist: (1) a Marxist tradition
that argues for a kind of South African exceptionalism on the grounds
of extensive white settlement, earlier and more comprehensive capital
penetration, and attendant proletarianization due to the late
nineteenth-century mineral revolution (gold and diamonds); and
(2) Mahmood Mamdani’s significant counter to this, which sees
apartheid as the logical extension and subsequent consolidation of the
legal and racial ramifications of British policies of “Indirect Rule” in
Britain’s other colonial possessions in Africa.
This book’s focus on “intimate matters” contributes to these major
historiographic debates by reading migrant mine-marriages in
chapter 4 as something like a sexual form of internal colonialism and
polygamy in chapters 2 and 3 as a site for the negotiation and renego-
tiation of cultural and civilizational differences. African Intimacies ar-
gues that attention to questions of desire, affect, and experience
suggests the contested and palimpsestic nature of Africa under the
time-spaces of colonialism, decolonization, postcoloniality, and now
globalization. As Achille Mbembe argues:
I wish I could have made it clearer that what is called Africa is first and
foremost a geographical accident. It is this accident that we subse-
quently invest with a multitude of significations, diverse imaginary con-
tents, or even fantasies, which, by force of repetition, end up becoming
authoritative narratives. As a consequence of the above, what we call
xvi INTRODUCTION

“Africa” could well be analyzed as a formation of desires, passions and

undifferentiated fantasies. It is a subjective economy that is cultivated,
nurtured, disciplined and reproduced. To nurture it, to police it and to
reproduce it involve an intensive work of the imagination. But it also en-
tails a tremendous labor of bad faith social science discourse does not
know how to deal with.15

This book investigates the place of an entity that comes to be called

“homosexuality” in the production (discursive, material, imaginary) of
a place called “Africa.”16 It argues that “homosexuality” is one of the
many imaginary contents, fantasies, or significations (sometimes in
the negative, sometimes not) that circulate in the production of African
sovereignties and identities in their representations by Africans and
others. Of course, Mbembe’s subjective economy is underpinned by
the economy of centuries of imperial material interest in this part of
the world.17 The literary as a mode of knowing tends to access this im-
perial history through imagination. “Homosexuality” is a small and
not obvious thread in this wider tapestry of space, desire, and identity.
Race is the big one.18
Within biologics, homosexuality is definitionally nonprocreative
and thus is difficult to convey as a metaphor of social reproduction. It
is occasionally imagined as a half-valorized space of play, or more usu-
ally imagined as a space of death: national, cultural, racial, or literal.
In 1898, the important maverick British sexologist Havelock Ellis
called “homosexuality” a “barbarously hybrid” term, no doubt refer-
ring to the yoking together of Greek and Latin components in its
coinage. However, the words barbarous and hybrid could not avoid
anxieties about race and sex and the risks of their mixture in the 1890s
any more than they can now.19 By investigating the emergence of
“homosexuality” (the term/concept itself is a loaded one and carries
with it willy-nilly the contaminating contingencies of its Western ori-
gin at the height of European imperialism20) in a variety of African his-
torical contexts, I propose to pull at this thread and see what unravels.
A body of scholarship currently exists that engages homosexuality
in terms of the relationship between identity and sexual practice.
Within the emergent field of lesbian and gay studies (itself a marker of
the consolidation of certain insurgent ideas about sexuality in the
North Atlantic world), the 1980s saw a controversy around the idea of
the social construction of homosexuality. Social constructionists built
on the Foucauldian notion that the passage between the sodomite (a
temporary aberration) and the homosexual (a species of human being)
occurs at a specific moment in European history.21 Foucault suggests
somewhat polemically that the homosexual becomes a species around
 INTRODUCTION xvii

1870. Consequently, social constructionists argued for a careful his-

torical and geographic bracketing of homosexual identity, held under
the sign “lesbian/gay” in the modern West. So-called essentialists ac-
cused the social constructionists of nominalism and argued for the
cross-cultural and transhistorical appearance of individuals and com-
munities that could be recognized as “homosexual,” suggesting some
kind of deeper transhistorical determinant of “homosexuality” (usu-
ally biology, sometimes a more diffused idea of benign variation in hu-
man sexual function).
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick reframed this debate in terms of minoritar-
ian and universalizing views of homosexuality.22 Is homosexuality, as
Freud asserted, a universal human possibility (“All human beings are
capable of making a homosexual object-choice and have in fact made
one in their unconscious”23), or is it a defining attribute of a minority
of human beings in certain societies at certain times? In 1988, Kobena
Mercer and Isaac Julien called for a wider set of historical determi-
nants within the social constructionist model: “the European con-
struction of sexuality coincides with the epoch of Imperialism and the
two interconnect.”24 Some significant work has been accomplished in
this area.25
While my opening chapter considers the relation between emergent
identitarian forms of homosexuality in Europe and African forms of
sovereignty and sex, the rest of the book moves Mercer and Julien’s
claim into the present to ponder the current neoliberal and globalizing
forms of homosexuality. President Mugabe’s now notorious utterances
mark a strong intervention in this terrain, where imperial legacies and
African authenticities struggle to imagine the relationships between
“Africa” and “homosexuality.”
Multiple exclusions enable the debate on the relation of lesbian and
gay identity to Western imperialism. Most obviously, the positions of
gay and lesbian Africans are not easily articulable in the confrontation,
for example, between progressive bishops of the Anglo-American
world and their African counterparts in chapter 3, or between Robert
Mugabe and the international gay and lesbian human rights move-
ment discussed in chapter 4, precisely because questions of sexuality
are used to police both national and racial authenticity.
Two strands of argument currently exist about the relation of les-
bian and gay identity to globalizing capital. The first theory argues that
capital produces homogenizing effects in the intimate relations of the
personal experiences it produces. This argument draws on an
anticolonial Marxist tradition of thinking about questions of cultural
imperialism and argues for an easy imposition of Western forms of
xviii INTRODUCTION

desire and sociality following new patterns of production and con-

sumption, particularly among urban elites in the so-called developing
world, with the attendant violence toward “indigenous” sexual
worlds. Yet to some extent, attributing these social changes to inter-
national capital is only possible from a certain privileged perspective.
While one is suspicious of the homogenizing effects of the culture in-
dustry, too quick an assertion of cultural imperialism and sexual identity
as cultural imperialism misses the ways in which these images/identities
are consumed and may be used from below to very different ends. John
D’Emilio’s thesis concerning the double-edged nature of capitalism for
gay and lesbian identity in the West speaks to this. To paraphrase, capi-
talism shifts the locus of material production out of the home and makes
lesbian and gay identity possible, but privatizing sexual reproduction
also institutes and sustains homophobia and imposes or exacerbates a
gendered division of labor.26
Whether this holds in a global market that is increasingly dependent
on the super-exploited labor of women of the global South is uncertain.
As Gayatri Spivak exhorts: “We must keep trying to deconstruct the
breach between home and work in the ideology of our global struggle
to reach this female bottom layer that holds up contemporary global
capital.”27 Capitalism’s further rearticulation of familist ideologies may
not open up the economic independence that D’Emilio implies is es-
sential for the flourishing of lesbian and gay identity.
The second theory, which finds its home in a burgeoning subfield
within anthropology and queer studies in the academy rather than in
the international activist sphere, argues for the emergence of new sex-
ual identities under global capital.28 This set of theoretical formula-
tions and empirical assertions can be termed the proliferation of
perversity hypothesis.
While the emergence of lesbian and gay social spaces and political
organizations, particularly among the urban classes in many Latin
American, Asian, and African countries in the last decade of the twen-
tieth century, can be offered as evidence for the globalizing of the
homo/hetero binary as the hegemonic means of organizing people’s
sexual practices, the “cultural imperialism” model cannot account for
forms of sexual identity and practice that are not reducible to the
homo/hetero binary. These forms may claim “tradition,” or might be
articulated as cultural heritage by the nativist strand in postcolonial
nationalisms. However, they generally are not, due to the submerged
familial and reproductive metaphors in European discourses of na-
tionalism that anticolonial struggles have inherited. There may also be
new forms, rearticulations of local gender and class variables that have
 INTRODUCTION xix

entered an expanded public sphere under the pressure of events such

as the global AIDS pandemic, sex tourism, state and international
health initiatives, expanded media representations, and the like. How
recognizable these new forms can be to international lesbian and gay
organizing is both an empirical and conceptual question. Organiza-
tions of male sexuality centered on questions of sexual aim, rather
than gender of object choice (the organizing principle of the homo-
hetero divide) in which only the inserted party gets marked (I suspect
through displaced misogyny), may be irrecuperable for international
lesbian and gay organizing.
The resistance to moving sexual practice into identity may be an-
other factor. Those forms of intimacy and identity that can be held un-
der the proliferation of perversity hypothesis could theoretically be
added as categories in the GLBTQ (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transsex-
ual, Queer) expansive trajectory. Within an additive logic, might it be
possible to imagine a gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, queer, hjira,
kathoey, berdache, or other global movement? I suspect that such a
movement would be caught between what Lauren Berlant calls “the
romance of the incommensurate” and a newly sophisticated form of
cultural relativism within the expanding regime of liberal democratic
forms of capital.29
This book seeks both to develop an archive for the investigation of
“homosexuality’s” place in contemporary Africa and to interrogate the
meaningfulness of the terms sexuality and homosexuality as they ap-
pear in diverse contexts, genres, and publics. The archive for this work
is fragmented and on the move. The chapters proceed roughly chrono-
logically from Buganda in the 1880s to South Africa today. As both
Benedict Anderson and Johannes Fabian have shown, however, “time”
in such contexts cannot be assumed and organizes social relations and
the ways they may be represented in complex ways.30,31 Geography is
also endlessly renegotiated in this work both historically and concep-
tually, as I try to elaborate a worldly Africa through the lens of an im-
bricated genealogy of categories of race and homosexuality, two terms
with uneven cartographies and temporalities. This lens is as much
kaleidoscope as it is camera, microscope, or telescope, and the narra-
tive produced is not one of historical causality. Rather, I focus on a se-
ries of events that operate as points of crisis, or flashpoints, during
which longstanding discursive forces that have organized representa-
tions of race, sex, sovereignty, and imperialism become visible as they
struggle to accommodate themselves to a changing world.
My opening chapter on the 1886 Buganda martyrs reviews a mo-
ment in the immediate prehistory of the scramble for Africa. At this
xx INTRODUCTION

time, European forms and norms of what could be called sexual inti-
macy misrecognize what could be called African forms of embodied
sovereignty and play a role in the emergence of colonialism in the re-
gion. The events in Buganda may allow for tracing the genealogy of
metropolitan male “homosexuality” to exceed narrow national con-
texts. In addition, these events permit a consideration of how homo-
sexuality functioned as a colonial regime of power (a subject-making
discourse).
I do not know whether the specificities of Buganda will defy gener-
alization, but my hopes are two-pronged. I hope that my reframing of
Mwanga’s story may convince historians of metropolitan homosexu-
ality of the relevance of colonial archives. In order to understand how
sexuality is theorized, perhaps even lived, under imperialism and
globalization, one cannot assume the self-sufficiency of the metropole
or a one-way street between metropole and colony, center and per-
iphery. I further hope that specific colonial histories would incorporate
careful framings of transformations in the significations of a range of
bodily practices.32
The 1965 Soyinka novel The Interpreters, discussed in chapter 2, is
reviewed as a consideration of homosexual subjectivity in decoloniza-
tion where nationality works orthogonally to race in a neocolonial al-
legory. Although diasporic black homosexuality is imaginable,
Nigerian homosexuality is not, even though a certain class solidarity
allows for racial allegiance to win out over national identity. The gay
African American character, Joe Golder, is often homophobically rep-
resented but remains an integral part of the African Bohemia of the
central protagonists. He is not handed over to the Nigerian police for
his part in the death of a handsome street youth. Thirty years before
Robert Mugabe made his now notorious pronouncements, The Inter-
preters offers a far more complex consideration of the place of male ho-
mosexual desires, practices, and identities in relation to national
belonging, racial authenticity, and emerging neocolonial economic
structures. Methodologically, in this chapter, I hope to speculate on
questions of race, sex, and globalization to show how a novel written
in the throes of decolonization and immediately before a catastrophic
civil war, well before the terms globalization and/or queerness/queer
theory had any political or critical purchase, represents in narrative
form problems of human embodiment, economic exploitation, and
subjective desires that we may call sexual.
The remaining chapters all engage versions of the present in the
context of the condensed colonial and decolonizing/neocolonial cases
of the two initial chapters. Chapter 3 discusses the 1998 Lambeth Con-
 INTRODUCTION xxi

ference of Anglican Bishops, which saw a strong split, along predom-

inantly geographic lines, between bishops on the question of ordain-
ing “homosexual” priests and sanctioning same-sex unions.
“Conservative” African and Asian bishops successfully opposed their
more “liberal” European and North American counterparts. In this
chapter, I argue that Lambeth in 1998 becomes an emblematic event
for thinking through the place of sex, sexuality, and intimacy in the ge-
nealogy of neoliberal rhetorics of development, and how the latter cite
and partially transform the sexual ideologies of colonialism and post-
or neocolonial modernity. The meanings of both my central
analytic/descriptive terms (neoliberalism, Africa, homosexuality) and
an important global institution (the Anglican Church) shift for varied
constituencies of interest, such as African bishops exercising power in
the now global Anglican church, Africans laying claim to lesbian and
gay identity, international lesbian and gay human rights activists, and
scholars who would write about such things. Lambeth in 1998 allows
one to watch reorganizations of ideas of race, Africa, homosexuality,
and globalization as they unfold into new continuities and contradic-
tions. Of particular interest is the way that “conservative” Africans po-
sition themselves as theologically central and that being African
enables a claim to represent the Anglican universal rather than con-
tinuing to carry the marker of cultural difference.
Chapter 4 offers an analysis of lesbian and gay rights in Southern
Africa in response to the new South African constitution. Sexual-
orientation-based rights mark the most recent attempt to give social
specificity to the universalizing human rights legacy of the European
Enlightenment. These rights circulate in a variety of public spheres (in-
ternational, regional, national, and local) and are usually imagined as
a universalizing of a category called lesbian and gay identity or, less
and more specifically, “sexual orientation.” This identity or orientation
has its own geographically and temporally circumscribed history, and
generally maps very unevenly onto the bodily practices or more ex-
tensive worlding(s) of the subjects it promises to describe and help.
This chapter attempts to account for why, at the level of the law, South
Africa has embraced the notion of lesbian and gay rights and why the
South African case frames the relationship between race, nation, and
homosexuality in very different terms compared to my opening high-
light reel of homophobic pronouncements by heads of state from other
African countries.33
The final chapters move us into the representational crisis around
the HIV/AIDS pandemic, where intellectual labor and imagination
have been required to displace homosexual questions given Western
xxii INTRODUCTION

representational hegemony over HIV/AIDS in the 1980s.34 This dis-

placement inevitably leaves traces. Chapter 5 ponders the question of
the imperial legacy in representations of the HIV/AIDS crisis in South
Africa. The chapter considers two public speeches given by Thabo
Mbeki, the president of South Africa: the inaugural Z. K. Matthews
Memorial Lecture at Fort Hare (October 12, 2001) and his speech at the
funeral of Sarah Bartmann (August 9, 2002). Both speeches came in
light of accusations of AIDS denialism leveled against the South
African president. In these speeches, President Mbeki gives an account
of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European racism in terms of sex-
ualized and gendered European investments in black bodies and pro-
duces a critique of what could be called the sexual ideology of racism.
Given President Mbeki’s increasing reluctance to give interviews on
HIV/AIDS, I speculate on how the speeches’ critique of the sexual ide-
ology of racism may underpin the South African government’s difficulty
in mustering the political will to respond systematically to the AIDS pan-
demic facing its citizens.35 Both speeches assert that the legacy of colo-
nial and apartheid-era racism is very much alive in the postapartheid
and postcolonial era and that the representation of HIV/AIDS as a sex-
ually transmitted disease destroying black people fits in only too well
with earlier racist renditions of the lasciviousness of blackness.
Rather than dismiss Mbeki’s invocation of the history of colonial
racism, as many have done, in relation to present day HIV/AIDS, this
chapter argues that Mbeki’s trenchant analysis of racism needs to be
extended to colonial racism’s representation of the sexual norms of
whiteness. In addition, new tropes for the representation of black sex-
uality need to be found within the archive of Pan-African literary and
cultural production. The buried polemic here is that it is not enough
to describe the diversity of African sexual practices on the ground in
order to suggest that Mbeki’s assumptions about the sexual nature of
HIV transmission are counterfactual; that description alone, no matter
how scrupulous, still produces African sexuality as the object of a
prurient Western gaze. Moreover, a certain anthropological praxis,
while indispensable, is by itself insufficient for the task of rethinking
and reimagining sexualities in Africa. It may run the risk of reproduc-
ing the very epistemological formations it wishes to undo and that
President Mbeki has pointedly criticized.
The final chapter begins exploring an alternative archive for repre-
sentations of African sexuality through an in-depth reading of a recent
South African novel. Chapter 6, “An Elegy for African Cosmopoli-
tanism: Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow,” argues that Mpe’s
2001 novel problematizes notions of African identity by resolutely re-
 INTRODUCTION xxiii

vealing the mutual implication of rural and urban worlds, South Africa
and the rest of the continent, Africa and the world at large, risking
what Edward Said calls “the essence of the cosmopolitan.” Mpe’s
novel, through deferral to a notion of heaven as the living endlessly
retelling of the stories of the dead, works to keep open several ongo-
ing historical wounds of the apartheid era and the postapartheid era
(rapid urbanization, xenophobia, resurgent witchcraft, and the
HIV/AIDS pandemic). The novel makes it clear that coherent national
and/or communal identities are “false palliatives.”
My reading invokes the reanimation of Freudian notions of melan-
cholia in recent U.S.-based queer and immigration studies to suggest
that the refusal to give up the lost loved object (the cornerstone of
Freudian melancholia) can be made to do ethical and political work in
the face of the personal and historical traumas the novel recounts. I
link this recent strand in queer theory to Edward Said’s recent reading
of Freud, which also offers a transfiguring of the experience of melan-
cholia. Said understands the experience of the cosmopolitan as one of
repeated loss of identity by hanging on to the originary break in iden-
tity. The cosmopolitan experience reminds us that self/other relations
are structured not only in antagonistic reaction formation but that the
self is indebted to the other in more proximate and intimate ways.
Race, nation, and sexuality are all brought into question as vectors of
othering. Mpe narrates and renarrates stories of love, death, and writ-
ing through, rather than in, contemporary Hillbrow. These stories are
not universal, nor are they only South African or African. They can be
told and retold. In their citation by different communities of interest,
new figurations of Africanness and sexuality begin to emerge through
the tenacity of never completely relinquishing loss for the melancholic
and the cosmopolitan.
Very few book-length engagements have focused on the questions
of African sexuality, let alone African homosexuality, under globaliza-
tion. Recent edited anthologies have tended to be anthropological in
focus. They are concerned with the necessary work of establishing the
facticity of such practices and, in some cases, identities among various
African groupings across place and time. To my knowledge, none con-
sider homosexuality in relation to changing forms and norms of
African sovereignty.
Two recent anthologies may be taken as emblematic, in diverging
ways, of the uses to which ethnographic and anthropological ap-
proaches to the questions of homosexuality and Africa have been put.
Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies of African Homosexualities
(Murray and Roscoe 1998) organizes its essays geographically to sug-
xxiv INTRODUCTION

gest both regional specificities and wider continental patterns. How-

ever, with few important exceptions, it does not put the organizing
rubric “homosexualities” under any conceptual pressure.36 The forms
of intimacy, genital and other, between bodies described in the essays
may signify kinship, power, shifting systems of gender, pedagogy, age-
group socialization, and even pleasure. However, the case for sexual-
ity as an organizing rubric is assumed rather than made.
This diversity of experiences subsumed under the sign of homo-
sexuality, even pluralized, can never interrogate the terms of the as-
sertion that “there is no homosexuality in African culture.” It can only
answer: “No, but there is, look . . .” In this way it precisely reproduces
the terms of the debate it wishes to end in a landscape of assertion and
counterassertion where finding practices that look “homosexual” to a
Western eye has little intellectual or political capital. The claim to
rights on the basis of homosexuality has been a fraught business in the
modern West. A universalizing faith in the liberatory potential of such
politicization of sexual minority identities repeats the failures and fan-
tasies of modernization theory without taking into account its devas-
tating riposte: underdevelopment theory.37
Questions of audience complicate the stakes of who benefits when
we find “homosexualities” everywhere. Remaining within an anthro-
pological framework, albeit a strategic nativist one, Ifi Amadiume pro-
vides an admonition in the preface to her own ethnographic work that
allows African sex and gender norms a kind of radical alterity without
forgetting the place of Africa in the Euro-American imagination. It is
an admonition that remains salutary:
There are already some indications that black lesbians are using such
prejudiced interpretations of African situations to justify their choices of
sexual alternatives which have their roots and meanings in the West.
Black lesbians are, for example, looking into African women’s relation-
ships and interpreting some as lesbian (see Carmen et al., 1984). What
prejudices and assumptions are they imposing on African material? How
advantageous it is for lesbian women to interpret such practices as
women-to-women marriage as lesbian (see Lorde, 1984). Such interpre-
tation of, for example, the cases cited in this book would be totally in-
applicable, shocking and offensive to Nnobi women, since the strong
bonds and support between them do not imply lesbian sexual practices.
In our search for power, or more positive role models and images of
powerful women, there is a limit to how facts can be bent or our own
wishes and fantasies imposed.38

In this case, Amadiume points to the kinds of political capital to be found

for Western sexual minority identities in the experiences of African peo-
 INTRODUCTION xxv

ple. This seeking of self-consolidating evidence from elsewhere to uni-

versalize and naturalize one’s own experience can also be found in many
of the early British (and European, more generally) articulations of “ho-
mosexuality” in their emergent activist, sexological, anthropological, and
psychoanalytic guises. In a representative example, John Addington
Symonds, in A Problem in Modern Ethics (1896), tells us:
It confronts us on the steppes of Asia, where hordes of nomads drink
the milk of mares; in the bivouac of Keltish warriors, lying wrapped in
wolves’ skins round their camp-fires; upon the sands of Arabia, where
the Bedaween raise desert dust in flying squadrons. We discern it among
the palm-groves of the South Sea Islands, in the card-houses and
temple-gardens of Japan, under Esquimaux snow-huts, beneath the sul-
try vegetation of Peru, beside the streams of Shiraz and the waters of the
Ganges, in the cold clear air of Scandinavian winters. It throbs in our
huge cities. The pulse of it can be felt in London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna,
no less than in Constantinople, Naples, Teheran and Moscow. It finds a
home in Alpine valleys, Albanian ravines, Californian canyons, and
gorges of Caucasian mountains.39

The “it” that Symonds is so slow to name in this panting eroticizing of

the world is found everywhere. He mobilizes its geographic universal-
ity in an impassioned plea against its criminal status in Britain. The lan-
guage of the extract is saturated with exotic icons. Climate and
landscape are the idealized terms that Symonds uses to posit human
difference in the claim of “homosexual” sameness, though what exactly
the “it” is remains unclear. However, “its” presence among many of the
subject people of empire could be and was used as evidence that it
should be further criminalized and/or pathologized. For the same rea-
sons and purpose, it was used as justification for colonizing, as my dis-
cussion of the Bugandan case in chapter 1 will make clear. Some ninety
years later, a figure like Audre Lorde, and writers like Steven O. Murray
and Will Roscoe, repeat Symonds’s move of using the diversity of else-
where to shore up beleaguered sexual identities in the metropole.
Of course, my own position here becomes untenable if not impossi-
ble: a white gay boy standing behind an African woman to make a crit-
icism of a sanctified figure like Audre Lorde, herself a figure of much
more geographic complexity than Amadiume acknowledges here. The
point is that an identity politics of sameness, literally of appropriative
identification, is potentially as harmful as the fetishizable difference of
exoticism. My reading of Mpe through the lens of Said’s Freud marks an
attempt to think the concepts of homosexuality and Africa, difference
and sameness, identification and disavowal, in a way that lets “our” dif-
ferences stand in another way, neither a reification of otherness nor a
xxvi INTRODUCTION

projective incorporation into self. I suggest that what enables this re-
thinking is a refusal to forget continuities in power differentials in the
shifting forms of global sovereignty over the last hundred years.
The similarities and differences between the titles of Amadiume’s
Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African So-
ciety (1987) and Murray and Roscoe’s Boy-Wives and Female Hus-
bands: Studies of African Homosexualities (1998) are pointed and
illuminating. In Amadiume’s title “Male Daughters, Female Husbands”
works to confound Western readers’ expectations of sex and gender
roles. In Murray and Roscoe’s title “Boy-Wives and Female Husbands”
works to consolidate (despite the plurality of “homosexualities” and
the particularity of “African”) certain Western notions of gender tran-
sitive homosexuality in ways that risk repeating the commonplaces of
commonsense homophobia that reduce gay and lesbian relationships
to the template of heterosexual coupledom.40
The singularity of Amadiume’s “an African Society” suggests the
ways in which the book’s arguments seek to preserve the possibilities
of internal differentiation within Africa. Sex and gender stand as ana-
lytic categories, not as sexes and genders, which are classifiable if not
fixed identities on the ground. In contrast, “Studies of African Homo-
sexualities” implies that both Africa and homosexualities can be sta-
ble objects of study and that what unifies all these different kinds of
homosexualities is that they are African. In Amadiume’s book “Gen-
der and Sex in an African Society” are used as a lever to problematize
ideas of sex and gender tout court. In Murray and Roscoe’s anthology
“homosexuality” becomes big enough to embrace its African variances
by becoming “homosexualities.”
It is risky to judge a book by its cover, but these differences at the
level of title are borne out by the respective contents, with two impor-
tant exceptions. Two of the best essays in the Murray and Roscoe an-
thology evidence extreme caution about the term homosexuality.
Deborah Amory in “Mashoga, Mabasha, and Magai: ‘Homosexuality’ on
the East African Coast” keeps the term in scare quotes throughout in
ways that suggest the lack of its proper fit to the people and practices
she describes. Kendall in “ ‘When a Woman Loves a Woman’ in Lesotho:
Love, Sex and the (Western) Construction of Homophobia” all but es-
chews the term’s utility. The essay begins: “My search for lesbians in
Lesotho began in 1992, when I arrived in that small, impoverished
southern African country and went looking for my own kind.” She never
finds her own kind but encounters another form of apparently norma-
tive erotic relationship among Basotho women, which is not assimilable
to lesbianism if one takes Basotho definitions of sex seriously. This
 INTRODUCTION xxvii

missed encounter, this failure to find one’s own kind, and the process to
learn something else is what is most striking in Kendall’s essay.
Many of the essays in Signe Arnfred’s edited collection Re-
thinking Sexualities in Africa (2004) are extremely careful in describing
local practices in in-depth, bottom-up ways, but it remains difficult to
imagine how these various local redescriptions can avoid a certain in-
commensurateness. While “sexuality” as an organizing rubric is certainly
rethought, “Africa” as a designation remains a concatenation of singular-
ities or a vague geographic gesture. Recent social science studies of the
HIV/AIDS pandemic may allow a resituation of the idea of “African” in a
more multifocal way, by situating the meaningfulness of the designation
“African” in material and representational global economies. What can
the historian of ideas and the cultural critic contribute?
The relation of African sovereignty to the history of imperialism and
current realities of globalization/transnationalism is integral to the
conceptualization of African Intimacies. This book seeks both to sup-
plement and to critique anthropological endeavors by considering the
overdetermined genealogies of representations of African “homosexu-
ality” in the context of the historical experiences of imperialism, de-
colonization, and now globalization. African Intimacies analyzes a
series of historical and literary representations of predominantly, but
not only, male same-sex corporeal intimacies in Africa. These repre-
sentations are contextualized in the light of current and recent public
debates about the un-African nature of homosexuality and the neces-
sity and difficulty of discussions of African sexuality more generally in
relation to the sub-Saharan HIV/AIDS pandemic.
This book argues that the literary and cultural critic can contribute
to these important debates in two key ways. First, the book outlines
the continuities and ruptures in figurations of African sexuality pro-
duced under imperialism, decolonization, and globalization. Second,
the book opens up the archive of African cultural productions that en-
gage questions of sexuality as an intellectual resource for epidemiolo-
gists, social scientists, and policy makers.
Recent social science work moves the discussion of HIV/AIDS in
Africa beyond narrow biomedical understandings of the disease and
attendant behavior-modification approaches to prevention. The edi-
tors of HIV & AIDS in Africa: Beyond Epidemiology (2004) write:
Our departure from these paradigms comes in striving to uncover the
various ways AIDS is embedded within social, economic, cultural, po-
litical and ideological contexts. The contributors to this volume largely
disagree with the representation of AIDS as multiple instances of indi-
vidual risk resulting from lack of information or poor decisions. We
xxviii INTRODUCTION

understand it as deeply rooted in historical antecedents, geopolitical re-

lations, global financial configurations, government policies, local insti-
tutions, and cultural politics. . . . It is clear at any rate that the pervasive
and multi-directional relations among global, national and regional fac-
tors suggest that we can understand neither why HIV is transmitted in
particular areas nor how to respond to it without comprehending the rel-
evance of multiple scales of analysis.41 (italics mine)
In discussing prevention strategies, Catherine Campbell, in turn,
shows how multiple scales of analysis may operate in the messiness of
practice and the resistances they induce, as well as the temporal dura-
tions of levels of interventions:
HIV/AIDS must be fought simultaneously on each of three time-scales:
the short-term (such as STI treatment, antiretroviral drugs), the medium
term (such as community-led peer education and local partnerships to
facilitate effective HIV-prevention and AIDS-care) and the long term (in-
cluding macro-social policies and interventions that work towards the
empowerment of women and poverty reduction).42
Understanding the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the prevention strategies
they enable needs to operate in terms of multiscalar and multitempo-
ral approaches. Much of the social science literature on sexualities in
Africa moves either from a set of liberal assumptions around sexuality
and privacy, from sexuality and personal decisions (biomedical inter-
ventions in the pandemic), or from often scrupulously constructed
forms of culturalism that can provide excellent in-depth, bottom-up de-
scriptions of identities and practices in particular locations at particu-
lar times. The cultural critic as intellectual historian of imaginings of
race and sex can add to this work by excavating the enabling episte-
mological assumptions in the shifting definitions and historically tena-
cious broad imaginings of Africa, and homosexuality, and by
suggesting new archives for the imagining of those concatenations of
desire, space, and identity.
The book’s final move is to suggest that the multiple scales, tem-
poralities, and locations of an analysis that can work out and through
the relations between Africa and sexuality may have both an affective
and an imaginative dimension. As a teacher of the humanities who be-
lieves that the value of a humanities education resides in the imagina-
tion’s training, this dimension is important to me. The “melancholic
cosmopolitanism” that I find in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hill-
brow may offer an ethical base or steeping for an inquiry that cannot
commit to the stridency of either an identitarian culturalism or its pu-
tative opposite—a regulative universalism—in relation to the topics of
African Intimacies.
 INTRODUCTION xxix

Let me work through a perhaps surprising example. John Le Carré’s

The Constant Gardener (2001), a New York Times best-seller, imagines
the HIV/AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa in ways that engage all
the central problems of African Intimacies and, along the way, makes the
argument for the value of fiction and literary reading. Le Carré has per-
haps written the first popular novel in English to read globalization
critically. Inevitably, the novel reproduces many of the social and po-
litical forces it attempts to critique. It gives us globalization from the
middle up. In this way, it reproduces several of the representational ax-
ioms of the great imperialist novel. As in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
(1898), Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (1948), and Isak Di-
nesen’s Out of Africa (1938), Africa (in Le Carré’s case, Kenya) is the
disturbing, exotic, exciting, terrifying (pick an adjective) backdrop or
symbol for the adventures, moral dilemmas, romances (pick an event)
of white people. It might be useful to provide the briefest of summaries
of the 600-plus page novel here.
Tessa, the feisty young heroine and wife of Justin (who is a sweet,
handsome, somewhat dull, but full of integrity mid-level diplomat-
bureaucrat at the British Kenyan High Commission), is murdered along
with her purported black lover, Arnold (who actually turns out to be
gay). She is killed after blowing the whistle that a new drug for the
treatment of tuberculosis, which is being tested in Africa, is actually
killing people. The novel is essentially about Justin’s attempt to find
out who killed her and why.
The novel is not actually about AIDS at all, except perhaps at a dis-
placed level of allegory or more cogently at the level of fantasy and/or
politics. There is a way in which the AIDS crisis is both symptom and
allegory of a world in which borders are increasingly open to the flow
of goods and capital and certain kinds of people but the movement of
the poor are increasingly regulated. The HIV virus, as a subindividual
agent, moves more in the way of a powerful abstraction like capital,
although where it hits, hurts, and stays can be attributed to factors that
are recognizably local. However, let us be literal here and consider
closely the one place in which the novel directly addresses the prob-
lem of the African HIV/AIDS crisis. Paradoxically, this only makes it
apparent that at its heart it is not really African at all, that its causes
lie within a much more widely dispersed global economic and politi-
cal system.
We are with Justin, at a food drop location in southern Sudan.
He has tracked Lorbeer, a kind of Kurtz figure who appears to be
implicated in Tessa’s death and has been connected to many of the
new TB-drug-related deaths. At this point in the narrative, we know
xxx INTRODUCTION

that Lorbeer was one of the new drug’s developers and is the person
responsible for its testing on human subjects. In a crisis of conscience,
realizing the drug, which he has hoped will cure people more effec-
tively and make him a considerable fortune, actually kills people, he
has gone to work in a famine relief center in Sudan. Justin (Peter),
masquerading as a journalist, interviews him there.

“Africa has 80% of the world’s AIDs sufferers, Peter. That is a conser-
vative estimate. Three quarters of them receive no medication. For this
we must thank the pharmaceuticals and their servants, the U.S. State
Department, who threaten with sanctions any country that dares pro-
duce its own cheap version of American patented medicines. OK? Have
you written that down?”
Justin gives Lorbeer a reassuring nod. “Keep going.”
“The pills in this jar cost twenty U.S. dollars apiece in Nairobi, six in
New York, eighteen in Manila. Any day now, India’s going to manufac-
ture the generic version and the same pill will cost sixty cents. Don’t talk
to me about the research and development costs. The pharmaceutical
boys wrote them off ten years ago and a lot of their money comes from
governments in the first place, so they’re talking crap. What we got here
is an amoral monopoly that costs human lives everyday. OK?”
Lorbeer knows his exhibits so well he doesn’t need to search for
them. He replaces the jar in the shelves and grabs a large black and
white box.43

Readers are put in the interesting but uncomfortable position of being

asked to agree with the novel’s most morally compromised voice. Le
Carré establishes a damning body of evidence against the pharmaceu-
ticals: Third World dumping, testing new drugs on vulnerable popula-
tions who have no recourse to either legal protections or medical care
should anything go wrong. Why put this moment of most explicit cri-
tique in the mouth of a probable murderer, a known apostate? This ten-
sion between who speaks and what is said is especially interesting as
Le Carré (as behooves a writer of Cold War spy thrillers) is in many
ways a Manichean thinker, with a fascination with the mechanisms of
complicity and betrayal that spy novels must engage. This difficulty of
reconciling who speaks and what is spoken is one of the many things
for which fiction functions well. Fiction addresses a subject’s imagina-
tion, an imagination that is paradoxically but profoundly embodied:
paradoxically because the act of reading (sitting still, being transported
into another world) is often a disembodied experience; profoundly be-
cause imaginative identification involves the entire sensorium. We can
see, taste, smell, weep, laugh, get aroused, or get bored reading a novel.
Narrative fiction necessarily embodies intellectual positions by em-
bedding them in character’s mouths, bodies, and life trajectories. This
 INTRODUCTION xxxi

conversation between Lorbeer and Justin/Peter requires an ethical en-

gagement from its readers: What would you do if you were Lorbeer, if
you were in his body, in his geographical location with his life experi-
ence? This question reveals the way the text both imagines and fails to
imagine its readership. It cannot imagine the victims of Lorbeer’s
halfway good intentions gone wrong—the millions of impoverished
Africans dying because they lack, among other things, access to the
medicines that might save them—as its readers can. To do so would
risk an obscenity, and the genre of the middle-brow thriller definition-
ally precludes those not at all or barely literate (in English).
If the readers of the middle-brow thriller can be imagined as smaller
Lorbeers, well-intentioned subjects caught up willy-nilly in an evil sys-
tem from which they accrue significant benefits, whether they want
them or not (in a snide moment, I wonder whether or not Tessa’s mas-
sive financial resources, which allow for Justin’s exposure of the
pharmaceuticals, are independent of investments in the very pharma-
ceuticals or the diversified conglomerates of which they form a part),
the writer here can be imagined as Justin disguised as Peter, who
writes down exactly what Lorbeer tells him: “OK? Have you written
that down?”
Lorbeer comes to conscience late in the novel. Will its readers, sit-
ting on planes, on trains, in armchairs—all locations that mark them
as members of the world Lorbeer implicitly denounces—do the same?
The novel’s careful staging of its representational work (conscience-
raising, rather than consciousness-raising), sugar-coated by the se-
ductions of narrative suspense, may allow its readers to begin ethical
work that in turn may become political. However, the limits of the
novel’s political vision, and perhaps the vision of any novel, become
clearer in the narrative’s failure, or refusal, or constitutive inability to
imagine a collective resistance to the forces of globalized capital, sym-
bolized by the ruthless pharmaceuticals, which are also embodied in
the figure of Lorbeer. More importantly, these limits are revealed in the
solitariness of the act of reading.
Justin can trust no one, most of all the people Tessa’s work so des-
perately wants to help. Unrepresentable in the narrative and defini-
tionally outside the potentially ethical circuit of reader/writer, the
African person with HIV/AIDS disappears here in the very exchange
that depends on him/her for its moral weight. We are in the familiar
landscape of subalternity here. In the world of The Constant Gar-
dener (and the title resonates with the notions of death and rebirth,
sustained cycles of labor and repose) we have African AIDS and
African disease more generally staged as a crisis for, for the want of
a better shorthand, European conscience. I do not think that this
xxxii INTRODUCTION

staging is necessarily always a bad thing, provided one marks its lim-
its. One should be wary of a vestigial romanticism that sustainedly lo-
cates agency in spontaneous collective responses from below.44
As fine a novel as The Constant Gardener is, it can only speak for
and about (never to or from) Africans with HIV/AIDS. Nevertheless, it
offers incitements to agency for readers who may be able to participate
in solidarity tourism at worst, and disinvestments and boycott politics
at best. I further think that the novel’s million plus readers, many of
whom know little and care just as little about Africa, reading the sen-
tence, “What we got here is an amoral monopoly that costs human
lives everyday. OK?” is not a bad place to begin.
Cynically speaking, the pharmaceuticals in Africa allow Le Carré as
a novelist to give continued life to the set of narrative conventions he
mastered in writing about the Cold War. Yet, within that maneuvering,
agentive possibilities may emerge. The novel remains useful to me in
the ways that it gives a multiscalar analysis of the pandemic—from the
transnational to the national to the local to the personal—narrative
and affective content.
African Intimacies privileges the term intimacies as a frame for ne-
gotiating those various scales of analysis in the language of imagina-
tion and affect.45 Methodologically, the book interrogates the difficulty
of subsuming a range of historical experiences and representations
under the banners of sexuality and homosexuality, though these are
terms that I cannot quite do without. The chapters circle an interlock-
ing series of questions in the unstable terrain of contemporary African
and sexuality studies. They move from the assumption that the expe-
rience of the embodied pleasures, stories, and traumas held together
in the liberal modern West under the sign “sexuality” have a pro-
foundly public character. This profoundly public character is deeply
affected by the set of economic and discursive relations that pertain
under imperialism in its shifting temporalities from the scramble for
Africa in the 1880s through the colonial and decolonizing periods of
the twentieth century to current-day globalization.
Ann Laura Stoler attempted to give Foucault’s History of Sexuality
(1978) its imperial geography in Race and the Education of Desire in
the context of the Dutch imperial adventure in Indonesia. Western and
anticolonial feminisms have always deeply contested the public/
private split central to liberal ideologies of sex and gender. In recent
years they have moved to a more geographically stratified notion of
“woman” in ways that are profoundly enabling for thinking through
the problems of corporeal pleasures and pains within a continually
racialized and gendered national and international division and defi-
 INTRODUCTION xxxiii

nition of labor. The vocabulary of intimacy talk bypasses many of the

difficulties in talking about the socially mediated experience of desire
and embodiment in a global context that have plagued the older (and
in many ways, more precise) vocabularies of psychoanalysis or an-
thropological reductions of these experiences to kinship patterns,
though the reading of psychoanalysis in the late work of Edward Said
and in a recent strand of U.S.-based queer and immigration studies
scholarship is central to my final chapter.
My hope is that this book will be of interest to various audiences,
including scholars and students in the areas of lesbian and gay stud-
ies and queer theory, African literature and history, and development
and globalization studies, as well as public health policy professionals
and a general readership concerned with the cultural underpinnings
and political and ethical implications of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in
Africa. Moreover, I hope that this book will encourage its readers to
read it more in the way that they might read Le Carré’s novel and to
find in Le Carré’s novel the kind of multiscalar analysis of the pan-
demic that Campbell and Kalipeni et al. outline. It is necessary for
readers to resist a confidence in the otherness of Africa and homosex-
uality and not to assimilate them to the discomfort of the signifying
economy of the same, to do the “provincializing of the West” work
with the African Anglican bishops at Lambeth, to imagine fucking
boys at a royal court in 1886 as a form of political rationality, to be im-
plicated in the ongoing historical processes described and analyzed,
and not to extract moral lessons for themselves from the examples of
elsewhere. This book tries to work out what a cosmopolitan interest in
questions of Africa and homosexuality might be, to suggest what read-
ers might need to know to be, in the title of the Phaswane Mpe novel
of the last chapter, “welcomed to our Hillbrow.”
This page intentionally left blank
 Chapter 1

AFRICAN SODOMY IN THE M I S S I O N A RY P O S I T I O N

Corporeal Intimacies and Signifying Regimes

In order to unsettle polemics on both sides of the currently raging de-

bate about the status of male homosexuality in African cultures, I wish
to revisit the Ganda martyrs of 1886. To do so, I suggest that framing the
debate in terms of “male homosexuality” and “African cultures” is par-
ticularly vexed. These two terms, far from being neutral descriptors, per-
form extremely complex ideological labor by masking a set of imbricated
relations between more volatile social abstractions such as capital, reli-
gion, race, and masculinity. Questions of representation informed by
problems of displacement, projection, and identification on all sides of
the debates add to the difficulties of unpacking this set of relations.
The following represents an abbreviated background and chronology
of the events that I will interpret in this chapter. Mutesa, kabaka (King)
of Buganda, offers hospitality to Henry Morgan Stanley, who searches
to clarify the source of the Nile. In a famous 1875 letter to the Daily Tele-
graph, Stanley, much impressed by Ganda society, urges missionaries
to take Christianity to Buganda. In July 1877, two members of the
Christian Missionary Society are received by Mutesa. The White Fathers,
founders of the Roman Catholic mission in Buganda, leave from their
base on the East African coast in 1878. In the same year Alexander
Mackay sets up the Church Missionary Society (CMS) mission in
Rubaga, Buganda’s capital. In 1882, Pere Lourdel of the White Fathers
baptizes the first converts to Roman Catholicism. In 1884, Mutesa dies
and his heir, Mwanga, succeeds him as kabaka. Throughout 1885,
Christian pages at the royal court increasingly refuse to yield to what the
missionaries call Mwanga’s unnatural desires. In September 1885,
Bishop Hannington, while en route to Buganda, is killed at Mwanga’s
request in Busoga.1 In May 1886, Mwanga demands that all Christian
pages, or “readers,”2 recant. More than thirty refuse to do so and are
burned alive on a single funeral pyre at Namungogo. These killings po-
larize the kingdom into three factions, all opposed to Mwanga. Muslim,
Catholic, and Protestant armies emerge and a civil war ensues. In Sep-
tember 1888, the Imperial British East Africa Company receives a royal
charter from Lord Salisbury’s government with instructions to preserve
law and order in Buganda.3

1
2 AFRICAN SODOMY IN THE MISSIONARY POSITION

Rereading the story of the Ganda martyrs offers insights into how
questions of sexuality may affect matters of realpolitik. As an example,
Mwanga’s relations with his pages provide some of the impetus for di-
rect British colonial intervention. A reconsideration of these events of
1886 may allow us to see what happens when bodily practices get re-
coded as “sex” and how representing these recoded bodily practices
plays a role in assigning meaning to cultural and racial difference. I
hope my analysis of these events can suggest how one may read sex-
ual subtexts in narrations of national, religious, and racial authentic-
ity at the cusp of formal European colonization. The events can be
used to concretize how, in certain historical moments, certain corpo-
real practices come to be represented as sexual, and move into identi-
tarian sexuality, as their meanings are transfigured under new
discursive regimes. While there has been much work on the emer-
gence of global homosexual identities in the present,4 there has been
little historical writing on same-sex corporeal intimacies before the
twentieth century outside of the North Atlantic world.
This history of the Ganda “martyrs” further raises important problems
in cross-cultural definitions of sexuality, while simultaneously illuminat-
ing the ways in which the category of “sexuality” can be deployed in or-
der to produce the idea of cultural difference. I set to work certain
anthropological or historical ideas of cultural difference (dynamically
rather than statically understood) against universalizing rhetorics of de-
sire and identity. Through this tension, I hope to recuperate other possi-
ble understandings of Mwanga’s actions and to reveal the ways in which
representations of the “sexualities” of other races both shore up and
destabilize the emergent homo/hetero binary in Europe. These events
also reveal the instability of meanings attributable to corporeal intimacies
as they enact and are acted upon by clashing signifying systems: murder
or martyrdom, sex or ritual, resistance or imperialism. In this context, the
term intimacy is useful in that it suggests relations between bodies that
are not reducible to identitarian or psychoanalytic notions of sexuality.5
I will offer four analyses of the Buganda events of 1885–86. Each
analysis determines significant shifts in how the events can be nar-
rated. These narrations are derived from both primary and secondary
sources. Abundant documentation exists from both the Anglican and
Roman Catholic missions in Uganda at the time.6 Twenty-two martyrs
were beatified by Pope Benedict XV in 1920; in order for this to occur,
their lives were fairly extensively documented.7 In addition to the mis-
sionary reports and letters, other information comes from the writings
of a subsequently prominent Ugandan, Sir Apolo Kaggwa, a Christian
convert who was himself stabbed by Mwanga.8
 AFRICAN SODOMY IN THE MISSIONARY POSITION 3

In the interest of a cautious and self-conscious nativism, I attempt

to imagine accounts from perspectives that are not represented in the
sources and are difficult to adduce from them even by carefully read-
ing against the grain of the missionary and colonial administrative ac-
counts. For example, what might renegade converts have written
about their king’s propensity to sodomize (if this is actually what he
did) youths at court? How might those who converted to Christianity
(either in its Protestant or Roman Catholic guise, thus acquiring liter-
acy and some proficiency in English or French) but then lapsed and
fought on the side of the king in the expulsion of the missions recount
events? I am particularly interested in the perspective of three Baganda
sent to England in 1879 as envoys to Queen Victoria and who, ac-
cording to the missionaries, became virulently anti-Christian and anti-
English upon their return.9 However, since they left no records, how
can their perceptions be responsibly imagined? Would they under-
stand the “sexual” issue as a red herring or, like the missionaries, see
it as a private vice with dangerous consequences for the state? Would
they understand the king’s corporeal intimacies with his pages as sex-
ual at all? Would they defend Mwanga’s practices under the sign of
loyalty to the kabaka, under the sign of Ganda “tradition,” or both? (I
return to these questions at the end of Frame 4.)

FRAME 1: AFRICAN “SODOMY” AS INCENTIVE TO THE TAKING UP OF THE

WHITE MAN’S BURDEN

The 1886 execution of the pages leads to the expulsion of the mis-
sionaries from the kingdom and direct British intervention in 1888,
culminating in Buganda becoming a protectorate in 1894 and in es-
tablishment of the British Uganda Agreement of 1900. Père Lourdel,
who was in charge of the Roman Catholic Mission in Buganda at the
time of the executions, writes:
The first cause is that the king, who does not himself want religion, can-
not bear the thought that they whom he calls his slaves, know more
about it than he does, and believes himself despised by the Christians
the moment he does not follow their example. The second cause is the
impossibility of satisfying his shameful passions.10

Subsequent scholars, who do not share Lourdel’s investment in arguing

for the privileging of Christian superiority in the causation of events,
have tended to reverse his two causal claims. Roland Oliver does so by
asking why Mwanga would take action against “mere children,” when
4 AFRICAN SODOMY IN THE MISSIONARY POSITION

there were prominent chief converts and many women converts, if his
motivation was solely against Christianity.11 Marie de Kiewet-Hemphill
agrees: “The immediate pretext, if not the whole cause, for the tragedy
was the refusal of the young Christian pages at the court to yield to
Mwanga’s unnatural desires.”12 J. P. Thoonen, in an early book-length
discussion of the events, bears this out, though clearly other political
factors are at play.13
Two refusals from pages particularly provoked Mwanga in the week
leading up to the executions. Lutaya, a close Muslim friend of Mwanga,
requested that the Protestant page, Matthias Gayiga, be sent to him for
purposes that the missionaries read as sexual.14 The king granted the
request, but Gayiga refused to comply with Lutaya’s demands and was
subsequently beaten and confined to the stocks for two days. Reverend
A. P. Ashe, second to Alexander Mackay at the Anglican Mission,
writes: “This splendid act of disobedience, when reported to Mwanga,
served to set the spark to the train which had already been laid.”15
Ashe’s language is interesting, as it subliminally connects this act of
disobedience with the building of a railroad, a critical colonial enter-
prise in the extraction of African raw materials. A Roman Catholic page,
Anatole Kirrigwajjo, then “refuses an important office at court but one
which he could only exercise at the peril of his soul.”16 If, as even Ashe
recognizes, the refusal of sex constitutes an act of political disobedience
with drastic consequences for the future of the state, can Mwanga’s, or
in this case his friend and ally Lutaya’s, desire for some corporeal inti-
macy subsumable under the sign of sex with a boy be simply depicted
as unnatural desire or sodomy? The significance of the king’s interest
in performing acts with his pages that can fall under the rubric of “un-
natural passion” in a colonial representational field is complicated.
Many historians claim that Mwanga learned this “foul practice”
from the Arab traders who maintained a strong presence at the Ganda
court. Thoonen notes that many witnesses during the apostolic
process mention by name the Muslims who “taught Mwanga to do the
things of Sodom.”17 Many were not Arabs but native Baganda who had
converted to Islam. R. W. Beachey claims of Mwanga: “He was capri-
cious, lacking in courage and sapped by private vices reputedly ac-
quired from the Arabs. He was soon in headlong collision with the
missions, and there followed in the early summer of 1886 the cruel
martyrdom of some 30 young Ganda youths.”18 On the one hand, “pri-
vate vice” can be invoked as an index of African savagery and de-
pravity. On the other hand, the assertion that this was an alien and
imported practice can be invoked as proof of African innocence. Note
here how the category “private” can be invoked against what might be
 AFRICAN SODOMY IN THE MISSIONARY POSITION 5

sanctioned as “customary.” Sir Harry Johnstone, an instrumental fig-

ure in setting up the protectorates of Nyasaland and Northern Rhode-
sia and the British representative in the British Uganda Agreement of
1900, makes the following remarks about Mwanga:
Perhaps he might still have been king had not his vicious propensities
taken a turn which disgusted even his negro people, and made them fear
that his precept and example spreading widely among his imitative sub-
jects might result in the disappearance in time of the Uganda race.19

This passage depicts Africans as intelligent children: They have some

moral sense since, like their “European superiors,” they find same-sex
eroticism reprehensible. However, like children, they are “imitative,”
and thus extremely vulnerable to corrupting influences, assuming they
are not already half-corrupted. The phrase “had not his vicious
propensities taken a turn which disgusted even his negro people” im-
plies that it takes something extremely reprehensible to the colonizing
mind–set to disgust even negro people. Irrespective of the radically dif-
ferent imputations as to the origins of Mwanga’s practices, the account
of African male same-sex corporeal intimacy, whether it encourages
the depiction of the African as a depraved degenerate in need of in-
struction or a noble savage in need of protection from Arab corruption,
is easily subsumed into an appeal to British paternalism.
This paternalism obviously takes the explicit form of correct religious
instruction, but as the cliché in this chapter’s title, “the missionary posi-
tion,” indicates, instruction in the proper use of bodies is as critical a part
of that instruction as doctrinal niceties. Mwanga clearly did not appreci-
ate that the only acceptable position for sexual gratification or ritual ex-
ercises of power that looked sexual to missionaries was “face-to-face,
man on top of woman in monogamous marriage.” Whether they were
corruptible innocents or depraved degenerates, the Ganda needed saving.
Moreover, as David Apter points out: “There grew up among the
British a myth of Buganda as a knightly and feudal nation. . . . The coun-
try was divided into territorial groupings similar to shires; the kingdom
was an aggregate of shires (sazas).”20 Victorian fascination with matters
perceived as medieval21 may have helped to give the Baganda a par-
ticular place in an imperial popular imaginary. In subsequent years,
Uganda was increasingly described as “the pearl of Africa.”22 The rep-
resentation of Buganda as emblematically chivalric, feudal, and ready
for Christianity may have prompted a set of identifications that made
the task of stemming “Arab corruption” not only a territorial, eco-
nomic, or religious concern. Fears of decadence, degeneracy, and
perversity as attendant on modernity were rampant in the England
6 AFRICAN SODOMY IN THE MISSIONARY POSITION

of the fin de siècle and could easily be projected onto a “half-

civilized race” in which earlier and idealized national forms were
recognizable. Sexual practices were a favored yardstick in measur-
ing national decline.
The British did not intervene in Buganda just to prevent the king’s
“sexual” excesses. Factors such as protecting the missionaries, making
the region safer for the ivory trade, attempting to eradicate the East
African slave trade, easing anxieties around German competition from
the East African coast, and identifying a desire to check Arab
(Mahdist) influence from the north probably had greater causal im-
portance. However, publicizing the scandal of the youths probably
made the task of justifying formal intervention to both the public and
largely pragmatic anti-imperialist elements within the British govern-
ment somewhat easier.23 More importantly, the sexualizing of the
Ganda state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violence may call into
question the state’s legitimacy.
Another area to explore is the potential instrumentality of the per-
ceived presence of “deviant” sexual practices in the justification of ex-
tending colonial rule. In an article that lies far outside the parameters
of this study but is nonetheless useful in pointing to and complicating
the production and mobilization of “sexuality” that I am discussing,
Jonathan Goldberg reads the English translation of Balboa’s feeding of
forty apparently transgender “sodomites” (some of whom were al-
legedly freely handed over to the Spaniards by the natives) to his dogs,
following the 1511 defeat of the leaders of the Indians of Quarequa in
present day Panama. Goldberg points to the multivalenced significance
of this act, revealing how the account allows for Balboa to be staged as
a protodemocratic hero, a fighter for native women (who must be de-
graded by the presence of these people in their midst), and a crusader
for Christ in the New World. In his analysis, the overdetermined nature
of homosexuality in colonial encounters is suggested, with the elimi-
nation of “the preposterous vice” serving as some kind of justification
for conquest, but never just that.24 I do not want to be seen as claim-
ing “colonialism” as one vast, monolithic entity, such that the Spanish
conquest of the New World in the sixteenth century necessarily bears
strong affinities with the implementation of British rule in East Africa
at the end of the nineteenth century. I invoke Goldberg on Balboa be-
cause he offers a methodological frame that transcends the concerns
of presentist identity politics by trying to place sexuality within the pa-
rameters of global political economy, and because of an awareness of
the significance of “representational” questions in this context.
In the history of colonialism in East Africa, Mwanga’s corporeal in-
timacies with his pages reveal clashing signifying regimes. The refig-
 AFRICAN SODOMY IN THE MISSIONARY POSITION 7

uring of these intimacies as “sodomy” or “unnatural vice” indicates an

effective European recoding of their significance. I would further claim
that this recoding had important material consequences. Without an
understanding of “sodomy as sin,” the boys would have no reason to
martyr themselves. Without the martyrdom, British intervention may
have been delayed or taken a different form. On a less speculative
note, bodily practices signified as sexual or acts signifying bodily prac-
tices as sexual may have been instrumental in the instigation of colo-
nial rule and were certainly an important part of its implementation.

FRAME 2: AFRICAN CORPOREAL INTIMACIES AND THE PRODUCTION

OF THEMETROPOLITAN HOMOSEXUAL

While missionaries and other travelers’ accounts generally may pro-

vide extremely graphic accounts of a variety of African cultural norms,
some of which were surely shocking compared to their expectations,
their coy references to the unspeakable sexual acts of Mwanga and his
young cohorts are remarkable.25 By way of contrast, descriptions of
other African “atrocities” abound with no representational scruples
about providing detailed descriptions of beheadings, burnings, am-
putations, and the like. Here is an extract from Mackay’s journal of
January 31, 1885:
That Serwanga, Kakumba and Ashe’s boy had been tortured by having
their arms cut off, and were then bound alive to a scaffolding, under
which a fire was made, and they were slowly burnt to death. Mujasi and
his men mocked them, and bade them pray now if Isa Masiya (Jesus
Christ) would rescue them from his hands. The dear lads clung to their
faith, and in the fire they sang, “Killa siku tinsifu” (the hymn, “Daily,
daily, sing the praises”).26

What does the fact that such corporeal violations are representable but
the bodily acts, the refusal of which lead to this gruesome scene, are
not revealed? The language of the mission reports makes it difficult to
gauge exactly what Mwanga did with his pages. The language used
varies from “disgraceful sin” to “unnatural acts” to “unbridled hea-
then obscenity” to “shameful passions.” There appears to be a re-
markable investment at points of not knowing, that these acts are
somehow more terrible and unimaginable than the acts of violence
that the missionaries feel morally obliged to relate in graphic detail.
In England, newspaper reports of the execution of the Ganda youths
reveal a similar reticence. Some omit the question of sodomy altogether
and encode the events as a straightforward matter of religious persecu-
tion. Others, in contrast, employ a similarly evasive set of phrases to
8 AFRICAN SODOMY IN THE MISSIONARY POSITION

those of the missionaries to gesture toward some notion of “unnatural

acts” or “barbaric sexual depravity.” However, the sexualized language
of Christianity is sometimes deployed, perhaps indicating unconscious
investments in the spectacle of the dying youths. A leading article in the
Times of October 30, 1886, invokes the religious commonplace that “the
blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” It grants generative and
reproductive metaphoric power to the martyrs that may implicitly be
contrasted with the biblical prohibition against letting “seed fall on bar-
ren ground,” a strong underpinning for Victorian prohibitions of both
masturbation (often termed “single vice”) and male same-sex erotic
practices (often termed “dual vice”).27 Although the executions can be
seen as politically generative, the acts that lead up to them cannot.
In addition, the possibility exists of connections between the Mwanga
episode in 1885–86 and the Wilde scandal ten years later. While I have
not found any pictures or drawings of Mwanga in the British press, it
is reasonable to speculate on how his physical appearance may have
been imagined. Blind to its own highly elaborate ornamentation,
middle-class British masculinity would probably imagine the costume
of the kabaka—a leopard skin cloak, ostrich feather plumes, and naked
chest28—as both hypervirilized (connotating despotism, hunting prowess,
and naked animal strength) and paradoxically feminine in the perceived
elaborateness of the display. The ornamented male for a Victorian imag-
inary was either dandy or savage, the sexual proclivities of either being
up for grabs at this historical juncture. Like the “not knowing” of sodomy,
the as-yet-unfilled-in picture of Mwanga allows these events to act as a
screen for the projection of metropolitan fears, desires, and ambitions.29
The figuring of both male and female “homosexuality” was further
frequently undertaken in terms of race and gender, often employing
evolutionary vocabularies of “arrested development” and “degenera-
tion” as well as the language of miscegenation, “sexual half-breeds,”
and so on. Siobhan Somerville, in “Scientific Racism and the Emer-
gence of the Homosexual Body,”30 elaborates how theories of scientific
racism, themselves deeply enmeshed in evolutionary arguments, are
used in the production of “medical” knowledge of the homosexual
body. Somerville elucidates the racial analogies in the third sex or gen-
der continuum models of homosexuality. I argue elsewhere that it is not
just the third sex theorists who use racial analogies to understand the
homosexual body, and that the Freudian figuration of homosexuality as
“arrested development” is indebted to evolutionary theories of racial
difference as “arrested development” in the phylogenetic sphere.31
It is clear that Mwanga, who is racially other, ornamented like a
woman, and given over to unnameable sexual acts, must have been a
 AFRICAN SODOMY IN THE MISSIONARY POSITION 9

seductive figure over which the new popular and scientific discourse
of homosexuality could have played out. Evolutionary tropes are par-
adoxically inverted and reinforced by representations of the homosex-
ual as suffering from a variety of degenerative illnesses; in other
words, the homosexual is viewed as degenerate rather than retarded.32
Given British fantasies about the Ganda as a noble and knightly peo-
ple, it is easy to see how Mwanga may be understood as a representa-
tive of degeneration, another important sexological discourse for the
figuring of the emergent homosexual body.
I would further suggest that the spectacle of the “half-naked sav-
age,” partially feminized by the Darwinian notion that ornamentation
is a defining property of civilized women,33 provoked similar anxieties
along the axes of gender and sexuality. However, as Alan Sinfield has
made clear, circumspection is necessary in reading effeminacy as an
encoding of homosexuality prior to the Wilde trials.34 While it would
also be tempting to present the many racialized images of Wilde as a
savage, a Negro, or “The Wild Man of Borneo” (as taken from his 1882
American tour) as further evidence of connections between the
despotic savage and the emergent homosexual in the popular imagi-
nation, I can only do so with a note of caution, as tracking back and
forth across three continents requires more careful attention to the par-
ticularities of American racial formation than I can do here.35 Never-
theless, the dandy and the savage—two ends of the spectrum of
masculinity—are both excessively ornamented, though whether this
ornamentation is directed at male or female spectators is unclear.
Wilde and Mwanga may push at the pleasures and anxieties involved
in racial and sexual indeterminacy.
Wilde and Mwanga can clearly be linked in their popular perception
as predatory. The socially subordinate class status of the young men
(previous tricks of Wilde) who turn state witness is arguably a major
factor in the failure of Wilde’s prosecution of the Marquess of Queens-
bury for libel and the subsequent failure of his defense against charges
of gross indecency. Wilde, as an emblematic homosexual, is predatory
on the young, innocent, and socially inferior. The success of the Mar-
quess of Queensbury can partially be explained by his spurious claim
that all he was trying to do was protect his son against the likes of
Wilde.36 Mwanga is also seen as predatory, coercing the young Christ-
ian pages over whom he has power of life and death to submit to his
wicked inclinations. This predacity on class and status inferiors is more
threatening in that both Wilde and Mwanga also prey upward.
Mwanga expresses a desire to marry Queen Victoria, and the history of
Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas is well known.37
10 AFRICAN SODOMY IN THE MISSIONARY POSITION

Given the social productivity of “scandals” and “atrocities” in pro-

ducing and mobilizing identities, and of adjudicating who lies inside
and outside, the cases of Wilde and Mwanga may be instructive.38 In
the Wilde case, male same-sex acts are other, even when committed at
the heart of the metropole. In the Mwanga case, geographic and “cul-
tural otherness” can be asserted to intensify the alien nature of the
people who indulge in such activities to the wider body politic. It
might not be going too far to assert that, in certain historical moments,
homosexuality may function as a crucially defining other of national-
ism. Institutionalized functions of sexual acts vary widely in the times
and spaces under discussion here.39
It is further possible to note temporal as well as geographic and racial
displacements in determining male same-sex practices. The unspeak-
able vice of the Ancients is never far from the surface in discussions of
Victorian same-sex male passion.40 This civilizational link can be found
in various forms in discussions of sex and vice from the imperial femi-
nism of Josephine Butler to the influential journalism of W. T. Stead, and
in a range of documents from what could be termed “social purity.” The
following claim about male homosexuality by a Reverend J. Wilson can
be taken as typical: “Rome fell, other nations are falling and if England
falls, it will be this sin, and her unbelief in God, that will be her ruin.”41
Alexander Mackay, the missionary in charge of the Anglican mis-
sion in Buganda, likens Mwanga to a “young Nero” in his absolute
despotism and unnatural appetites.42 In juxtaposing these two quotes,
we see how same-sex sex acts need to be represented as part of Eu-
rope’s transcended historical past, no matter how glorious, or as part
of Europe’s present past in Africa, where the spatialization of time en-
couraged by evolutionary narratives permits various peoples to stand
in as living representatives of Europe’s stone-age, bronze-age, and bar-
barian periods of development. Practices deemed sexual often help de-
termine a society’s place in this evolutionary hierarchy. Yet, this
parallel with Rome may also destabilize imperial certainties, for cross-
racial Christian identifications subvert Roman imperial ones.

FRAME 3: HOW “AFRICAN” WAS “AFRICAN SODOMY”?

Sir Richard Francis Burton claims that “homosexuality” is definitively

Un-British, even though his own sexuality continues to be a matter for
much speculation.43 In the “Terminal Essay” (1886) to his translation
of A Thousand and One Nights, he constructs a Sotadic zone in which
climate is seen to facilitate pathological love. Fascinatingly, the only
two regions of the globe that he exempts from encouraging same-sex
 AFRICAN SODOMY IN THE MISSIONARY POSITION 11

erotic practices are northern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. This ex-
emption of black Africa from homosexual vice goes back to Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–80), which asserted sub-
Saharan Africa to be “exempt from this moral pestilence”44 and has
reemerged in the current claims of postcolonial African leaders.45 Prior
to Freud’s relocation of the problem of abberant sexual practices to the
psyche, these practices are thoroughly saturated with concerns around
national and racial authenticity.46
As noted earlier, many commentators claim that Mwanga learned the
practices from Arab traders who had been at the Ganda court, probably
since the 1850s. This claim invokes the massive edifice of Orientalism47
to serve a number of interests. The missionaries can play on fears of Is-
lamic competition for converts in the region in order to solicit more re-
sources for their own conversion enterprises. Making gestures toward
Arab sodomy could call on popular fantasies of the luxurious and deca-
dent East and allow for the European male to feel virilized in contrast.
Islam in late nineteenth-century European stereotypes is understood in
almost polar opposite ways to the way it is perceived in late twentieth
century Euro-American stereotypes. For the Victorians, Islam repre-
sents sexual license, perfumed houris, slave boys, eunuchs, harems, op-
portunities for cross-dressing, and a variety of nomadic fantasies.48
Accusations of Arab instruction in sodomy may also have spun off
from unconscious missionary anxieties about the highly charged ho-
moerotic milieu they inhabited. As they were either single or separated
from their wives by a continent, working mostly with teenage boys in
a context where life and death emotions were continually playing out,
it seems reasonable to speculate that there could have been momen-
tary failures (acted upon or not) in the work of religious sublimation.
It may be instructive to speculate here on how the Ganda may have
perceived the missionaries—the White Fathers with an explicit ideol-
ogy and practice of celibacy, in contrast to the Anglican missionaries
who were not prohibited from marrying.
Displacements around the national, racial, and historical character
of same-sex sex acts and desires are a feature of European discourse
on the subject at the last fin de siècle. To return to Roman invocations,
strange shifts in identifications take place. Writing of an empire under
the threat of perceived moral degradation, Reverend Wilson, in the
quote cited earlier about England and Rome both falling due to “this
sin,” implicitly identifies England with Rome. However, in the context
of Buganda, it is Mwanga, the barbarian, who is identified with Rome,
not only for his unnatural sexual practices but more explicitly for his
persecution of the Christians. H. M. Stanley, in his report to the C.M.
Intelligencer of August 1890, writes:
12 AFRICAN SODOMY IN THE MISSIONARY POSITION

The more I heard the story of Zachariah and Samuel and the others,
looking at their cleanly faces, hearing them tell the story of how they en-
dured the persecutions of Mwanga, I was carried back to the days of
Nero and Caligula, how they persecuted the Christians at Rome; just the
fortitude I had read in books of the martyrs of the early Church.49

Here we have the classic imperialist (and evolutionist) trope of identi-

fying Africa as Europe’s childhood. This understanding of the Ganda
church as similar to the early church under the Roman Empire permits
interesting cross-racial identifications under the universal sign of
Christianity. However, the idea of equality in this universal sign is
problematic, because while the Ganda martyrs may be perceived as
fellow Christians, their Christianity is at an embryonic stage, if one is
prepared to literalize the metaphor of the martyrs’ blood as seed.
I would also speculate that elements of displaced antisemitism, con-
nected in a pre-Zionist era with the anti-Arab sentiments noted earlier,
may be located in the missionary accounts of Mwanga. Within the long
discursive life of European antisemitism, the first persecutors of Chris-
tians are not the Romans but the Jews. The trope of the Jew as Christ-
killer and the abductor and murderer of Christian children has a fairly
vigorous life in nineteenth-century British literary representations.50 The
sexuality of the Jewish male body is equally a source of anxiety, with cir-
cumcision regarded as a quasi-sexual practice and an indication of racial
difference. It has further been argued that the feminizing of the Jewish
male body as a result of a number of social vectors (circumcision being
only the most obvious marker) implicitly induces sets of homoerotic anx-
ieties. The literature on this is vast, but I make a gesture toward it be-
cause the Victorian popular imagination would surely draw on its prior
phantasms of racial and sexual otherness in its encounter with the figure
of Mwanga: “sodomite,” despot, and persecutor of Christians.51

FRAME 4: “AFRICAN” “SODOMY” AS PRIMARY ANTICOLONIAL RESISTANCE

Most accounts make it clear why the missionaries would target the
pages at the royal court for their most strenuous conversion efforts.
These pages were the “sons” of ruling families from all over the king-
dom of Buganda. David Apter writes Mwanga was oppressed by an in-
creasingly stifling pattern of control by the missionaries. In addition to
giving advice, they now controlled the selection of pages to the court
of the king (these pages made up the main group from which chiefs
were selected). Control of the chiefs, one of the critical aspects of Ki-
ganda authority, was slipping from Mwanga’s hands.52
 AFRICAN SODOMY IN THE MISSIONARY POSITION 13

Given the centrality of the role pages could play in the political or-
ganization of the kingdom, it is clear why missionaries would target
them as important subjects for conversion. As converts with political
power, they could return to their regions and, using their status as
chiefs, both spread and legitimize the new religion. According to Apter,
recruitment occurred in the following way:
Pages were sent to the court of the king by clan elders and chiefs. They
were selected from families who had in some way distinguished them-
selves, either as chiefs (and almost every chief had a son at court) or as
other notables. However it was not necessary to be either a son of a no-
table or a chief in order to be selected as a page, or to be among the
pages selected for chieftaincies. Hence no permanent social barring was
present. Indeed because so many of the sons of chiefs had been killed
either in war or intrigue, it was a common practice of the chiefs to send
their slaves’ sons. If a slave’s son was sent he went as a chief’s or elder’s
son and was, of course, a clan member.53
This relative flexibility in the selection of pages can help explain the
growing missionary input in the process, as missionaries could either
promote youths already converted as potential pages or target those
likely to be selected as pages for more strenuous conversion efforts.
Briefly holding in abeyance questions of personal preferences, and
perhaps even contesting the notion in relation to Mwanga, why would
Mwanga also target these pages as desired sexual objects, if this is
what they were? Given the missionary evidence, which is necessarily
invested in producing Mwanga’s desire as aberrant and private, it is
nevertheless difficult to make the case for sodomy (or some corporeal
intimacy subsumable under that sign) serving some political institu-
tionalized function at the court. Mutesa, Mwanga’s father and imme-
diate predecessor, is not recorded as having any predilection toward
having sexual relations with his pages, though this itself may tell us
nothing. Moreover in 1876, Mutesa executed seventy of his Muslim
pages after they questioned the seriousness of his Islamic faith.54 The
power of the kabaka to execute those who question his authority on
religious grounds is thus not an innovation on Mwanga’s part. Since
the missionaries never reveal what exactly Mwanga did with these
pages (where, when, how often, why?), a set of older practices serving
ritual, religious, initiatory, or fealty-producing functions may possibly
have been recoded by the missionaries under the terms “unnatural
vice,” “shameful passion,” and so on. As Andrew Kiwanuka relates:
The king practised the works of Sodom. Moslems and pagans were pre-
pared to do those things with the king, but the Catholics absolutely re-
fused. For that reason the king began to detest us, and deliberated with
14 AFRICAN SODOMY IN THE MISSIONARY POSITION

the pagans and Moslems about putting us to death. . . . With my own

ears I heard the king utter words of anger, because the young Catholics
refused to sin. I, for one, was often importuned by him, but refused.55
Sodomy is used to signify a huge range of practices across time, cov-
ering almost all imaginable practices except the insertion of the penis
in the vagina when both participating parties are also involved in a
monogamous marriage. It is difficult to know what corporeal intima-
cies were being resignified under the term sodomy.
Contemporaneous observers note absolute loyalty to the person of the
king as a critical Ganda value. Even if these “unnatural passions” were
not a recoding of older practices, it is possible that in the context of Chris-
tian political encroachment, certain corporeal intimacies between the
king and his future chiefs, coded by the missionaries as “vice,” may have
served as more than just idiosyncratic depravity. Indeed, they may have
served as a test of loyalty to Mwanga and to the institution of the kabaka.
Thoonen writes: “Even quite young pages now dared to ‘insult’
[Mwanga] by refusing to comply with certain demands, thereby justify-
ing the taunt of his Muslim courtiers that he was no longer a ‘king.’”56
Even if not a recodification of older practices, “unnatural vice” may have
functioned as a spontaneous attempt to consolidate the threatened au-
tocratic authority of the kabaka, a figure at the center of client patronage
whose authority was so profoundly invested in his person that he could
hardly be said to have had a “personal life” in a recognizably Western
modern sense of the term. Kabakas “were Buganda, a corporal reflection
of the country’s body politic. At succession, they ‘ate’ the country, be-
coming one with it, and they subsequently conducted periodic sacrifices
to replenish their own and the country’s vigor.”57 The kabaka’s symbolic
significance in gendered terms is also relevant here. One of his honorifics
was “the man of all men,” and in his presence other men were to adopt
the bodily greeting postures women used in greeting men.58
Submission to the king’s will was a crucial political principle if the
kabaka was to remain in power under extremely stressful political con-
ditions. Mwanga’s court was rife with reports of the Mahdist threat to
the north, the “eating up of land” by the Germans to the south and
east, and the increasingly visible presence of Catholic and Protestant
missionaries in the immediate vicinity. What better way to test the po-
litical loyalty of your future chiefs than to make them submit to an act
explicitly prohibited by the new religions and perhaps held in some
disapprobation by the old? J. P. Thoonen, writing largely from the per-
spective of the Roman Catholic missions in Buganda, asserts: “As it
was, he found himself, as the year 1885 wore on, constantly thwarted
in his evil designs by his Christian pages led by Joseph Mukasa, his
 AFRICAN SODOMY IN THE MISSIONARY POSITION 15

major domo (katikoro). It was exasperating that here was a conspiracy

which Buganda public opinion forced him to endure in silence, for un-
natural vice was still held an abomination.”59 Yet one of the apostolic
witnesses reveals that after the execution of Mukasa, the status of “un-
natural vice” changed:
Before the death of Joseph, the practice of unnatural vice was the sub-
ject of secret conversations; the king spoke of those things only with his
private servants and with the Moslems, and practised them like one who
steals; but after Joseph’s death they were spoken of in public, and prac-
tised without restraint.60

Of course, this refusal of the king’s demands for “sexual” favors could cut
the other way, too. Resistance to the king’s desires sexual or not, was a
political act, and a declaration of allegiance to authorities other than the
kabaka was no doubt mobilized by various factions at the court for their
own political ends.61 If chastity marked loyalty to Christianity and the
white missionaries, “sodomy” marked an allegiance to the kabaka and
the Ganda state. As another witness in the apostolic proceedings notes:
Among the young men who were put to death for their religion, I have
not known a single one who consented to commit sin with the king. Had
they consented he would have pardoned them, as he pardoned others,
and not have had them killed.62

Love of king and country appears to be a value opposed to the love of

God. The current stakes in my polemical reinterpretation of “sodomy” as
primarily anticolonial resistance are high. In the last ten years, African po-
litical leaders across sub-Saharan Africa, in the name of decolonization,
have vociferously denounced “homosexuality as a white man’s disease”
and as “a decadent Western import.” Most notoriously, Robert Mugabe,
president of Zimbabwe, has claimed among other things that “Homosex-
uality is for whites only and is an anathema to African culture.”63 Alpheus
Naruseb, Minister for Information and Publicity in Namibia, claimed:
It should be noted that most of the ardent supporters of this perverts
(sic) are Europeans who imagine themselves to be the bulwark of civil-
isation and enlightenment. They are not only appropriating foreign ideas
in our society but also destroying the local culture by hiding behind the
facade of the very democracy and human right we have created.64

Similar remarks have been made by Daniel arap Moi, former president
of Kenya.65 The rhetoric surrounding the attempts to form national les-
bian and gay organizations in Swaziland and Zambia has also con-
tained arguments that there is something fundamentally un-African
about same-sex desires and practices.66 In all instances there has been
16 AFRICAN SODOMY IN THE MISSIONARY POSITION

an asserted congruence between what is Christian and what is African.

Ironically, this very set of events I am describing could be mobilized
in support of homophobic African nationalism. Let me suggest half-se-
riously a Mugabean homily about Buganda in 1886: Young African
men would rather die than be sodomized.
Paradoxically in their defense of African authenticity, many of the
players in these debates have reproduced an understanding of sexual-
ity, which, I would argue, is relatively recent and definitively Euro-
pean. This is the understanding of sexuality as part of the private truth
of the person (which, more recently, must also be socially performed),
an innate or acquired set of private desires that is critical in the con-
stitution of personhood.67 This displaces a set of precapitalist determi-
nations of sexuality (codifed in the West as necessarily oppressive),
which have more to do with questions of lineage consolidation, pri-
mary accumulation, and political organization. Religious understand-
ings of homosexuality from prohibition to “love the sinner, hate the
sin” nuance the shifting understanding of homosexuality in terms of
social identity, personhood, and practice. Although I, too, have as-
cribed to this modern understanding of sexuality in writing of
Mwanga’s or Mutesa’s “predilections” and would not deny the place
of such desires in the unfortunate history of the Ganda kingdom, I
maintain that such desires need to be thoroughly historicized.
The work of such historicizing is extremely difficult from within a
set of current discourses that posits sexuality as a kind of ontological
anchor, or in Althusserian parlance as an interpellatory ideological ap-
paratus par excellence. Refiguring Mwanga’s sexual advances to his
pages partially as a response to European encroachment is an attempt
to resist an understanding of sexuality as a matter of personal prefer-
ence or psychological essence or as a necessarily subject-making dis-
course.68 While certain unnamed and perhaps unnameable corporeal
intimacies were the catalyst around the clash of the missionaries and
their converts with the Ganda king, the battle raged around other
questions that we might now call “sexual.”
As Ham Mukasa notes, Mwanga was not averse to transforming
many aspects of Ganda tradition under Christian influence:
The palace of Nalinya (the eldest sister of the Kabaka) of Mutesa com-
prised about forty-five houses, and there were about three hundred and
fifty maid servants. The idea in looking after the Nalinya in this way,
which was not applied to other princesses was to try to keep her chaste.
It was Sekabaka Mwanga who abolished this custom. He asked Rev. Fa-
ther Lourdel whether it was good to keep the Nalinya in that way, and
the Rev. Father said that it was not a Christian thing to enforce any per-
 AFRICAN SODOMY IN THE MISSIONARY POSITION 17

son to be celibate. One must choose for oneself. If one chose marriage
let him or her marry. Therefore Mwanga allowed his Nalinya to get mar-
ried, and he gathered all the princesses and told them how he had abol-
ished the custom of enforced celibacy to the Nalinyas. In this way they
were set free, and his aunt, the Nalinya of Mutesa, who was between
sixty and seventy years, got married to a young man.69

Here, we see that Mwanga was not opposed to the notion of sexual
choice (albeit circumscribed by the notion of “marriage”) as a value
across the board, though it is clearly perceived as a new value and one
attributed to a Christian source. While in this instance some accom-
modation could be reached between Christianity and “tradition” in the
production of a “new tradition,” as the killing of the youths makes
plain, this was not always the case. Another arena, polygamy, also
raised sustained difficulties.
In Light and Darkness in East Africa, a writer for the World Do-
minion Survey Series claims of Mwanga:
But he quickly revealed himself a dissolute profligate, and during the
years 1885 and 1886 made a determined effort to swing the country back
to heathenism. Neither the king nor his chiefs could brook the Christian
requirement of monogamy, though it was being applied with charity and
tact. A deeper cause however was Mwanga’s resolve to make his court
a center of unbridled heathen obscenity.70

Nevertheless, polygamy as a site of resistance to the encroachment of

Christian norms and practices has been recuperable in terms of contem-
porary assertions of cultural authenticity. A hundred years later, even the
World Conference of Bishops of the Anglican church will resolve not to
condemn polygamous unions.71 The question is, what makes polygamy
defensible and certain corporeal intimacies between men (even if only for
kings) indefensible for the extremely hybrid discourses of African tradi-
tion, nationalism, and Christianity? I would speculate that the answer is
political in a fairly narrow sense of the word. Polygamy was reducible to
a sexual institution (i.e., it could be reduced to the sphere of the private
under British policies of Indirect Rule, a site where customary law could
operate, without interfering too much with the smooth running of the
emerging colonial bureaucratic apparatus). “In the British colonial terri-
tories the courts have apparently never taken the view that the relevant
‘repugnancy clauses’ governing the application of native law required
them to withhold legal recognition from the custom of polygamy.”72
This undoubtedly is connected to shared patriarchal values between
the colonizers and colonized. The king’s intimacies with his pages were
not similarly reducible; due to the political institution of kingship, these
18 AFRICAN SODOMY IN THE MISSIONARY POSITION

acts inevitably had some kind of public character, and the absolute
power of the kabaka had to be curtailed in order for colonial gover-
nance to emerge at all. Ideologically, the “sodomy” attribution or rein-
terpretation worked to colonize Ganda cosmology, placing the king on
the human side of the human/divine divide. Rendering the corporeal
intimacies with his pages as sodomy allowed the missionaries to refig-
ure the kabaka as subject to, rather than a subject of, cosmology. Fi-
nally, by recasting these underdescribed intimacies as primarily
“sexual,” the missionaries undermined the Ganda state’s monopoly on
the legitimate use of violence that is central to all state sovereignty.
In making these arguments, I run the risk of defending African ab-
solutism against imperialism in ways that are risky given the present
mobilization of cultural relativism in the post–Cold War era to justify
support for extremely repressive regimes. I consider a book like
Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations73 or the influential
journalism of Robert D. Kaplan,74 who both claim that democracy is
culturally alien to many parts of the world, which may better be
served by brutal dictatorships. In this sense, I remain trapped in the
current impasse of liberalism, believing that the notion of a single set
of norms, which may mask as universal, inevitably reflect specific in-
terests and do violence to human diversity. Simultaneously, I am
aware that arguments in favor of cultural relativism can foster fairly
disastrous results on the ground in terms of justifying the excesses of
ethno-nationalisms and the like. I suspect that it would be very easy
to get a hypothetical consensus between missionaries, colonial ad-
ministrators, postcolonial African leaders, and an organization like
the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission
(IGLHRC) that both Mwanga’s corporeal intimacies with his subjects
and his killing of them constitute human rights violations. However,
I think this would be to miss most of what is interesting and instruc-
tive in this historical event by ignoring the conditions for agency in
this moment, by reducing notions of individuation and community to
a specific historical formation (Euro-American liberal capitalist, for
the want of a shorthand).
The history of Mwanga and his pages prevents easy certainties
about agents and victims, heroes and villains. Mwanga was entirely
prescient of what was at stake in the presence of the missionaries. As
Mackay reported in the CMS Bulletin, Mwanga had the following re-
action on hearing of German encroachments on the coast near Zan-
zibar: “The Germans are coming and I shall be the last native king of
Buganda. After my death the white men will take my country, but as
long as I am alive I will not let them do it.”75 History would prove
 AFRICAN SODOMY IN THE MISSIONARY POSITION 19

Mwanga right, except after protracted struggles and double-crossings,

exile rather than death would be his fate as kabaka.
The kabaka would survive into the colonial era as a ceremonial fig-
ure of sorts. My investment in this narrative is as follows: The events
read somewhere between tragedy and farce. Mwanga, who is belea-
guered, caught in a web of conflicting advice, shrewdly refusing to dis-
tinguish between the English, Germans, French, Anglicans, and
Roman Catholics, tries to harness his corporeal plea-sures for political
ends, a futile if fascinating strategy against the forces of colonial ex-
ploitation. His victims in contrast seem pathetic—silly, heroic boys,
their virginal sphincters tightly clenched while they burn singing to Je-
sus, giving up not only their lives, but their birthrights, their land, and
their future power as chiefs, all for an abstraction they had all known
only for a year or so. I wish to stage Mwanga, retroactively produced
as a pervert and moreover a weak and evil man, as equally heroic, as
someone who fucked (with the full and bizarre semantic range of that
verb) both Christianity and imperialism and ultimately lost.
Simultaneously, without disputing the sincerity of the young con-
verts, one could speculate that Christianity may have been useful to
the young men in providing them with a source of authority for refus-
ing the perhaps unwelcome sexual demands of the kabaka, whatever
form those took. As chapter 3 will make clear, Christianity, while ob-
viously a colonial imposition, has its meaning transformed when used
from below by colonized people either against the colonized, or in this
case against shifting indigenous forms of sovereignty that were possi-
bly experienced as oppressive.
First, I hope to have suggested the overdetermined nature of repre-
sentations of events in Buganda in 1885–86 and to have sketched some
of the factors influencing these overdeterminations, as well as possible
lines for selective reimaginings. Of course, I am also methodologically in
a missionary position of sorts. If the missionaries performed an act of
metropolitan recoding of Mwanga’s corporeal intimacies, signifying them
as “sodomy,” I am also performing a metropolitan (albeit disguised as
nativist) recoding of sodomy as primary anticolonial resistance. This re-
coding is done through the protocols of history—event, narrative, and se-
quence. However, I do not claim to be writing history. This recoding
could also have been accomplished using the protocols of anthropology,
and there are key anthropological moments in my text. Since Africans
tend to be rendered more frequently as the objects of anthropology for
reasons connected with ongoing investments in primordialism and the
siting of difference elsewhere, historical protocols seemed to offer a less
compromised resistance to the axiomatics of imperialism.76
20 AFRICAN SODOMY IN THE MISSIONARY POSITION

Second, I hope that the contemporary stakes in revisiting these

events in the history of colonial East Africa are legible. Corporeal inti-
macies similar to those practiced by Mwanga and his pages, along with
the forms of identity that these practices have produced, are being
claimed as Western cultural imperialism by many African leaders. I of-
fer the reminder that it was precisely these practices that were stamped
out by an earlier wave of European imperialism. This does not mean
that I am calling Mwanga a homosexual or saying that homosexuality
is African. I present this analysis of clashing and overdetermined sig-
nifying regimes both as a place where European discourses of devel-
opment (Christian and evolutionary) in relation to race and sex find
embodiment and as a place where they are exceeded. While Pope
Benedict XV, in a kind of affirmative action avant la lettre, beatified
twenty-two of the executed pages, and my recoding of events has im-
bued “unnatural vice” with political rationality, and one could imag-
ine the events as the plot for a Rider Haggard novel, it is clear that
martyrdom, native resistance, and Victorian melodrama are all insuf-
ficient frames for understanding the last kabaka to rule Buganda.
 Chapter 2

DECOLONIZING THE B O DY
The African and African American in Wole Soyinka’s
The Interpreters

Questions of black masculinity (particularly, the sexuality of black mas-

culinity) have been central to understanding processes of decolonization
since Frantz Fanon. My first chapter outlined ways these questions might
have been relevant to colonizing enterprises. This chapter analyzes Wole
Soyinka’s first novel, The Interpreters (1965), to speculate on questions of
race, sex, masculinity, and political economy. This analysis shows how a
novel written in the throes of decolonization and immediately before a
catastrophic civil war, well before the terms queerness or queer theory had
any political or critical purchase, imagines the ways in which problems
of racialized human embodiment, economic exploitation, and subjective
desires that we may call sexual can be represented in narrative form.
In imagining bodies in decolonization, the novel ponders what mas-
culinity means in relation to key analytic and descriptive variables. In
this chapter, I read the sexuality of black masculinity in terms of its re-
lation to disembodied presences—ghosts, visions, gods; racialized
femininity; the problem of “tribal” or precolonial legacy—in order to
pose this question: How does diasporic homosexuality in the charac-
ter of Joe Golder inform the novel’s struggle to imagine the sexuality
of black masculinity under decolonization?
In 1965, The Interpreters stages a version of the “no homosexuality
in African culture” debate that will follow a series of pronouncements
by 1990s African presidents, with much more attention to the mutu-
ally constitutive categories of race, gender, and sexuality under condi-
tions of decolonization and postcoloniality.1 The novel appears
centrally concerned with relating “homosexuality” to “homophobia”
in the context of Africa in decolonization through a series of displace-
ments and diffusions of both terms.
Let me begin with a brief argument for the utility of literary close
reading to broach questions of sex, race, and decolonization. In this
context, all three terms stand as necessary abstractions that must risk
reification as they attempt to describe and explain an overwhelming
diversity of forms of desire, embodiment, and individual and collective
experience (a necessary but dangerous way of worlding a world). This

21
22 DECOLONIZING THE BODY

is no doubt a way of performing, and hopefully displacing, an anxiety

around the use of what is arguably the most historically narrow and
conservative strategy in the arsenal of English departments.
Nevertheless, imaginative fiction, as a site for investigation of ques-
tions of race, sex, and decolonization, is useful for me because it allows
the horizons of the imaginable to become visible. In fiction, one can find
an archive for the complex lived and felt experience of never completely
determining social abstractions. When I teach close reading, I work to
instill in my students the idea of responsible reading as an ethical activ-
ity, in which readers may work to being othered by the text by watch-
ing their enabling abstractions and assumptions come under pressure.
At least they should begin to understand their bewilderment as an invi-
tation to imagine reading competencies they cannot have without some
kind of self-destabilization. That said, I am often disturbed by the self-
consolidating intransigence of the “I am so glad I am an American” re-
sponse of otherwise good students to postcolonial African material.2
On a second ethical tack, since literary works are definitionally pub-
lic and intended to be read, as one moves across the neoimperial field
of knowledge production, reading the literary allows for the possibil-
ity of less-invasive forms of entry into worlds that are not one’s own.
The very fictionality of fiction, the fact that it stages representations
for public consumption by diversely imagined audiences, can become
an invitation to the scholar. Many other possible scholarly formations
and positionings also exist that pay heed to the notion of an ethical en-
try (native anthropology and scholar/activist, to name two). However,
they tend to get off the ground by blurring the subject/object distinc-
tion in neoimperial knowledge production.
In literary analysis, the object of study has already issued an invita-
tion, mediated through the global capitalist exchanges of publishing,
printing, translation, marketing, distribution, and consumption. More-
over, if the literary, in Gayatri Spivak’s words, offers readers the experi-
ence of the “singular and unverifiable” in entering the emotionally and
politically charged and overdetermined terrain of “race” and “sex,” with
their often impossibly painful genealogies and histories, the stakes be-
come lower. Learning can slow down and deepen, and mistakes need
not be fatal.
Wole Soyinka’s first novel, The Interpreters, is published in 1965, five
years after the independence of Nigeria, and two years before the Bi-
afran war of secession causes many Nigerians to question the viability
of “Nigeria” as an entity. It is in many ways a novel of decolonization
par excellence, placing at its center a group of characters (an artist, an
engineer, a preacher, a journalist, a visiting history professor/musician)
 DECOLONIZING THE BODY 23

attempting to make sense of this simultaneously new and fragmenting

nation. In this national frame, they encounter nepotism, corruption,
and opportunity both within themselves and in their immediate social
and political contexts.
While the novel marks a profound engagement with its historical
context, it is not entirely reducible to it. The novel is also centrally en-
gaged with problems and questions of much deeper temporalities, race,
myth, religion, and the central focus in this chapter, diverse notions of
human sexualized embodiment. I understand the task of Soyinka’s
eponymous interpreters as one of reading culture, civilization, and hu-
man value(s) off and onto sexualized and raced human bodies.
The Interpreters is a novel of almost Dickensian social sweep in both
personnel and milieu as it seeks to represent massive class and ethnic
diversity. The narrative establishes a set of often-satirical connections
between Sir Derinola, chairman of the board, to Noah, an attractive
street youth3 accused of theft and then rescued by an entrepreunerial
church led by an albino man, who claims to have been resurrected
from the dead. Yet most of the narrative radiates out from a group of
well-educated young people, some of whom have been educated
abroad and inhabit a social and economic landscape that bears the fea-
tures of a nascently prosperous Bohemian milieu. They are artists,
journalists, academics, and musicians, with a token electrical engineer
thrown into the mix. These characters take great pleasure in exposing
and mocking the foibles of the professional classes and mediate the
various social connections through the novel.
Both through the careful delineation of the novel’s cultural milieu
and through its title, the cultural critic is already implicated in The In-
terpreters’s satire before she or he has written a word. Since the novel
engages multiple genres of writing, ranging from a Kafkaesque absurd-
ity in the description of Sekoni’s power plant through more straightfor-
ward social satire in the academic party scenes (which in certain ways
give us a postcolonial preview of the academic novels of David Lodge)4
to Sagoe’s hungover hallucinatory visions of Sir Derin emerging from
Dehinwa’s closet, a narrative summary can only scratch the surface of
the novel’s representational stakes. However, it is probably essential for
readers who still have the joy of reading The Interpreters ahead of them.
In a third person narrative voice, in an episodic structure, with multiple
digressions and philosophical speculations, the following events unfold.
The novel opens during a rainstorm, in a nightclub with a leaking
roof. Readers meet Sagoe (a journalist), Dehinwa (his girlfriend, who
works in the civil service), and Bandele and Egbo (two young men).
The story quickly jumps to a canoe in a creek where Egbo revisits the
24 DECOLONIZING THE BODY

site of his parents’ death. The juxtaposition establishes Egbo as a char-

acter with an unresolved relation to his past in ways that the old chest-
nut of “tradition versus modernity” is going to struggle to explain.
Quickly, the narrative moves back to the nightclub and then to Ijioha,
the village where Sekoni (nicknamed Sheikh) built a perfectly func-
tioning electricity power plant. However, the power plant never
opened as it was more lucrative to write it off.5 This scenario repre-
sents the most blatant corruption in the novel and emblematizes neo-
colonial development with a kind of tragic humor. Sekoni ends up in
a mental hospital.
The novel’s next significant narrative event has Dehinwa taking Sa-
goe back to her apartment in Lagos in the early hours of the morning,
where her mother and aunt have unexpectedly arrived from the coun-
tryside. Monica Fayesi (an English woman married to the buffoonish
Dr. Fayesi) then embarrasses her husband at an academic cocktail
party. We flash back to a hungover Sagoe waking up in Dehinwa’s
apartment, where he has a vision of Sir Derinola, chairman of the
board, emerging from Dehinwa’s closet. Sagoe then recalls his inter-
view for his journalist job, which had to go through several levels of
petty bureaucratic approval. Sagoe then outlines his scatological phi-
losophy of voidancy for the office clerk, Matthias.6
Sekoni returns from the lunatic asylum and begins working on a
sculpture. Joe Golder (a homosexual African American visiting history
professor and part-time singer), who is sitting for Kola’s painting of the
pantheon of Yoruba gods as Erinle (an animal spirit god), wishes to buy
the sculpture. At Sir Derin’s funeral, Sagoe watches and half-heartedly
helps an albino man rescue a young street youth, called Noah, from a
mob intent on killing him for supposed theft. Egbo becomes obsessed
with a courtesan, Simi, but begins a relationship with a nameless fe-
male student, whom he takes out to a group of rocks on a river, which
is his place of most private refuge. Sagoe visits Bandele at the latter’s
university apartment, where an odd German pretending to be an Amer-
ican is hanging about. They attend a cocktail party where a drunk Sa-
goe causes a scandal by throwing a plastic pear (part of the wall
decorations) out into the garden. Sekoni is killed in a car accident.
The albino man appears at the bar, seeking out Sagoe, and asks him
to attend a church service. He explains that his new name is Lazarus and
that he died; when he came back to life he was no longer black. Sagoe
plans on writing an article about Lazarus and his church for his news-
paper. Joe Golder meets Sagoe, invites him back to his apartment, and
then invites him to spend the night. Sagoe, however, rebuffs Golder’s ad-
vances. Golder eventually drives Sagoe back to Bandele’s apartment.
 DECOLONIZING THE BODY 25

Bandele develops an erotic interest in Monica Fayesi and bonds with her
mother-in-law by making fun of Dr. Fayesi at another satirically ren-
dered academic lunch party. We are then given the brief history of Kola’s
friendship with Golder. Sekoni’s sculptures are to be posthumously ex-
hibited and Kola decides to unveil his “Pantheon” at the exhibit.
Egbo and Kola are lost on the creek near the site of Egbo’s parents’
death when an oil barrel bursts into flame and illuminates Lazarus and
Noah in front of the church. Noah runs away. They rescue Lazarus. It
turns out that Simi has also posed for Kola’s “Pantheon.” Egbo, driving
Simi to Ibadan, sees the fugitive Noah by the side of the road and of-
fers him a lift. They all end up in Kola’s studio, where Egbo has brought
a ram to be sacrificed in honor of the exhibit. At the studio, they dis-
cover Joe Golder, who has sneaked in, very much against the artist’s
wishes, to look at the painting before its unveiling. This is an important
scene for a consideration of the ethics of interpretation; looking seems
to require an invitation, and Golder violates this requirement.
Egbo and Simi leave Noah alone with Joe Golder. At 2 A.M., Bandele
wakes up Simi and Egbo to announce that Noah has fallen out of
Golder’s balcony under suspicious circumstances. They drive to the
studio where Lazarus is also staying and inform him of Noah’s death.
The novel’s final scene takes place after the exhibit opens at a nearby
theater where Joe Golder is singing. Golder sings the classic “Some-
times I feel like a motherless child.”7 At the recital’s interval, Egbo
learns through the gossip of self-important professors at the university
that the nameless woman he had an affair with is pregnant and not al-
lowed to return to the university. Bandele curses them “I hope you all
live to bury your daughters.” The novel ends with the bell announc-
ing the end of the interval. Egbo watches Simi walking toward him.
The narrative moves through a set of coincidences within a social
circle. Although many of the characters display features that almost
demand allegorical readings, they cannot be reduced to such readings.
The two partially deracinated male figures, Lazarus and Joe Golder,
are of particular interest. Lazarus, the founder of a Messianic black
church, learns that the price of resurrection is becoming white like an
albino. He rescues a young black man, Noah, from a street mob, the
latter later fleeing from him in the face of an oil-barrel-induced fire. Joe
Golder, the African American history lecturer and singer, sits for the
painting of a Yoruba hunting and stream spirit god, has powerful sex-
ual inclinations toward men, is interested in buying African art, and is
implicated in the death of the same young black man.
One could produce the following homilies about these figures, reading
them as emblematic of conditions of embodiment under decolonization.
26 DECOLONIZING THE BODY

Lazarus: The paradox of indigenous Christianity robs subjects of racial

authenticity (Lazarus becoming an albino upon his resurrection); it may
help in allowing select individuals to escape collective injustice (Noah is
saved from the mob) but cannot hold in the face of the dangers of foreign
economic exploitation (the burning oil barrel). It is important to remem-
ber that Lazarus also functions significantly in two of the novel’s religious
cosmologies. In a Christian tradition, he is the man Christ raises from the
dead. In certain Yoruba traditions, as an albino, he would be sacred, along
with hunchbacks, dwarfs, and pregnant women to Orisanla and would
have to be buried by his priests. However, the specter of the non-Nigerian
reader who has nothing like a mother-tongue intimacy with Yoruba mat-
ters begins to haunt me here.8
Joe Golder: Homosexuality is a powerful metaphor for the degra-
dations inflicted by American investment (both libidinal and cul-
tural) in African products and bodies. While this location of
homosexuality in a foreigner’s body may mark a homophobic dis-
placement, sustained attention to the relationships between the
novel’s male characters may reveal that displacing homosexuality
may equally be a way of displacing homophobia. The questions
raised by The Interpreters’s bald plot, previously outlined, are com-
plicated by the novel’s self-conscious staging of the problems in artis-
tic and cultural representation through the figures of Kola (the artist)
and Sagoe (the journalist) and the foregrounding of the cultural prod-
ucts they produce (paintings) and don’t produce (articles). The char-
acters’ philosophical and historical ruminations add another layer to
the complexity of the novel’s problem of racialized and sexualized
human embodiment.

DEHINWA’S CLOSET: CROSS-DRESSED GHOSTS AND THE BETRAYAL

OF NATIONAL LIBERATION

The following scene most baldly and satirically engages a set of sexual-
ized and gendered metaphors for the emerging failures of decoloniza-
tion. Dehinwa brings Sagoe to her apartment very early one morning
after a night of drinking and encounters her aunt and her mother up
from the countryside waiting. The next morning, the hungover Sagoe
hallucinates that he sees Sir Derinola, naked except for a brassiere,
emerging from Dehinwa’s bedroom closet, a piece of furniture he had
previously reviled on aesthetic grounds:
The obsessing furniture was heart-shaped. Cheap wood overlaid with
varnish that was perpetually running. There was a hatbox on it this
 DECOLONIZING THE BODY 27

morning, and he swung his concentration from his sweaty head onto the
hatbox. It brought relief. Curiously the hatbox made him think of Sir Some-
one and his brows were knotted as he tried to remember him. . . . Aha Sir
Derinola, that was his chairman’s name. He turned his head sideways at
the hatbox and winked at it. . . .
Salaam, Sir Derinola, Salaam. Oh, but you are a lizard, Sir Derin,
and your skin is harmattan scabby, though you turn on it eternal
faucets of oil.
It became obvious that this was the moment to contain the dead
knight . . . Oh, he was dead at last, hat and wig, Sir Derinola was
dead . . . . And Sagoe remembered news photographs of Sir Derinola
in a top-hat, when he strolled through St. James’s Park to receive his
knighthood from the queen. . . . And Sagoe chuckled to himself, re-
calling now how Sir Derin was nicknamed The Morgue. . . . The hat-
box stayed in place but the wardrobe door pressed outwards, very
very slowly, and the good knight himself came out, naked except for
a pair of Dehinwa’s brassieres over his chest. . . .
“Sir Derin, what do you want? You look indecent!”
The Morgue was solemn. “Oh you are wrong. You are wrong, sir. I
take it you do not mean that, don’t you. In fact, it is only a worm.”
“I protest, Sir Derin. Do all board chairmen behave like this? And to
think you were once even a judge.”
“Don’t remind me. These politicians, you can never trust them.” . . .
Sagoe was obstinate. “You will have to go back. At least put on some-
thing. Cover yourself. Or get rid of that worm clinging to your groin.”
“What use would clothes be to me now, young man?”
Sagoe nodded. “That is true, Sir Derin, you never had much use for
clothes.”
“No, I did not and even now I cannot change my principles. The cloth
does not make the man. Do you realize the newspapers still quote me
on that?” . . .
“But you see, you cannot keep a good man down. I got my knight-
hood. That is why I keep the brassiere on.”
Sagoe confessed that he did not see the connection.
“For the medals, young man. The medals. They pin something on
you when they give you a knighthood you know. And I do keep the
knighthood.” (Soyinka 1996, 63–65)

Readers are in the landscape of decolonization’s emasculation of

African men in a comic vein here. One should be careful not to overread
Sir Derinola “coming out of the closet,” as there are no other indications
in the novel that this phrase means declaring one’s homosexuality,
what it would have meant in the North Atlantic world at the time of
writing. At the same time, the sophisticated narrative voice of The In-
terpreters can only feign innocence in moments of convenience.
28 DECOLONIZING THE BODY

Sir Derin enters the boudoir of the afterlife in Sagoe’s imagination,

naked except for a pair of Dehinwa’s brassieres, denying the anatom-
ical marker of his masculinity as a worm. He is, in multiple ways,
quite literally the ghost of a man—self-castrating, all shadow, and no
substance. His anarchic appearance when stripped to his essence is
rendered ironic by the repetition of the bon mot of his fame: “The
cloth does not make the man.” The implication is neither do medals,
themselves markers of metropolitan recognition, signs of achieve-
ment that were valuable to the former colonial power, but that now,
pinned to the brassiere of the late chairman of the board’s ghost, are
nothing short of absurd. The spectacle of the cross-dressed ghost
arouses no desire. Sir Derinola suggests that the upwardly mobile
comprador African under colonialism comes out of the closet as a
feminized, emasculated ghost. The specter of the homosexual almost
raises his head as a way to figure corruption and castration in decol-
onizing Nigeria in Sagoe’s hallucination. This figuration will be ex-
plored in a much more embodied and complicated way in the person
of Joe Golder.
The satire of the scene’s cross-dressing elements may function dif-
ferently for readers with literacy in Yoruba cosmology. In a virtuoso
reading of cross-dressing in Yoruba priestly initiation rituals, J. Lorand
Matory argues:
Instructed by the semiotics of dress itself, we must assume that not all
crossings dressed up in “gender” are essentially about men and women.
Indeed, the overwhelming authority of men in a cult that valorizes “bride-
liness” in its priests seems to lie in the fact that transvestites are the most
permanent emblems of the god’s own dressing across boundaries—in the
bodies of human beings.9
This secular, postcolonial, white African critic can only glimpse a glim-
mer of this possible reading in another’s mother-tongue with the aid
of a careful anthropological study. Sir Derin in his brassiere may mark
the atrophy of older ritual orders as much as he can embody the bank-
ruptcy of the postcolonial. The Interpreters is written in English for
readers of English, but there is undoubtedly much more for those read-
ers who can touch the textures and contradictions of multiple symbolic
orders—the resonances of which defy easy translation.

A WOMAN DANCING: KURTZ’S MISTRESS IN DECOLONIZATION

If the meanings of homosexuality in the novel are seen as historically

and geographically overdetermined, and incipiently open to allegori-
 DECOLONIZING THE BODY 29

cal reading, the novel is careful to suggest that the meanings of its
defining opposite—heterosexuality—are equally neither natural nor
self-evident.10 The novel’s imagining of male heterosexual desire in
the throes of decolonization reveals a form of desire inflected by prob-
lems of colonial histories in unsettling ways. Early in the novel, well
before Kola draws Golder as Erinle, Kola draws a woman dancing in a
nightclub.
Only then did Egbo see the original herself alone on the dance floor. None
of them, except obviously Kola and Sekoni, had seen her take possession
of the emptied floor. She had no partner, being wholly self-sufficient. She
was immense. She would stand out anywhere, dominating. She filled the
floor with her body, dismissing her surroundings with a natural air of su-
perfluity. And she moved slowly, intensely, wrapped in the song and the
rhythm of the rain. And she brought a change again in the band, who now
began to play to her to drape her in the lyric and the mood. . . .
But first Kola’s sketch would intrude, a transparency stuck on his
retina. . . . And she was still by herself, her feet in water, her shimmer-
ing velvet wrapper with designs of a past fashion rage—Owolebi—
trailed irreverently, soggy, by a corner. So Egbo called her Owolebi,
murmuring the name again and again . . . Till Dehinwa overheard and
cried, “That’s it. I was trying to remember what that design was called.”
. . . She should have, Egbo decided, iyun around her ankles, antimony
rings on her breasts and light tooth marks, a full circle of flat valleys
sunk in antimony. And on nights like this, to the clang of iron bells and
the summons of shaved drums, even old women opened their wrinkled
thighs to heaven. The dancer turned her head and her brows arched a
rainbow and her hills and runnels were bared clearly to his sight.
“. . . She is revoltingly fat that’s all. Why, I can almost hear her but-
tocks squelch, like these oranges in Kola’s drawing. . . .”
“You know a white woman that size would be wholly amorphous.
Quite revolting. But black women eh . . . .”
“. . . I have seen both colours on their home ground and I know what
I am talking about. That woman for instance. She is ample but she isn’t
surplus. She uses every ounce of her flesh and she is feminine.”
. . . And Egbo, his eyes all the time on the dancer: “I would put my
head between her breasts and smother my ears in them. And let even
God Almighty shout ‘Egbo’ and I’ll reply, ‘Call back later, can’t hear a
word you’re saying.’ ”
Sekoni, instantly horrified, began to struggle, “N-no, really you must
not. A woman . . . she is the body of religion. T-t-to bring her in c-c-con-
flict. . . .” (Soyinka 1996, 25)

Egbo sees the sketch before the original, yet the original is “wholly self-
sufficient,” then Kola’s sketch “would intrude,” “a transparency stuck on
his retina.” This remarkably self-conscious staging of the problems of
30 DECOLONIZING THE BODY

perception and representation in a key scene of male heterosexual desire

in a public place prepares the reader for the following conversation. Egbo
adds to Kola’s sketch: “She should have, Egbo decided, iyun around her
ankles, antimony rings on her breasts and light tooth marks, a full circle
of flat valleys sunk in antimony,” but this is no simple addition. Egbo’s
vision transforms the woman’s ornamentation in significant terms. He
gives her the name of the design of her velvet wrapper—Owolebi—a past
fashion rage, trailing irreverently, “soggy by a corner.”
Like the band, who seeks to “drape her in the lyric and the mood,”
Egbo also seeks to reclothe her in the accoutrements of something
older, something deeper, something other than the transient costumes
of commodified modernity—“a past fashion rage.” Why name the
woman for the past fashion craze, while simultaneously locating her
value and interest in a set of “traditionalizing” tropes? This is a mas-
culine investment. Dehinwa, the only named female character present,
is more concerned with remembering the name of the past fashion
craze. Kola, in contrast, in his sketch, renders the woman absurd. “He
had planted a goitre on her neck and encased her feet in Wellington
boot canoes or perhaps it was a platypus.”11
A range of familiar tropes for representing femininity are embodied
in the dancing woman. The passage evinces the classic metaphors of
the female body as land to be conquered or liberated in the colonial and
the decolonizing imagination, respectively—“her brows arched a rain-
bow and her hills and runnels were bared clearly to his sight.” But the
passage complicates this view of femininity’s place in decolonization.
A libidinal economy is not a precise analogy for a political one, but sex-
ual desire is denaturalized and historicized in Egbo’s fantasy of re-
clothing and unclothing the woman. The dancing woman is not only
like the land; she is more explicitly and favorably contrasted to a white
woman. The terms of the comparison suggest that this particular
woman is not easily rendered representative of anything other than her-
self. “She is ample but she isn’t surplus. She uses every ounce of her
flesh and she is feminine.” Insofar as the scene can depict the woman’s
desire, it is an autoerotic one; she dances, caught up in her own sen-
sual rhythms. It is this self-possession that excites Egbo’s desire, and it
is a desire to lose himself, not to hear even God calling his name.
This scene of male scopic desire, the fantasy of redemptive feminine
plenitude, avoids sentimentality, partly through a recognition of the
potential grotesqueness of its object, both in Kola’s sketch and through
the general bawdiness of the bar’s milieu. What besides a necessary
singularity of desire may the scene emblematize? What ideological for-
mations of African masculinity under decolonization may be general-
ized? Many possible readings emerge. In loosely psychoanalytic terms,
 DECOLONIZING THE BODY 31

Egbo seeks to rephallicize himself in the face of colonialism’s emascu-

lation of African men by merging with the massiveness of the dancing
African woman, who is “traditionalized” in his imagination as recov-
ered lost land and history. Thus, this desire, while seeking a very dif-
ferent object, shares a structure with Fanon’s colonized man who
desires the settler’s wife.12 However, reclaiming one’s masculinity by
losing one’s personal and “tribal” name, Egbo, in the embrace, the be-
coming one with a woman, who is reclothed in metaphors of land and
the costume of the countryside, is at best paradoxical. If readers refute
the liberal consignment of sexual desire to the realm of the private (and
the very publicness of the scene—the rain-soaked bar, the circulation
of Kola’s drawing, the discussion of the men—encourage us to do so),
the political valences of Egbo’s desire become visible and contradic-
tory. Having established himself as person of a variety of sexual
appetites—“I have seen both colours on their home ground and I know
what I am talking about”—Egbo’s desire for the dancing woman pro-
duces the “heterosexual” African “traditionalized” embrace as a kind
of joyful self-extinction.13

EGBO’S CREEK: LEGACY, MODERNITY, MASCULINITY

If, as the previous scene of fantasy suggests, male African heterosexu-

ality struggles to accommodate itself to commodified modernity and
turns to a geographically (from bar to countryside) as well as histori-
cally displaced self-sufficient African femininity for self-obliterating
solace, what kinds of social continuity can The Interpreters envisage?
Egbo remembers being brought to his grandfather and feeling the con-
tact of a terrifying virility and a redeeming grace in the touch of his
grandfather’s hands. Those hands seem to penetrate his skull and
touch the very bumps and crevices of his brain.

“I’ve brought your son.” And Egbo could remember the sudden trans-
formation of the ancient strong man, his laughter of menace changed to
true delight and a sudden incomprehensible strength which lifted him
clean above the dwarfs and onto his knees. Egbo felt again the contact
of a terrifying virility, of two hands which felt him all over the face and
head, the head especially, of fingers which pressed beneath the hair and
into the skull as if it would feel into the bumps and crevices of his brain.
He knew and despised the age which sought to mutilate his begin-
nings. . . . If the fight were only political, nothing more. But Egbo had
felt a virile essence, a redeeming grace in the old man and that existence.
And this was being destroyed, he knew, and by cozening half-men who
came bloated on empty wind. There is also my pride of race Egbo said,
32 DECOLONIZING THE BODY

I am after all an Egbo. Egbo had begun to wonder and to set the warlord
of the creeks against the dull grey file cabinet faces of the Foreign office.
Affecting innocence, Kola asked, “How many wives has the old man?”
For a moment Egbo was deceived and then he laughed. “I’ve admit-
ted that’s a powerful consideration. . . . Just think, not only to be able
to fill my house with women but to have it regarded as befitting and
manly. I don’t know how many he has but I won’t be skimpy, I tell you.”
...
“Oh I’ve dreamt of me and a household like that dozens of times.
And the future prospects for the country’s traditions. By example to con-
vert the world.”
“You are the first genuine throw-back of this generation.”
“On the contrary. Polygamy is an entirely modern concept. Oh I don’t
deny the practice is old, but whoever thought it was polygamy then. . . .
What choice, I ask myself is there between the ugly mudskippers on
this creek and the raucous toads of our sewage ridden ports? What dif-
ference?”
“None.”
“That is the answer I dread to find if I yield to temptation and reclaim
my place here. None. Sometimes I go so far that I say, ‘What is my grand-
father but a glorified bandit?’ Only that doesn’t help either. Sooner a glo-
rified bandit than a loud-mouthed slave.” (Soyinka 1996, 10–14)

Egbo’s parents are dead, marking a rupture in the generational story.

Egbo therefore reads his grandfather, a chief or local big man, as an al-
most god-like personage. Yet the wider historical rupture between the
rural, tribal world of his grandfather (the passage deeply troubles both
those assignations) and the modern world of the city is revealed as al-
most illusory. “What choice, I ask myself is there between the ugly
mudskippers on this creek and the raucous toads of our sewage ridden
ports? What difference?” “None.” Yet the metaphor is not innocent.
Toads eat mudskippers.
Historical time as lived in individual life stories through continuity
or rupture has a difficult time getting started in this conversation be-
tween Egbo and Kola. This problem is staged in terms of sex and alien-
ated labor. If Egbo “goes back” and reclaims his place in his
grandfather’s world, he will have lots of wives. As Kola implies,
polygamy is the marker of traditional masculinity, one of the manifes-
tations of the grandfather’s terrifying virility that Egbo feels directly,
without the mediation of a female body. Egbo is quick to refute this:
“On the contrary. Polygamy is an entirely modern concept. Oh I don’t
deny the practice is old, but whoever thought it was polygamy then.”
The idea of return to the old is problematized because this very notion
of tradition is seen as both a production and function of modernity.14
 DECOLONIZING THE BODY 33

This exchange anticipates and qualifies the arguments made in Hobs-

bawm and Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition (1983).
While arguments about the modern invention of tradition tend to in-
vite a kind of debunking, a wholesale acceptance of the invention of
tradition argument ignores the deep internalization of “tradition”: the
fact on the ground that “tradition” is a route to subjectivity in decolo-
nization, as Egbo’s fantasy makes clear here. Authenticity or historical
truth becomes besides the point. Egbo’s shrewd distinction between
polygamy as practice and category marks the rupture of invention,
while noting the sustaining power of authenticity. This distinction also
recalls the classic native informant’s response to the anthropologist’s
search for cultural authenticity and difference: “I would not have
thought about it if you had not brought it up.” Egbo, in this scene, is a
kind of anthropologist of himself, and the novel once again foregrounds
the centrality of questions of interpretation: their historical determi-
nants, their ethical possibilities, and their inseparability from desires.
Tradition, invented or not, does not so much dupe as seduce. Egbo
will “yield to temptation” to reclaim his place here. The sexual spaces
of tradition can only be brought into representation in the mode of
speculative fantasy, as in the previously discussed scene with the
dancing woman. Egbo does not know how many wives his grandfa-
ther has, and the experiences of both grandfather and wives are not
represented in The Interpreters, implying that this world is closed to
our urban protagonists, in much the same way that the world of “the
exclusive coteries in Lagos and the Emirs and their little boys” will be
seen as off-limits to Joe Golder.
The question of alienated labor—a concept associated with the
emergence of capitalism and therefore on the modernity side of the
tradition/modernity dyad—in this context pushes the paradox fur-
ther. Tradition is a set of practices associated with a stultifying same-
ness, unreflexive collective repetition in the developmentalist terms
of the tradition/modernity dyad. In many ways decolonization,
understood itself at least in part as a modernizing project, is seen as
more enabling of masculine individualism. The warlord of the creeks
is a powerful romantic fantasy in the face of the homogenizing dull-
gray file-cabinet faces of the foreign office. Modernity emasculates
through bureaucratization. The old man is a law unto himself, which
is why his grandson can call him “a glorified bandit.” However, this
is a modern judgment, an ethnocentric recoding of shifting forms of
Egbo sovereignty. In opposition to “the glorified bandit,” there are
“loud-mouthed slaves” and “cozening half-men who came bloated on
empty wind.” With whom is Egbo to side?
34 DECOLONIZING THE BODY

Egbo sees his “Egboness,” what he calls his “pride of race,” as both
something prior and subsequent to his person. He hated those who
would “mutilate his beginnings” and claims that “I am after all an
Egbo,” (italics mine) but what kind of man is he to be after his begin-
nings and before after all. Masculine subjectivity caught in the inter-
stitial times of decolonization appears to have nowhere to go, trapped
in the revealing phrase “future prospects of the country’s traditions.”
The warlord of the creeks cannot convert the dull-gray file-cabinet
faces, never mind the whole world. The satirically rendered fantasy
that tradition contains the power of bringing about change in the form
of conversion adds complexity to the besieged dynamism experienced
by Egbo in working out whether or not his grandfather’s life represents
possible options for his own life.15

KOLA’S PANTHEON: AFRICAN AMERICAN HOMOSEXUAL DIVINITY

AND CORRUPTION

If Egbo struggles to imagine the form of his life as an African man under
decolonization, another key male character, Joe Golder, initially appears
to experience similar struggles with a very different set of identity vari-
ables. He is African American, not African; sexually interested in men,
not women; an aspiring artist/academic, not a conflicted bureaucrat; but
he must nonetheless negotiate a difficult transition from a past mediated
by historical trauma to a present of well nigh impossible sexual desires,
in a complex series of self and social interpretations. This section will ar-
gue that questions of sexuality, and in particular homosexuality, provide
key narrative and conceptual tropes for tracking back and forth between
and within the realms of history and what might be called memory or
philosophy or desire in the problem of self-fashioning.
A key conceit in the novel brilliantly stages the problem of historical
interpretation. Kola, a painter, is working on a painting of a pantheon of
Yoruba gods throughout the novel. The painting is unveiled in the penul-
timate scene. Various characters are asked by Kola to sit as models for the
portraits of the gods and to thereby act as intermediaries between the liv-
ing and the dead, the present and the past, the historical and the eternal.
Joe Golder, an African American man (though revealingly the narra-
tive refers to him as “three quarters white,” with a libidinal investment
in both blackness and men), is asked to pose for the portrait of Erinle,
an animal spirit. Golder’s whiteness may be a factor in his selection to
pose for an animal god, offering an almost too neat decolonizing rever-
sal of the place of race in colonial negotiations of the human/animal
 DECOLONIZING THE BODY 35

spectrum. Erinle, as far as an outsider can read his place in Yoruba cos-
mology, is a complex figure, whose personality and significance has im-
portant geographic and historical variances. These may be contradictory
or may be multilayered in similar ways to Golder’s composite history
and identifications. Erinle is an animal spirit, a hunting deity, a god of
streams, and, in some historical (and presentist) accounts of religious
rituals, the originator of the ijala style of chanting.16
Nineteenth-century European accounts suggest a certain gender am-
bivalence. At mid-century, Erinle was worshipped as a male orisa at La-
gos and as a goddess at Otta.17 In a more general discussion of the
contradictory nature of Yoruba divinity, Abdulrazak Gurnah claims that
“Golder models for Erinle in Kola’s Pantheon, for Erinle is bisexual, a
killer and a healer.”18 It would appear that Golder’s racial ambivalence,
his sexuality, and his membership of the African diaspora suggest more
congruence than contradiction in Kola’s choice of him as the literal model
for Erinle. In the depiction of Golder as Erinle, we may see the seeds of
an African American/African/Nigerian/Yoruba cosmopolitanism.
Kola ends up using one of the embodied signs of Golder’s racial am-
bivalence—his skin—as both the subject and material of the painting in
a scene saturated with crosscurrents of identification and desire. The
artist, subject, and object of the painting dramatize the difficulties of rep-
resenting desiring male bodies in the times and spaces of decolonization:

Joe Golder turned up in the studio one day with crinkled newsprint stuck
raggedly all over his face, rewards of afternoon exposure to the burning
sun. “Just what masquerade do you think you are?” Kola, near hysterical
with anger.
“Your sun is more potent than I thought.”
Kola threw aside the palette in despair. “Do you really think that I
will paint your face in that condition?” And he stopped, because even
as he spoke, he was seeing Golder’s face more intensively, seeing the dif-
ferent fierceness in its new character. When Joe Golder was ugly, he
went the full range of transformation. . . . And he was being ugly from
pique, self-despising as always that he could not take the sun like a full
African Negro. Kola, even before he began his canvas on the Pantheon,
had remarked how well he would translate into one of the gods; when
at last he began the mammoth task, Golder fell in place as Erinle, only
less obviously than Egbo as Ogun. And now with the frizzled skin all
peeling on his face, frizzled in little loops and curls with a few clean
patches of arid land, Joe Golder had assumed an after-sacrifice fierce-
ness, bits of slaughtered feather sticking to his face. Kola snatched up
his brush again, squeezed more paint onto the palette and began work-
ing furiously.
“You won’t scrub your face?” he pleaded.
36 DECOLONIZING THE BODY

“Can’t even bear to touch it. You cannot imagine how it hurts.”
“When will you give up trying to be black?”
“When I look three-quarters black. I feel like Esau, cheated of my
birthright.”
“You look like Jacob with shop-soiled fur on his face.”
The following days were filled with near despair. Joe Golder’s face ap-
peared to flake rapidly, a sudden breeze through the studio and a fragment
of skin would gently disengage, float mockingly above the easels and after
several triple turns in the air, float gently through an open window while
Golder looked on amused and Kola watched helplessly. Until a greedily
large piece almost vital to the facial collage, a large piece frizzled sepia and
Turkish slipper shaped freed itself from the cheekbone, then Kola lost con-
trol and attacked it, caught it on a brushpoint and flattened it on the paint-
ing where he left it, an outgrowth from Erinle’s ear. (Soyinka, 1996, 102–3)

This passage is both narratively and metaphorically almost impos-

sibly rich. Kola, as artist, flips from “near-hysterical with anger” to
“working furiously” at the sight of Golder’s appearance, from “Do
you really think that I will paint your face in that condition?” to
“‘You won’t scrub your face?’ he pleaded.” Kola initially finds
Golder’s peeling face an impossible signifier of the essence of both
Golder and the god, Erinle. Suddenly, Golder’s frizzled countenance
becomes the perfect signifier of both Golder and the god. Frenzied
work on the part of Kola becomes necessary to capture the image
before Golder heals. Golder’s sunburn shifts from connoting his in-
ability to approximate normative blackness to the appropriate garb
of divinity. Golder experiences his disfigurement as the robbed
Esau, while Kola reads it as the cheating but empowered Jacob.
What are we to make of this biblical exchange in a scene of the
painting of African divinity? It is tempting to read this exchange in
terms of national allegory: Golder is an American interloper, like Ja-
cob, wishing to claim a birthright (Africanness) that is not his. How-
ever, by painting him as Erinle, Kola enables the claim, rather than
being a guardian of African authenticity.
The capturing of flayed skin is not without historical resonance in
the depiction of an African American subject. While it may initially ap-
pear that Golder contains what Homi Bhabha calls the inevitable hy-
bridity of the colonized (and the biblical exchange in the midst of the
depiction of African religion would seem to bear this out), the text in-
sistently asserts that Golder is an American. The hyphen in Soyinka’s
text is in three-quarters white, not in African American. Kola repre-
sents the problem of Golder as one of patrimony/patronymy in
terms not dissimilar to the relationship between Egbo and his grand-
 DECOLONIZING THE BODY 37

father, the warlord of the creeks, in the scene discussed just before
this one.
The invocation of the biblical story contains a gendering that
hints at the subsequent disclosure of Golder’s sexual preferences.
Jacob is smooth-skinned and feminine in relation to his hairy and
macho brother, Esau. In the biblical tale, Jacob also represents cer-
tain domestic virtues, which is ironic given that Golder is nothing if
not a relentless traveler. In this scene, Golder’s peeling skin is de-
scribed in terms of “slaughtered feathers” and “shop-soiled fur.”
The depiction of Golder’s skin in terms of slaughtered feathers
aligns him with the animal sacrificed to the gods in the very moment
of his depiction as a god. The shop-soiled fur, in addition to refer-
encing the mechanism of Jacob’s deception, connotes the problems
and opportunities of American commerce and exploitation in the
newly independent Nigeria. It also anticipates the environmental
degradation oil will bring in the scene when Lazarus’s church burns.
Trading in this cultural context is sustainedly feminized. It is Egbo’s
grandmother, not his grandfather, who is associated with this kind
of activity.
The deeper representational issue for this central scene is paradox-
ically one of surface: skin as paint, paint as skin. The blistering and
peeling of the signifier of race becomes the marker of African divinity.
The god, Erinle, as animal spirit (represented by the homosexual
Golder), is both Esau and Jacob, simultaneously legitimate and illegit-
imate heir to competing Judeo–Christian and African animist religious
traditions. Golder’s peeling face is represented by Kola as the essence
of an African god while staged by the narrative in the Jacob/Esau
analogies as the sign of a diasporic usurping of blackness.
Biodun Jefiyo, in a recent book-length study of Soyinka, isolates a
type of embodiment and political/artistic performativity which he calls
the “postcolonial national-masculine ‘sublime.’” He reads Soyinka’s life
and work as exemplary of this type, in both heroic and debunking
terms, but generally skirts the question of sexuality in the construction
and reproduction of this “big man” figure.19
In both Black Skins, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth,
Fanon understands the experience of colonialism as emasculating to col-
onized men. The idea of the “postcolonial national-masculine sublime”
can be invoked to understand the trajectory of Egbo’s self-fashioning,
drawing the potency of the traditional grandfather into the possibilities of
postcolonial masculinity. While Kola’s painting of Golder as Erinle may
mark an attempt quite literally to draw Golder into this sphere of mas-
culine possibility, Golder’s sexual desires for African men get in the way.
38 DECOLONIZING THE BODY

One of the most notorious geographical bracketings of homosexual

identity comes from Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (1952):
Let me observe at once that I had no opportunity to establish the overt
presence of homosexuality in Martinique. This must be viewed as the
result of the absence of the Oedipus complex in the Antilles. The
schema of homosexuality is well enough known. We should not over-
look, however, the existence of what are called there “men dressed
like women” or “godmothers.” Generally they wear shirts and skirts.
But I am convinced that they lead normal sex lives. They can take a
punch like any “he-man” and they are not impervious to the allures
of women—fish and vegetable merchants. In Europe, on the other
hand, I have known several Martinicans who became homosexuals,
always passive, but this was by no means a neurotic homosexuality:
for them it was a means to a livelihood as pimping is for others.20
(Italics mine)

The muddle Fanon finds himself in here is instructive. He conflates two

theories of homosexuality and attributes both of them to psychoanaly-
sis: the Oedipus complex makes homosexuals. His evidence for homo-
sexuality is gender confusion: there are no homosexuals but there are
men who wear shirts and skirts. Freud is at pains to refute the third sex
or gender continuum theorists, and psychoanalysis allows for the possi-
bility of male homosexuality remaining masculine as identified in the
last instance. (I have strong suspicions that men had and have sex with
men in Martinique, but they did not understand themselves and/or iden-
tify as homosexuals or as closet-cases, though certain of them are more
likely to do so now.) Without denying the homophobia of these remarks,
they reveal in their margins a different though recognizable “sexual” sig-
nifying system only tangentially held together by the homo/hetero bi-
nary (in its universalizing form in psychoanalysis, rather than its
minoritizing form that is increasingly hegemonic in the twentieth cen-
tury in the West).
Let us read Fanon’s language closely. When he writes: “This must
be viewed as the absence of the Oedipus complex in the Antilles,” the
“this” refers to his lack of opportunity to establish the overt presence
of homosexuality in Martinique. Perhaps, he simply did not know
where to go, but I suspect that in his historical moment he could be
right: the Oedipus complex may not have been the route to acquire sex-
ual subjectivity in the Antilles. The emotional intensity resulting from
Egbo’s recollection of being lifted onto his grandfather’s knee and what
this recollected moment means for his sense of identity may or may not
be reducible to Oedipus as the route to human subjectivity. However,
in the absence of Oedipus, and without collapsing into voluntarism,
 DECOLONIZING THE BODY 39

how does Fanon account for the cross-gendered identifications of these

men, if one can read dress as evidence of such identifications?
The psychiatrist/native informant is caught between two signifying
systems here. He accepts a psychoanalytic narrative that one of the by-
products (or failures) of the Oedipal conflict is overt homosexuality. He
tries to impose this onto a native set of what I am calling sex and gen-
der norms, encoded in dress, though the text also implies that what may
appear as sex and gender norms might be something else. For what kind
of sex and gender system can be deduced from men in skirts who desire
female fish and vegetable merchants? Whatever it may be, Fanon asserts
that the Oedipal grid cannot account for it. An Oedipal grid may miss
these men’s desires, identifications, and sexual/economic practices.
Which contra Fanon does not mean men cannot have sexual rela-
tions with each other in Martinique. The evidence of the diasporic
Martinican rent-boys is a salutary reminder that there may be an eco-
nomic rationality to sexual practices that escapes the privileged link-
ing of sexuality to identity. The begged question here is when do
sexual relations between men become homosexual relations.
Similar to Fanon, Joe Golder has difficulties in reading sexuality off
transpositions of culturally specific classed and gendered forms of de-
portment. However, instead of seeing homosexuality nowhere in colo-
nized space, Golder sees it everywhere in decolonizing space:
Chagrined always to discover that the craving for beauty or “hand-
someness” was only one more student aesthetic malformation, Joe
Golder roamed the college at night, roamed the night-clubs where he
misjudged the swaggering hips of a tight-jeaned thug, the cultivated in-
dolence of his eyelids, the pomade of his hair; and took a savage beat-
ing in his flat from the incredulous mortally insulted thug and dared not
call the police. (Soyinka 1996, 216)
Investments in masculine beauty, which are generally homophobically
prescribed as sexually suspect in the white North Atlantic world of the
second half of the twentieth century, do not necessarily signify homo-
sexual inclinations among Golder’s African students. Male bodily orna-
mentation and display, which may be normative in their own cultural
milieu, look effeminate and consequently potentially homosexual to
Golder’s desire-driven, culturally Western gaze. Tight jeans, cultivated
indolence of eyelids, and pomaded hair may signify solicitation of a spe-
cific kind of male attention in the nightclubs of London, Paris, Berlin,
or San Francisco in the mid-1960s. Simultaneously, in the clubs of La-
gos and Ibadan, as the word thug suggests, a similar mode of appear-
ance and embodiment implies a hypermasculine, aggressive, and easily
offended predatory heterosexuality. This is a lesson in desire across cul-
40 DECOLONIZING THE BODY

tural codes of classed and gendered embodiment that Golder learns at

cost to his body, and “the incredulous mortally insulted thug” learns at
cost to his dignity. Only the wounds suffered by the tight-jeaned young
man are described as “mortal.”
An earlier exchange between Joe Golder and Sagoe dramatizes a
similar set of misrecognitions with more complexity:
The American was speaking again, much more slowly now. “Do you
think . . . are you afraid I might molest you. Is that it? Do you think I am
a homo?”
“Good God, no.” The suggestion startled Sagoe and he did not even
think before he rejected it. “You have some rather effeminate manner-
isms, but that is all.” . . . “Listen you, it is true I have spent some time
in places where every possible perversion is practiced, but I do not on
that account jump to hasty conclusions. I happen to be born into a com-
paratively healthy society. . . .”
He jumped on him. “Don’t give me that. Comparatively healthy so-
ciety my foot. Don’t you think I know nothing of your Emirs and their
little boys? You forget history is my subject. And what about those ex-
clusive coteries in Lagos?”
. . . “You seem better informed than I am. But if you don’t mind, I
will persist in my delusion.”
Up till that moment, Sagoe had kept nothing back, assumed no more
than he admitted. He had erected the wall in societies where sex was
the key to town planning, where designs for park-railings were turned
down because of unsuspected symbolisms. Unable, while in America,
to accept that three out of every five of his friends were perverts, active
or latent, and that the fourth was in love with his mother, he simply
pulled down a cast-iron shutter and developed a judo-chop for those
whose movements in a darkened cinema left him in no doubt at all.
(Soyinka 1996, 199)

Golder begins by imputing homosexual panic where none has been ex-
pressed by Sagoe, who instead plays dumb in the face of Golder’s in-
vitation to spend the night. The possibility that Golder may be “a
homo” does not register on Sagoe’s horizon. Ironically Sagoe’s time in
America prevents Sagoe from recognizing Joe Golder. At first blush, it
would appear that we are in the currently familiar landscape of the
modern West (for want of a better shorthand) as the original home of
perversity and African society as comparatively sexually “healthy.”
This idea has been central to certain African nationalist attacks on
homosexuality as a decadent Western import.
However, the foreigner Golder is quick to put himself in the posi-
tion of having greater knowledge on these matters than Sagoe, the
 DECOLONIZING THE BODY 41

potential native informant in this exchange, and reminds Sagoe of cer-

tain indigenous homosexual formations: “the Emirs and their little
boys,” and “those exclusive coteries in Lagos.” The pejorative refer-
ence to “Emirs and their little boys” cannot go unremarked. The in-
sult cuts many ways, and the fact that it is Golder who utters it is of
some interest. Imputing homosexuality to the emirates of the north-
ern Nigerian caliphate in the mid-1960s makes a somewhat snide po-
litical point in the run-up to the Nigerian civil war. The reference to
“Emirs and their little boys” further engages two colonial-era stereo-
types. One depicts Islam as a religion of sexual license and a corrupt-
ing influence on Africans. In the other, the reference to little boys
marks the infantilizing of, and concomitant denial of masculinity to,
African men in colonial racist ideology.
Golder, by characterizing what arguably could be an indigenous ho-
mosexual milieu, though the question of Islamic influence mitigates
against this putative indigeneity in these dismissive terms, reveals the
continued vitality of colonial stereotypes about religious and sexual
difference in an era of decolonization. While these sentiments can be
attributed to his position as an American, and therefore being made to
carry the imperial aspirations of the United States in the Cold War and
post–Cold War eras, it is likely that these sentiments are shared by
many Nigerians, including Soyinka himself.
Chris Dunton, in the definitive article on representations of homosex-
uality in African literature, “Wheyting Be Dat?,”21 notes a very similar
passage in Soyinka’s second novel, Season of Anomy (1983). Revealingly,
the narrative never takes the reader or Joe Golder to these potentially
“native” homosexual spaces. Soyinka, like Fanon, does not provide op-
portunities for establishing “the overt presence of homosexuality” in col-
onized and decolonizing spaces. Sagoe’s response reveals that he not
only learns about perversion in America, but also learns to ignore per-
version there. A space in-between the attribution of perversion and the
ignoring of it (although both the perversion and the ignoring are learned
abroad) might open up the narrative possibilities for the representation
of “African sexuality” in terms of neither the repudiated otherness of
perversion nor the half-internalized norms of Western heterosexual
monogamy. Both the milieus that Golder mentions in his argument with
Sagoe—“the Emirs and their little boys” and “those exclusive coteries in
Lagos”—reveal different strategies of “homosexual” othering for our Bo-
hemian protagonists: the Emirs with the taint of Islam and the North, the
little boys bearing the infantilizing and emasculating charge of racism,
and the exclusive coteries as class enemies of sorts.
42 DECOLONIZING THE BODY

Denials of homosexual practices and identities in the “developing”

world, like the one previously inaugurated by Fanon and repeated by
characters like Sagoe in The Interpreters, need to have their historical de-
terminants and discursive strategies unpacked. Western accusations of
“homophobia” from the position of the moral high ground tend to ig-
nore ongoing imperial projects and repeat, often without a transforming
difference, a proselytizing (if not quite missionary) relation to African
sex and gender norms. Given the hypersexualization of both masculine
and feminine blackness in Western cultural representations, such as
Golder’s desire to both be and have blackness, and the attribution of an-
imalesque sexual license to Africans in a formidable range of Western
thought on Africa, Sagoe’s insistence on the comparatively healthy state
of African sexuality is not simple homophobia. The imputation of de-
generate sexuality is reversed. Golder (the Western, albeit black, man)
is seen to carry America’s sexual decadence, the site of pervasive sex-
ual perversion, in Sagoe’s characterization from the previous passage.
What is remarkable about The Interpreters’s understanding of Golder’s
homosexuality is its refusal of psychogenetic narratives of homosexual-
ity, which must be described rather than explained. Sagoe’s satiric liter-
alism about a vulgarized Freudian Oedipus complex referenced in the
previous remark about American men being in love with their mothers
buttresses this refusal. Golder’s homosexuality is indistinguishable from
his cosmopolitanism. It is deeply cultural in both the anthropological and
Arnoldian senses of cultural. Golder’s texts of seduction draw on art, bal-
let, law, and film, suggesting that his apparently repressed and hidden de-
sires are pervasive in ways that exceed his instrumental use of them.
As Eve Sedgwick asks: Are homosexual bonds between men the social
solvent or the social glue? Importantly, we see a homosexual denigration
(to use a word whose etymology operates precisely in this overdeter-
mined racial field of signification) of the United States in this passage that
can be usefully contrasted with America as the home of sexual perversion
in the earlier exchange with Sagoe. Golder, as befits a culturally refined
history teacher/blues singer/seeker of rough trade, loathes Hollywood.
Joe knew the torment of edging conversation in tutorial classes towards
his craving, trying to find cult members, casually discussing the
Wolfenden report and watching hawk-like for a reaction. And he had a
book of Indian paintings. When he invited students to tea, he would
show this to them, and watch their faces when puzzled they asked, is
this meant to be a man or woman? He leant them his Life of Nijinsky.
And there was a spate of Indian films in all the theatres and Joe Golder
who loathed the tawdry, cheap imitations of Hollywood banalities,
would offer to take students to the picture. “They have such handsome
heroes,” some student always said. (Soyinka 1996, 215–16)
 DECOLONIZING THE BODY 43

What should we make of the fact that Indian movies and Indian paint-
ings are a potential medium for an African American man to seduce his
African students in 1960s Ibadan and Lagos? The phrase “cult mem-
bers” further complicates attributions of decadence and primitivity
along racial and/or cultural lines. Several arguments about the global
circulation of modern male homosexual desire and practice are nascent
in this paragraph. The citing of the Wolfenden report, a 1957 British le-
gal report calling for the decriminalization of “male homosexual sex acts
in private or public” in the form of the repeal of the Labouchere Amend-
ment of 1886, gives the lie to the fantasy of the West as a place of unre-
stricted sexual license. The circulation of “exotic” cultural products as
routes to homosexual seduction participates in a much older imperial-
ist fantasy of “other cultures” as the site of erotic possibility. All of this
makes Joe Golder a very complicated kind of Pan-Africanist sex tourist.
In the most powerfully homophobic scene in the novel, Egbo com-
forts the distraught Joe Golder after the death of Noah by patting his
knee. However, upon being told that Golder is “queer,” he experiences
strong feelings of contamination and revulsion:
As from vileness below human imagining, Egbo snatched his hand away,
his face distorted with revulsion and a sense of the degrading contamina-
tion. He threw himself forward, away even from the back seat, staring into
the sagging figure at the back as at some noxious insect. His hand, which
had touched Joe Golder, suddenly felt foreign to his body and he got out
of the car and wiped it on grass dew. Bandele and Kola stared, isolated
from this hatred they had not known in Egbo and the sudden angry spasms
that seemed to overtake each motion of his body. (Soyinka 1996, 236–37)

Egbo’s response to the news of Golder’s sexuality is a visceral one. It

“distorts” his face and makes his body move in ways that almost seem
out of his rational control. Touching Golder induces feelings of bodily
alienation: “his hand . . . suddenly felt foreign to his body,” which ex-
periences sudden angry spasms. He wipes his hand on grass dew, look-
ing to clean the contamination of what is “below human imagining”
from imagined forces of natural purity. Interestingly, what is contagious
and contaminating in this scene is not homophobia nor homosexuality
but rather alienation. As Egbo stares at Golder “as at some noxious
insect,” Kola and Bandele stare at Egbo, “isolated from this hatred they
had not known in Egbo and the sudden angry spasms that seemed to
overtake each motion of his body.” What breaks community and iso-
lates African men from each other in this moment of circulating trauma
is “this hatred they had not known in Egbo” rather than the unfortu-
nate homosexual African American man, possible murderer of a possi-
ble murderer, sedated in the back seat of the car.
44 DECOLONIZING THE BODY

Egbo, as we have previously seen with his grandfather, is a character

powerfully affected by male touch, whether it is the virilizing male touch
of ancestral patriarchy and patrimony, which he struggles to claim as his
own, or the act of touching Joe Golder’s sexually deviant, quintessen-
tially modern, racially diluted, diasporic male body. However, Egbo’s re-
sponses are not the only responses to the potentially homoerotic male
body and are definitely not the valorized ones for the narrative. Inter-
estingly, the previous passage relocates the troubled body from Golder
to Egbo. It is his body that is “overtaken“ by involuntary angry spasms.
Egbo’s visceral response alienates Bandele and Kola, but not to the ex-
tent that touching Golder’s body induces self-alienation.22
In Joe Golder and his implication in the death of Noah, we see some
credence given to the notion of homosexuality as a metaphor for West-
ern corruption. However, in the varied responses to him, we enter a
much more complex field of feelings and actions: Sagoe is indifferent,
Kola sees the beauty of his body, Bandele is his friend. While I do not
think the essentially predatory Golder is a figure available for heroic
sublimation23 as opposed to Kola’s aesthetic sublimation, none of the
women-desiring characters can attain heroic status, either. Desire
compromises racial purity all around; through the figure of Lazarus,
religious ascetism has similarly deracinating effects.
I am inclined to speculate that Soyinka’s novel is haunted by par-
tially deracinated diasporic blackness in the figure of Golder, an artist
who leaves the sexually and racially oppressive America (paradoxi-
cally also imagined as the home of sexual freedom/license in the mor-
alizing and pathologizing language of perversity). Let me risk further
speculation here. Lying on the backseat of Golder’s car is a copy of
James Baldwin’s Another Country:
[Sagoe] noticed then a book lying on the seat beside him and picked it
up, holding the cover to the dashboard.
“It’s Another Country, the latest Baldwin. Have you read it?”
“I spell it Another Cuntry, C-U-N-T.”
“You don’t like it?”
“It reminded me somehow of another title, Eric or Little by Little!24
Said with an anal gasp if you get my meaning.”
“You enjoy being vulgar,” he said again.
“And you? Why is this lying on the car seat? So when you give lifts
to students you can find an easy opening for exploring?” (Soyinka 1996,
200)

It is remarkable to me that in a novel centered on a group of young, ed-

ucated, and cosmopolitan cultural workers, Baldwin is the only novelist
mentioned by name in the entire novel. In addition, Another Country is
 DECOLONIZING THE BODY 45

the only literary work by a black writer referenced at all. For Soyinka, a
young Nigerian novelist living and writing in and out of exile in the 1960s,
an author like Baldwin, the most prominent black writer of the 1960s in
self-imposed exile in Paris, could represent a model to be embraced and
refuted simultaneously. Furthermore, Kola’s painting of Golder as Erinle
may mark a buried intertextual dialogue within a literary tradition that
Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic 25 now allows this reader to perceive.
Reading Golder as a figure like Baldwin26—an artist and, literally in
The Interpreters, an artist’s model; as a problem and partial solution for
the African writer writing in English in the period of decolonization—
allows for an important reframing of the problem of “homosexuality in
African culture.” Such a reading can refute the primordialism of
African culture, invoked both by colonialism and by its reactive force,
anticolonial nationalism, in the name of a timeless tradition and see
this construct called African culture as essentially dynamic and con-
tested like all or any culture. Reading Golder as similar to Baldwin al-
lows that this ever-changing culture has been in deep dialogue not only
with dominant colonial cultures (however they may be construed)
but also with the cultures of diasporic blackness, Garveyism, pan-
Africanism, and negritude.
At this point, the opposition between perverse sexuality and racial
authenticity may begin confounding its poles in ways that do not just
replicate the putative liberal tolerance in the West, itself staged as per-
version in the rhetorics of anticolonial nationalism. Joe Golder’s swan
song in the novel, “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,” resonates
here. The song is a spiritual expressing the impossibility of human
connection, continuity, and belonging under U.S. slavery. How does its
meaning shift when it is sung by a self-identified homosexual, African
American man in Nigeria in a historical period of decolonization?
Sometimes I feel
Like a motherless child
Sometimes I feel
Like a motherless child
A long way from home
True believer
A long way from home
Sometimes I wish I could fly,
Like a bird up in the sky
Sometimes I wish I could fly,
Like a bird in the sky
Little closer to home
46 DECOLONIZING THE BODY

Motherless children
Have a real hard time
Motherless children
Have such a real hard time
So long so long so long
Sometimes I feel
Like freedom is near
Sometimes I feel
Like freedom is near
But we’re so far away
Sometimes I feel
Like it’s close at hand
Sometimes I feel
Like the freedom is near
But we’re so far from home
Sometimes, sometimes,
Sometimes
So far, so far, so far,
So far Mama from you, so far27
Home, freedom, and Mama are the unattainable objects that the song’s
singer strives to reach, but the striving is not a totalizing one. The most
repeated word in the lyrics is “sometimes,” at least keeping the possibil-
ity open that the protagonist does or can feel at times free, at home, and
the plenitude of the mother’s care. The mode of experience in the song
is one of affect: “sometimes I feel,” not sometimes I think, or sometimes
I know or see or do. The lyrics also mark a distrust of feeling as a mode
of experience, particularly in its optimistic guise: “Sometimes I feel Like
freedom is near, But we are so far away / Sometimes I feel Like it’s close
at hand . . . But we’re so far from home.” This dissonance between the
feeling of closeness and the reality of distance creates much of the song’s
pathos, which the singing must seek both to bridge and express.
Where and/or what is home for Joe Golder? He is well traveled but
feels out of place almost everywhere. His greatest terror following the
death of Noah is that he will be forced to leave Nigeria. The idea that
Africa is home for African Americans, particularly in the mode of feel-
ing, has a long and complicated history that cannot be engaged here,
except to note that Soyinka’s fictional Joe Golder participates in it, too.
He has come to Nigeria and, despite all his difficulties, he does not
wish to leave. Egbo flashes back to a moment in his childhood watch-
ing Joe Golder sing this song.
 DECOLONIZING THE BODY 47

The double-spot bore a hole in the ground and Joe Golder stood with
his feet in this circle of emptiness, Egbo thinking of how they would
take possession of the dyers’ compound when the women were gone,
standing on the rims of the enormous pots of the dyers. [He then re-
members small children falling into the dyer’s pots.] The blackness
swallowed Joe Golder now before his eyes, and Egbo heard the shriek
of the child’s terror once again and the blackened hands that flailed des-
perately for hands to touch his and lips to touch his and clean waters to
lave him and the waters did. Indigo fountains rose and swirled his feet.
Joe Golder, seeking blackness ever, walked in the backyards of old
women. . . . There were black rains from dwarf skies and clean quick-
sands beneath his feet were drenched in this one dye of his choice. Joe
Golder pressed his foot anywhere and springs uprushed of dye and old
women’s long-straddled piss, straddled across the rims of their own dye
pots, and black pap frothing through black bubbles from cornices from
black lava deep in the bowels of seasoned pots deep in rim levels with
the ground, oh I’ve played among them Egbo said where old women dye
their shrouds, and grief is such women, old as the curse from snuff-
lined throats. (Soyinka 1996, 246)

It would appear that finally, in Egbo’s eyes, Golder is baptized into

blackness while performing “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.”
The parallels with the earlier scene in Kola’s studio are obvious, ex-
cept here we have dye instead of paint—childhood trauma rather than
quite literally modeling divinity as the means to accommodate Joe
Golder’s body into the representational scene of Africanness. In this
scene, Golder performs rather than poses. The contrast with Egbo’s
earlier attempted ascension into his birthright is even more explicit.
Egbo is lifted up onto the lap of the warlord of the creek, his grandfa-
ther. Golder is dunked into the dye pots of grief-stricken old women.
Artistic production, understood as a powerful affiliative force, in the
mode of shared feeling across geographic and historical difference, can
begin the work of social reproduction in the face of the crisis in gen-
eration experienced by all characters in the novel. A generative and
forgiving Black Atlantic cosmopolitanism that can preserve internal
differentiation and keep the harsher tonalities of satire emerges as The
Interpreters’s significant contribution to rethinking the designations of
both “Africa” and “homosexuality.”
 Chapter 3

NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH

The World Conference of Anglican Bishops

This chapter moves us into the institutional palimpsests of post–Cold

War neoliberal Africa. I am unsure what narrative and/or conceptual
relations can be elaborated from the key terms of my paratactic title
(neoliberalism, homosexuality, Africa, the Anglican Church) as they
collide at an event (the Anglican Conference of World Bishops held at
Lambeth in 1998). Moreover, they are terms and definitions with spe-
cific institutional forms and histories that have their meanings con-
tested in a process of apparently ceaseless revision. I read the conference
as a site for arresting moments in their various genealogies and for of-
fering a cross-section of their intersection in order to isolate the con-
ditions of agency for the various participants. A snippet from
Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals captures succinctly the prob-
lem I face here with all four terms:
The cause or origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employ-
ment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart, whatever ex-
ists having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted
to new ends, taken over, transformed and redirected by some power su-
perior to it; all events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming
master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh inter-
pretation, an adaptation through which any previous meaning and pur-
pose are necessarily obscured or even obliterated.1
What happens to the meanings of the terms neoliberalism, Africa, ho-
mosexuality, and the Anglican Church as they collide during the course
of the conference? What “previous meanings and purposes” remain in-
telligible even as they are “necessarily obscured”? What does the sub-
duing? Where might the fresh interpretations come from? And most
importantly, what might be the stakes of the transformation of mean-
ings of these powerful abstractions, institutions, and designations for
varied constituencies of people: African bishops exercising power in the
now-global Anglican Church, Africans laying claim to lesbian and gay
identity, international lesbian and gay human rights activists, or schol-
ars who would write about such things? The most obvious theoretical
problem remains the difficulty of thinking through the place of sex, sex-
uality, or intimacy in the genealogy of neoliberal rhetorics of develop-

48
 NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH 49

ment and how the latter diverge from and repeat the sexual ideologies
of colonialism and post- or neocolonial modernity. The 1998 Lambeth
conference is an event in which strands of this problem become visible.

THE ANGLICAN CHURCH

Despite the national, cultural, and perhaps even racial specificity im-
plied by its name, the Anglican Church has always claimed universality.
It can now, however, make assertions to being a global church in ways
that it could not earlier in its history, most simply because it now claims
more African, Asian, and Latin American congregants than, for want of
a better shorthand, white ones.2 The global Anglican communion is es-
timated to have around 77 million members, with over 30 million mem-
bers residing in Africa.3 With this expanded global congregation, the
church’s perceived centers of vitality have also shifted from Canterbury.
The meaning of this change in the social and geopolitical locations of
members and centers of vitality of the Anglican community was up for
grabs at Lambeth. A distinctly hostile rhyme from Brendan Behan’s
Borstal Boy (1958) on the founding of the Anglican Church can neatly
stage (and upstage) the messiness of origins and the continually con-
taminating contingencies of history in relation to the truth claims made
by all the Lambeth participants: “Don’t speak of the alien minister, Nor
of his church without meaning or faith, For the foundation stone of his
temple, Is the ballocks of Henry the Eighth.”4 Behan writes from an anti-
colonial platform in mid–twentieth century Ireland, implicating the An-
glican Church in a continuingly bloody history of British imperialism.
His writing also unwittingly registers the church’s original role in a dis-
course of national self-determination (the articulated goal of anticolonial
struggles) of self-generation, even if I may overread “ballocks” a bit.
The rest of Behan’s poignant and hilarious novel/memoir springs
from inside a range of colonial stereotypes about the drunken, criminal
Irish. Without attempting a potted history of the Anglican Church over
the five hundred years of its existence, a few salient points need to be
made. Sexual politics embedded in questions of divorce and dynastic
succession are central to the Anglican Church’s becoming a distinct en-
tity at all, and we note a key and ongoing paradox over the course of
its institutional history: It is an institution partially founded to resist for-
eign domination, which later plays a significant role in the implemen-
tation of British imperialism, as well as in resistance to it. The Church
may then find itself an increasingly resistant voice against certain vec-
tors of current globalization. This chapter argues that questions around
50 NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH

embodiment, identity, and ritual and mundane practice, straining un-

der the banner of sex, play a pivotal role in this paradox.
Broadly speaking, the relation of Christianity (and let us subsume
Anglicanism under Christianity for this moment of the argument) as
an ideological force to the broader social forces of both imperialism
and decolonization is complex and contradictory, producing an atten-
dant difficulty in generalizing a relation at all outside of specific local
contexts. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler suggest some of the
possibilities during the period preceding and during colonization:
In the Philippines as much as in Africa, people heard what Christian
missionaries had to say but scrambled the message—sometimes finding
in the mission community something valuable and meaningful to them,
sometimes using their mission education to gain secular advantage,
sometimes insisting that their conversion should entitle them to run the
religious organizations themselves, and sometimes dismantling both
doctrine and organization to build a religious edifice or even a revolu-
tionary movement that was wholly new, neither the Christianity of Eu-
rope nor a recognizable variant of local religious practices.5
In short, the church was always potentially on all sides. The thir-
teenth Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops, as an event in the
neocolonial aftermath of decolonization, and despite, or perhaps be-
cause of, its history as an imperialist metropolitan center, encapsu-
lates some of these diverging trends, which affect the ways it also
functions as a site: uneven, contested, and fragmentary to be sure, for
the emergence of cross-culturally recognizable sexual norms. The
Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops, first held in 1868 and gen-
erally held every ten years since, has almost from its inception been
a forum in which “sexual” norms across cultures (or where sexual
norms have been used to define “cultures”) have been negotiated un-
der the banner of an ostensibly unified church. Granting and denying
religious sanction to corporeal intimacies (for reasons that should be-
come apparent, I am wary of the term sexual, believing that it begs
the question it is then used to answer, in these contexts) has fre-
quently been a divisive factor.
At the height of the late nineteenth-century scramble for Africa, the
third Lambeth Conference, held in 1888, passed two resolutions on the
subject of polygamy: (1) A converted polygamist should not be bap-
tized, but should continue a catechumen until he should be in a posi-
tion to accept the law of Christ (i.e., monogamy). (This resolution was
passed by 83 votes to 21.) (2) The wives of polygamists might be bap-
tized under conditions to be decided on locally. (This was carried by
a margin of 54 to 34.) In this second resolution, we see the difficulty
 NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH 51

that the Anglican universal has when it acknowledges cultural differ-

ence, and how, in the late nineteenth century, gender is the occasion
for this acknowledgment. One rule exists for men, but “local condi-
tions” will decide rules for women. This requirement that woman
mark the embodied, the particular, and the local, while male subjects
have less-mediated access to the universal and its agentive possibili-
ties has been a key quarrel that anticolonial feminists have picked with
anticolonial nationalisms,6 and Western feminists have had more gen-
erally with the Enlightenment legacy.7
If this earlier focus on polygamy forced gender to carry the weight of
cultural difference, the 1998 conference’s focus on homosexuality par-
tially hands this task over to sexuality, though the ordination of women
clergy remained a divisive issue on similar geopolitical lines. Ordaining
a woman in a polygamous marriage was not an issue that could have
been broached in 1888 and likewise was not raised in 1998. The 1888
resolutions largely confirmed the position of the Church Missionary So-
ciety, the organ of the Anglican Church most involved in sending mis-
sionaries to proselytize in the colonial or potentially colonial spheres.
This position, which argued against the baptism of polygamists, was out-
lined in Henry Venn’s memorandum of 1856, though many high church
organs, constitutively suspicious of the evangelical streak in missionary
endeavors, considered it too strict. Bishops from Africa were all mis-
sionaries from the British Isles, though an anticipatory excitement was
expressed about the future possibility of native bishops representing
these dioceses. These colonial bishops were trenchant about admitting
no concession in relation to church toleration of polygamous practices.8
The tension between metropolitan liberals and more conservative “colo-
nial” bishops on matters of “sex,” is already present at Lambeth in 1888.
Some 110 years later, African bishops (no longer exclusively
white missionaries) showed greater flexibility on the issue of
polygamy and resolved not to condemn polygamous unions. How-
ever, issues around “sexuality” remained high on their agenda and
they were similarly conservative on such issues (albeit, I will argue,
for a range of different reasons). The most divisive issue of the thir-
teenth Lambeth Conference held in 1998, was the question of or-
daining “non-celibate homosexual clergy” and the legitimacy of
clergy presiding at “same-sex unions.” This conference marked the
first time such questions made it onto the agenda. After intense de-
bate and several amendments, the bishops overwhelmingly passed
a resolution stating homosexual activity to be “incompatible with
Scripture” and recommended against the ordination of noncelibate
homosexuals and the blessing of same-sex unions. The final vote
52 NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH

was 526 in favor to 70 opposed, with 45 abstentions. In mitigation,

the resolution committed the church to “listen to the experience of
homosexual people” and called them “full members of the Body of
Christ.”9 Keeping and modifying an earlier proposal, the conference
also condemned “irrational fear of homosexuals.” Though not bind-
ing on the Communion’s 37 provinces, the resolution carries moral
weight as a statement of the Lambeth Conference.
The build up to, and the rhetoric around, this resolution deserves
close attention for the ways in which questions around the production
of the category of sexuality, visible and invisible markers of something
called cultural difference, and the identities of those who are obliged
to carry those markers are rearticulated. The very identity of the An-
glican Church also appeared at stake for some bishops. The newly au-
thorized African Anglicans aligned themselves with the self-named
traditionalists from the West at the conference. The Lambeth confer-
ence dates back nearly 150 years; this is a salutary reminder that pub-
lic forums with global reach and aspiration precede the U.N apparatus
and global “free markets.” The tensions within the global Anglican
Church at Lambeth in 1998 and their subsequent history may simul-
taneously mark the rupture between an older imperial global order
and a newer neoliberal globalized one.10

AFRICA

In the colonial era, Africans’ access to the emergent apparatuses of a

recognizably international public sphere was restricted. Under differ-
ent colonial systems, colonized Africans could represent themselves in
the form of sub- or para-state units, a tribe, a nation, or (most expan-
sively in the case of a movement like Negritude) a race. In recent years,
African voices and perspectives, compromised as they may be by a
neocolonial political order and a globalizing economic one, have en-
tered sectors of the international public sphere as representatives of
the universally human. I think here of the role recently decolonized
African countries played in the nonaligned movement at the United
Nations during the Cold War, as well as the appointment of Boutros
Ghali and later Kofi Annan to the position of Secretary General of the
United Nations.
Decolonization allowed Africans access to the normatively univer-
sal and geographically global form of political modernity: the nation-
state, with Africans as leaders of nation-states and participants in the
 NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH 53

normative formalities of global geopolitics in the post–World War II

era. The 1998 Lambeth Conference features such an instance of
African leadership roles in institutions with universalist assumptions
and global reach. African bishops were instrumental in the passing of
the conference’s two most controversial resolutions. Resolution 1.15
on International Debt and Economic Justice called for debt relief in im-
passioned terms:
We have heard and understood the point of view that poverty reduction
is more important than debt cancellation. Nevertheless we conclude that
substantial debt relief, including cancellation of unpayable debts of the
poorest nations under an independent, fair and transparent process, is
a necessary, while not sufficient precondition for freeing these nations,
and their people, from the hopeless downward spiral of poverty. Be-
cause indebted nations lose their autonomy to international creditors,
debt cancellation is also a necessary step if these governments are to be
given the dignity, autonomy and independence essential to the growth
and development of democracy. We believe it vital that all of God’s peo-
ple should participate, on the basis of equal dignity, in the fruits of our
interdependent world.11

This resolution passed unanimously. The second resolution in which

African bishops played a prominent role was more divisive. It is clear
that the issue of sanctioning homosexuality through either ordaining
noncelibate homosexual clergy or allowing Anglican clergy to pre-
side at same-sex unions is one that is divisive throughout the Angli-
can community. In an attempt to diffuse the racialized rhetoric that
surrounded the resolution, the Archbishop of Canterbury himself de-
nied that the resolution represented a cultural divide, pitting the
churches in Africa against the churches in Western Europe and
North America:
We have to work from theology and we have to find agreement within
that theology so that, as well as listening to the experience of the ho-
mosexual community, together we have to listen to authority as it
comes to us through Scripture, and through the entire Christian tradi-
tion as well. . . . On the subject of homosexuality the rift goes through
all the churches.12

Nevertheless, with the exception of a few South African bishops,

African bishops were almost unanimously in favor of fairly strict re-
strictions on any church endorsement of homosexuality and insisted
on a literalist biblical understanding of sexual morality. With the sup-
port of European and North American conservatives, they pushed
54 NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH

through several amendments that strengthened language condemning

homosexual sexual activity and pressed for abstinence as the only ac-
ceptable alternative to marriage. Furthermore, language expressing an
allegiance to the idea of homosexuality as definitionally alien or un-
African was common.
Bishop Wilson Mutebi of the Diocese of Mitiyana (Uganda) asserted
that in his diocese, and throughout Eastern Africa, the Bible is the foun-
dation for faith. Anglicans in his region, he said, are aware of what sci-
ence and philosophy have to say on homosexuality, but for them the
final truth resides in Scripture: “For us, the Bible and the apostolic tra-
dition have authority through all our church.” “In the Sudan we know
nothing of homosexuality,” claimed Bishop Michael Lugor of the Dio-
cese of Rejaf. “We only know the Gospel and we proclaim it.”
Ironically (and to have the pleasure of quibbling with a bishop on
biblical matters), none of the gospels have anything at all to say on the
matter of same-sex sexual activity. Rather, the notorious proscriptions
are found in Leviticus and in the letters of Paul. Bishop Eustace Ka-
manyire of the Diocese of Ruwenzori (Uganda) stated that homosexual
activity is condemned as immoral in both the Old and New Testaments,
saying that “pastoral care towards homosexuals should emphasize re-
pentance.” He also criticized liberal bishops for continuing to ordain
noncelibate gay men and lesbians and bless same-sex unions, which
“is causing serious damage and scandal to Christ and his church. The
Christian faith is not only under attack by nonbelievers but is actually
being undermined by some of the same people who are supposed to be
its defenders.”13 Homosexuality is unknown in their regions and pro-
scribed by the Bible, even if it were known. These Anglicans are clear
that there is no place for practicing homosexuals in their church.
It was clear that a regionally partisan showdown on sexuality was
scheduled for Lambeth after a meeting of Anglican leaders from the
southern hemisphere at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in February 1997. In
a statement, the eighty participants agreed:

Holy Scriptures are clear in teaching that all sexual promiscuity is sin.
We are convinced that this includes homosexual practices between men
or women, as well as heterosexual relationships outside marriage. . . .
We are deeply concerned that the setting aside of biblical teaching in
such actions as the ordination of practicing homosexuals and the bless-
ing of same-sex unions calls into question the authority of Holy Scrip-
tures. This is totally unacceptable to us.14

The Kuala Lumpur Statement placed the issue on the agenda of the
worldwide Anglican Communion, expressing “concern about mutual
 NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH 55

accountability and interdependence within our Anglican Communion.”

The Standing Committee of the province of Southeast Asia endorsed the
statement and said that it would “be in communion with that part of
the Anglican Communion which accepts and endorses the principles of
Kuala Lumpur and not otherwise.”15 The controversy is ongoing.
Following the 1998 Lambeth Conference, the position of certain
African bishops has hardened. The Nigerian and Ugandan Church
broke ties with the U.S. Episcopal Church over the latter’s 2003 con-
secration of New Hampshire Bishop, V. Gene Robinson, who lives with
another man in a gay relationship. The archbishops of Nigeria, Kenya,
and Uganda, who have some 30.5 million Anglicans in their pastoral
care, announced they will not accept grants from the Episcopal
Church. Some Rwandan and Tanzanian bishops have followed suit.
The costs for these dioceses have been high as American conserva-
tives have not stepped in to match the funds refused. Rwandan Bishop
John Rucyahana of the Diocese of Shyira acknowledged: “To be hon-
est, there is not enough money for the needs we have in Rwanda after
the [1994] genocide, but if money is being used to disgrace the Gospel,
then we don’t need it.” Kenyan Archbishop Benjamin Nzimbi said in
an interview he was willing “to do without the money” in order to re-
mind the U.S. Episcopal Church of its mission. “It was to preach the
Great Commission, but what kind of Gospel are they preaching now,
saying there should be union of people of the same sex.”16
Educational and AIDS services programs have been cut and basic
infrastructure imperiled. In July 2005, the Rev. Alison Barfoot, assis-
tant to the Anglican Archbishop of Uganda, reported that the Anglican
province has no working phones in its Kampala headquarters because
it lacks the funds. Over 70 percent of the operating budget for the dio-
ceses of the Council of Anglican Provinces of Africa is estimated to
come from U.S. Episcopal funds generated from either tithes or dona-
tions.17 U.S. bishops who have had their donations refused have in
turn impugned the Christianity of the African bishops. Central Penn-
sylvania Bishop Michael F. Creighton called Ugandan Bishop Jackson
Nzerebende’s decision to cut ties with his diocese, which had donated
more than $65,000 for school fees, transportation, college tuition, and
an AIDS program, “a Good Friday nail in the compassion of Christ.”
He added: “Our consent to the election of a bishop in New Hampshire
appears to be more important than the compassionate ministry we
have shown with his own people,” he said, “who are struggling with
and dying of AIDS.”
In September 2005, the Anglican Church of Nigeria issued a state-
ment announcing “all former references to ‘communion with the see
56 NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH

of Canterbury’ were deleted” from its constitution.18 While stopping

short of a feared formal schism, the changes reveal how the contro-
versy around homosexuality is deeply divisive within the global An-
glican Communion. Rowan Williams, the current Archbishop of
Canterbury, has ordered a commission to investigate how the breaches
between Anglican Churches over sexuality questions can be healed.19
Why do African bishops pledge allegiance to a literal interpretation of
Scripture with the attendant repudiation, if not wholesale disavowal, of
the possibility of indigenous same-sex sexual practices? I am tempted to
read this as a reaction formation in the psychoanalytic sense against cer-
tain colonial sexual and racial formations. In the colonial era, corporeal
attributes (real and/or imagined; sexual or ritualistic) like the largely
mythic cannibalism,20 or imagined hyperfecundity of African peoples
were invoked in the production of the new scientistic theorizings of
racial hierarchies. The Victorian white bourgeois patriarchal family is
posited as the evolutionary pinnacle, and other social arrangements are
ranked by European anthropologists in a fairly explicit evolutionary hi-
erarchy. These scientific theories argue that the evolution of humanity
is a long march from primitive promiscuity to the institution of the in-
cest taboo to group marriage to polygamy to the Victorian norm, with
certain groups of people stuck at way stations along the road.21
Moreover, postabolition22 imperial cultural representations hyper-
sexualize blackness, particularly along the lines of simultaneously
feminizing and hypervirilizing black men. The general lasciviousness
of savages is a trope that cuts across genres and disciplines through-
out the nineteenth century. Though marked by multiple ruptures and
significant shifts and reversals, there is arguably an important strand
of thinking beginning in Victorian anthropology and moving through
psychoanalysis to current configurations. This approach views AIDS as
a predominantly homosexual and African (and, in the U.S. context,
Haitian) disease linking the homosexual and the savage, who are both
required to represent promiscuous unbridled lust and are held to em-
body states of arrested development or degeneration.
In this context, anti-Western attacks on “homosexuality” can be
seen as responses to these prior attributions of primitiveness, and as
reversals of the racist charge of retardation and/or degeneration. These
attacks consistently locate the origin of perversion (and, with greater
political urgency, AIDS) in the West. While Christian dogma, with its
rhetoric of the universal brotherhood of man, can and has mitigated
against some of the racism in these imperialist formations, and the
sign “marriage,” Christian or not, can render the other grave threat to
Christian sexual norms (polygamy) somewhat recuperable, imperial
 NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH 57

“civilized” sexual norms can remain in place and can paradoxically be

defended as authentically African.
Temporality as a marker of civilized sexual behavior becomes par-
ticularly convoluted in the context of an event like the 1998 Lambeth
Conference. Tolerance of homosexuality is seen among other things, as
a marker of civilized sexual values, often obliquely invoked by states
like Israel, Taiwan, and, more recently, Romania, which use their anti-
discrimination against homosexuals laws in processes of global exclu-
sion and differentiation or as a means of deflecting attention from
other human rights abuses in these countries. In the Romanian in-
stance, this strengthens its case for entry into the European Union.23
Tolerance of homosexuality becomes a marker of civilized moder-
nity, but in the African context and perhaps also in a more generalized
postcolonial one, the bourgeois nuclear family is seen as the proper in-
timate form of modernity. In a witty and compelling analysis of do-
mesticity on the Zambian copperbelt, James Ferguson writes of
company-run courses for the wives of mineworkers:

A continuation of the paternalistic social welfare policies of the colonial

mining industry, these courses were intended to teach mineworkers’
wives to be “good housewives” by giving them instruction in cooking,
cleaning, sewing, knitting and so on—all in the name of fostering mod-
ern family life in the mine townships.24

Ferguson concludes by noting the anachronism of the figure of the

1950s U.S. housewife as a model for African modernity. “Like the West-
inghouse kitchen in Tomorrowland, ‘the modern housewife,’ in mid-
1980s Zambia appeared preposterously archaic and somehow
poignantly out of place.”25 The bourgeois nuclear family simultaneously
emerges as a phantasm of nostalgia and developmental aspiration. Ar-
guably, the African bishops at Lambeth in 1998 worked an earlier domes-
tic ideology of civilized modernity (the nuclear family, anachronistically
coded as religious tradition) against an emerging one: public tolerance of
homosexuality.
These temporal problems around the questions of modernity, civi-
lization, and domesticity can be found not only in the utterances and
actions of African bishops, but also more generally in strands of African
nationalism. In certain crucial ways, nationalism, as a hybrid product of
European enlightenment and romantic discourses, carries its own set of
implied gender relations and sexual norms, even when appropriated, or
used from below by anticolonial nationalisms in the struggle for decol-
onization.26 Sub-Saharan anticolonial nationalisms struggle to imagine
lesbian and gay citizens. Moreover, the anticolonialist and nationalist
58 NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH

discourses of postcolonial ruling elites of Zimbabwe, Namibia, Zambia,

Uganda, Kenya, and Swaziland express an entrenched resistance to
emerging lesbian and gay identities in their countries.
However, a paradox exists in the way the resistance is expressed, by
simultaneously defending modernity and tradition. The emergent
African postcolonial nation needs to present itself as the vehicle for
economic and cultural progress—in other words, as the agent of
modernity. Simultaneously, it must represent itself as the custodian of
the fixed identities conferred on it by a precolonial past—in other
words, as the repository of tradition.27 In the bifurcated temporality of
postcolonial nationalism, representational roles have been embodied
differentially along class and gender lines. Thus it is usually (but not
always) women and rural populations that represent tradition, while
men, particularly urban men, are seen to embody progress into moder-
nity.28 Whether or not this still holds is uncertain, given the failure of
postcolonial modernization across much of sub-Saharan Africa.29
The importance of women’s varied and often informal economic ac-
tivity makes their position as the ideological placeholders of precolonial
traditions increasingly untenable. What positions can gay men and les-
bians occupy in this representation of emergent nations as both the
voice of the past and the vehicle for the future? Three configurations
emerge. The first one perceives lesbian and gay identity as a conse-
quence of excessive Westernization and a violation of traditional norms
and forms of sexuality. The African bishops at Lambeth, understand-
ably ignoring the fact that Christianity also marks Westernization and
at minimum a compromise of precolonial traditions, frequently articu-
late this position, lending it biblical sanction. The second configuration,
which holds tenuous sway in South Africa, aligns lesbians and gay men
(often across class and racial divides) with the historically oppressed.
This view, which was less in evidence at Lambeth is the subject of the
following chapter. The third configuration, perhaps at the heart of the
impulse of the pro-homosexual bishops at Lambeth and perhaps most
easily attached to ideas of neoliberalism, imagines tolerance of homo-
sexuality as part of a telos of universal human progress. It is possible to
read the conflict around homosexual questions at Lambeth as sympto-
matic of a wider tension between a religiously inflected postcolonial na-
tionalism and emergent global human rights culture, with both sides
evading the question of their respective imperialist legacies.30
To return to the first configuration, the strange synthesis between
African nationalism and Christianity (arguably the colonial cultural
import par excellence) has not gone unnoticed by lesbian and gay ac-
tivists on the ground. GALZ (Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe) re-
 NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH 59

sponded to the ongoing Namibian fracas and the statements by certain

African political leaders with which this book begins by precisely mak-
ing such an allegation: “the minds of many of our Southern African po-
litical leaders remain thoroughly colonised by Victorian dogma which
they now have the audacity to claim is the backbone of our African
cultural heritage.”31 If it is difficult for the homosexual to be African,
what can he be? (And he is indicatively male in these debates.) The
homosexual is definitionally a Westerner and implicitly white or a di-
asporic African or Asian for these religious and nationalist discourses.
My previous chapter discussed the representation of an African Amer-
ican gay man, Joe Golder, in Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters as a nuanced
fictional exploration of this problem. Early on in the history of the AIDS
pandemic, Simon Watney noticed the legitimating by reversal inversion
of this racialized attribution. Gay men suffering from HIV and AIDS in
the West are Africanized.32 Consequently, it becomes extremely difficult
for Africans laying claim to lesbian and gay identity to find a public voice
in these nationally and religiously inflected debates.33 In this case, South
Africa seems to be an exception, at least at the level of legal discourse;
this topic will be considered more extensively in the following chapter.

HOMOSEXUALITY

Homosexuality, as a word designating a lifeworld predicated on same-

sex erotic attraction, was first coined in 1869.34 Much scholarship ex-
ists on where and when social and psychic phenomena that we might
now recognize as homosexual originated. The wealth of material gen-
erated around the essentialist vs. social constructionist understandings
of (homo) sexuality during the 1980s offers a useful introduction to
central definitional problems in writing histories of homosexuality.
John Boswell makes the most compelling case for the transhistorical
and transcultural existence of recognizably homosexual persons.35
Following Michel Foucault, David Halperin argues forcibly for his-
torical specificity and later provides an impressively nuanced reap-
praisal of these earlier controversies.36 Genital intimacies between
partners of the same sex have been subject to a wide variety of legal,
religious, social, and medical opprobium in many different societies.
Considerable ongoing anthropological and historical work on societies
exists where such acts can be sanctioned, celebrated, and institution-
alized into forms of social reproduction. Predictably, it appears im-
possible to assign any single meaning to these acts across space and
time. Sin, preference, disease, noblest form of love, unmentionable
60 NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH

vice, pedagogy, means to establish hierarchy, military coherence, po-

litical subversion, political resistance, initiation ritual, hazing,
lifestyle, developmental phase, contingency, romantic friendship, pec-
cadillo, and various combinations of these offer themselves as candi-
dates for the possible meanings of same-sex genital intimacy.37
However, a definition eludes me here. What is less uncertain, and of
even more recent provenance than the term homosexuality itself, is the
use of this term, which is often refined to a further level of abstraction as
“sexual orientation” in a variety of public forums as a way of claiming le-
gal rights and protections. Reading sexual orientation as homosexuality
in these legal contexts is justifiable as the other orientation, heterosexu-
ality (provided we bracket its many deviant forms, such as polygamy,
prostitution, and s&m, among others), has very rarely required any pro-
tection under human rights logic. The protection of women’s rights in
heterosexual relationships has been of concern to feminist human rights.
However, protecting heterosexuality has not been necessary because, as
Adrienne Rich argues, a massive array of social, legal, political, and eco-
nomic dictates and incentives render heterosexuality “compulsory.”38
It is this meaning of homosexuality as sexual orientation, and sex-
ual orientation as part of what it universally means to be human, that
concerns us here. This meaning can claim rights in an increasingly
neoliberal network of local (the antidiscrimination ordinances and do-
mestic partner registration provisions in any number of U.S. and West-
ern European cities), national (the new constitutions of Ecuador and
South Africa), and transnational institutions (single-issue organiza-
tions like ILGA and IGLHRC, or broader umbrella human rights or-
ganizations like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International). This
relatively new meaning of homosexuality thus circulates in diverse
global public spheres,39 although events at Lambeth show it is far from
hegemonic. African neocolonial elites have been quick to contest the
universal claims of this new meaning, using a time-honored strategy
for refuting universal claims (i.e., by pointing to homosexuality’s his-
torical situatedness, its particularity), and attempt to reconfigure the
controversy as one between competing cultural relativisms.
If homosexuality, in its new meaning and overlaid with earlier reli-
gious understandings, has become un-African in elite African political
and religious discourse, what are its points of origin? In the debates lead-
ing up to the resolution vote, certain African bishops offered an answer,
in the form of asserting that it was an “abuse to impose the Western con-
cern with homosexuality on the Third World.” Bishop Benjamin Kwashi
of Nigeria said that many Africans felt “oppressed with this Western
problem.” Yet what exactly is being imported from the West here?
 NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH 61

In a discussion of African lesbianism, Gaurav Desai pithily captures

the ambivalence of the colonial experience for African sex and gender
norms, while nuancing the activist claim that it is homophobia, rather
than homosexuality, that is the decadent Western import: “Could it be
that just as British colonialism radically changed the gender possibili-
ties available to women, it may also have instituted and regulated sex-
ual practices so that the ‘offense’ at the thought of lesbianism may be
precisely the ideological mark of such intervention.”40
The homophobia of anti-imperialist movements and regimes in
such diverse contexts as Cuba, Iran, and more recently Zimbabwe,
Namibia, Kenya, and Zambia, as well as the actions and statements of
the African bishops at Lambeth, cannot simply be responded to by
white gays and lesbians with quick accusations of homophobia.41 The
translation of homophobia into “irrational fear of homosexuals” in the
resolution passed at Lambeth marks how little currency the term ho-
mophobia has in these conversations.
If I am struggling to understand why anti-imperialism cannot imag-
ine the practitioners of nonnormative sex acts as part of its con-
stituency, or why African bishops claiming to speak for the entire
Anglican Communion feel the need to exclude homosexuals, I wish to
insist that the question can be usefully reversed: What of the interna-
tional homosexual rights movement’s complicity in developmental
and universalist depictions of third world sexual mores? The problem
here is that much of the initial human rights documentation in the
West arises from asylum cases that have a vested interest in making
conditions appear as bad as possible elsewhere.
IGLHRC begins life as an immigration lobby for lesbian and gay cou-
ples divided by nationality. Supplementing this or legitimating it by re-
versal is the insistence on third world difference by lesbian, gay, and
queer anthropologists; however, since the subjects of the proliferation
of perversity hypothesis (outlined in the introduction to this book) did
not enter the debates at Lambeth, they concern me less here. Are an
interested cultural relativism or outright cultural imperialism the only
possible positions?
I suggest that the universalization of the homosexual as a transhis-
torical, trans-spatial subject, as it is articulated in human rights dis-
course and used by advocates within the Anglican Church at the 1998
Lambeth Conference, reproduces certain axiomatics of imperialism.
Like their missionary forbears, international gay rights activists and
the predominantly Anglo-American pro-gay bishops assert that their
sexual norms are the only valid ones, that their specific cultural or-
ganizations of corporeal intimacies need universal protection, in this
62 NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH

instance that sexual orientation is a common property and right of hu-

manity. Paradoxically, the antihomosexual African bishops partake in
the same legacy, by asserting another proselytizing universal norm.
However, to return to the Kuala Lumpur statement, it is possible to
mark a resistance to modern conceptions of sexuality as an identity-
conferring attribute, as the bishops proscribe all practices, heterosex-
ual or homosexual, outside of marriage.
While I am not interested in the theological aspects of these debates,
and their positions are asserted as scripturally based, I wonder if it is
possible to locate some resistance to the imposition of newer Western
norms in an insistence that sexual acts in and of themselves do not nec-
essarily give rise to sexuality. (An aside here: My secularism positions
me complicitly in these debates as religious fundamentalism is fre-
quently invoked as a sign of non-Western backwardness, particularly
by liberals; see Bishop Harris’s comments in my final section.)
To return to human rights discourse, by identifying people who en-
gage in same-sex erotic acts as homosexual persons, do we not ignore
the worlding of the majority of participants in same-sex acts in “other
cultures.” Steven O. Murray provides a long list of Arabic, Turkish, and
Farsi words indicating a range of names given to men sexually in-
volved with other men. Some of the terms refer to propensities, others
indicate the person who occupies a certain position in a sex act, and
still others refer to indeterminate gender status.
While Murray marshals this evidence to make the case for some
kind of transhistorical “homosexuality,” the cross-cultural examples
he elaborates could equally be used to explode the very notion of
“homosexuality” as an epistemologically grounding term, since the
acts, propensities, relations, and identities he records reveal a range
of understandings, if not contestations, of what may be held under
the sign “sexual” in ways that cannot be contained by the binary
homosexual/heterosexual.42
The cost/benefit analysis of claims to homosexuality and the right
to sexual orientation under global capitalism remains to be done and
would be an extremely difficult, if not impossible, empirical project.
It may be that sexuality as an organizing frame, for the claim to being
human may be the problem here rather than homosexuality per se.
Sexuality, as an organizing principle for corporeal intimacies between
partners of the same gender, is far from universal and carries the
traces of its Western origins (imbedded as they are in imperial racial
formations) in all the debates I am referencing. Moreover, the project
of international gay rights may depend on a prior successful hetero-
sexualizing of the world.43
 NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH 63

NEOLIBERALISM

In thirty-one countries of the world, the majority of them African, the

per capita foreign debt exceeds the per capita gross national product.44
The hardships this creates for these countries’ citizens cannot be under-
estimated. I would define neoliberalism as the set of global economic
policies and institutions that have created this situation. Along with Den-
nis Altman, I would isolate policies “which, in the name of the free mar-
ket and greater competition, have urged an end to restrictions on foreign
investment, privatization of government owned enterprises; reduction in
the power of unions; corporate deregulation, deficit reductions, the down-
sizing of the public sector, often through a process of ‘out-sourcing’; and
steady cuts in public expenditure on health, education and welfare.”45
These policies have become the condition for support from the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund for poor countries under the
name of “structural adjustment” over the past two decades.46
In this context, the World Conference of Anglican Bishops, along
with many other religious organizations with a global reach, functions
as a kind of global counter-public sphere. It is important to reiterate
that the other arena in which bishops of the South prevailed was in a
resolution condemning the World Bank and the International Mone-
tary Fund in relation to the problem of Third World debt. The servic-
ing of this debt was articulated as the major obstacle in the face of the
conference’s theme “Towards full humanity.”
Following the Kuala Lumpur statement, the Episcopal Synod of
America, a traditionalist organization within the Episcopal Church
USA, endorsed and commended the resolution against tolerance of ho-
mosexuality and raised the possibility that the Episcopal Church
“should be expelled from the worldwide Anglican Communion” if it
failed to reverse its acceptance of the ordination of noncelibate homo-
sexuals and the blessing of same-sex unions.
In the fall of 1997, African bishops from sixteen nations met with
American traditionalists in Dallas and issued a statement arguing that
“it is not acceptable for a pro-gay agenda to be smuggled into the
church’s program or foisted upon our people—we will not permit it.”
The statement concluded, “Those who choose beliefs and practices out-
side the boundaries of the historic faith must understand that they are
separating themselves from communion, and leading others astray.”47
The Rev. Vinay Samuel of the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies, a
sponsor of this Anglican Life and Witness Conference in Dallas, said
that the statement was a plea to churches in the North to stop making
decisions that breed disunity. “One of the key intentions of the Dallas
64 NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH

conference is to enable the church in the South, and all those com-
mitted to orthodox Christian faith, to contribute to the shaping of the
theological direction of the Anglican Communion.”48 The subsequent
failure of conservative U.S. Episcopal dioceses to match the “liberal”
funds the African Anglicans have given up on principle renders the
claim of enabling “the church in the South” ironic, if not hypocritical.
However, it was not only traditionalists who commented on the os-
tensibly homophobic positions of the African bishops. Bishop Barbara
Harris of Massachusetts, the Anglican Communion’s first woman
elected to the episcopate, was somewhat trenchant. In her column in
the diocesan newspaper, she expressed relief that the conference was
over “and I never have to do this again!” Even though she knew a
number of the bishops, Harris said, “Nonetheless, I was struck by how
precious little we really know about each other and the cultural norms
and values with which we live, as well as the depth of our divisions.”
She added, “At times it was difficult to fathom what holds the Com-
munion together beyond our love of the Lord Jesus Christ and Wip-
pell’s [international outfitters to the clergy].”
In trying to explain “the tone of the most contentious resolutions the
conference passed,” she pointed to “our different understandings and in-
terpretations of Scripture, its place in the life of the church and the strug-
gle of rapidly growing churches in the hostile environments of many
developing nations.” She claimed that another factor was the different
sharing of authority in parts of the world church. “To put it more bluntly,
in many provinces of the church—particularly those in African and
Asian countries—diocesan bishops hold absolute sway.” Claims of cul-
tural relativism are as subject to hierarchical evaluations of culture as ac-
cusations of failure to meet the standard of a putatively universal norm.
For Harris “the vitriolic, fundamentalist rhetoric of some African,
Asian and other bishops of color, who were in the majority, was in my
opinion reflective of the European and North American missionary in-
fluence propounded in the Southern Hemisphere nations during the
18th, l0th and early 2nd centuries.” In her acknowledgement of a his-
tory of colonialism, however strangely conceived (Did Christianity
have any awareness of the southern hemisphere during the second
century? What might it mean to talk of nations in the tenth century?),
Harris identifies a similar contradiction that GALZ pointed to in its
claim that it was Victorian dogma that southern African political lead-
ers were claiming as authentic African culture.
The hard-line stance on gays and lesbians and the role of women in
the church was rooted in what she called “a belief in the inerrancy and
primacy of Scripture, which supports a preexisting cultural bias.” That
 NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH 65

meant bishops from the developing world brought the same truth “that
not only had been handed to their forebears, but had been used to sup-
press them.” In addition, they found allies in “a small contingent of
U.S. bishops who had been unable to move their agenda at last sum-
mer’s General Convention.” These allegations were repeated when
Bishop Richard Holloway, the primus of the Episcopal Church of Scot-
land, publicly charged the American conservatives with influencing the
Africans. “These Americans have lost the battle in their own Episcopal
Church so they have hired a proxy army,” he said in a press interview.49
Unpacking the stakes of these various claims is a complicated task,
as many of the remarks evidence the collapse of global inequalities
into American identity politics, scriptural solidarities confound politi-
cal interests, and my allegiances become irrevocably split. Imperialist
benevolence is noteworthy in both the liberal and conservative Amer-
ican camps. African agency is simultaneously appropriated and re-
futed in a cross-ideological refusal to allow African bishops to speak
for the Anglican universal. The Africans are “their pawns,” per Harris,
or “our parrots,” per Samuel. Once again a position on sexuality is
used to police insider/outsider status, with race ironically only being
a marker for the liberal position.
West African bishops sponsored an amendment that condemns ho-
mosexuality as “a sin, which could only be adopted by the church if it
wanted to commit evangelical suicide.” New York Bishop Catherine
Roskam warned that condemning homosexuality would be “evangeli-
cal suicide in my region” and result in a “divided church.” What is in-
teresting about this exchange is the configuration in which the
historical metropole or core is reconfigured as a “region,” that West-
ern homosexuality becomes a marker of cultural, if not racial, differ-
ence. The unmarked cultural category “white” or “Western” becomes
marked through appending “homosexuality” to it. A shift in the hege-
monic constituents of the Anglican church as a global church is visi-
ble. A metropole or center is quite literally provincialized.50
Bishops from Uganda and Nigeria demanded that bishops who are
pushing for equal rights for homosexuals either repent or leave the An-
glican Communion. Bishop Wilson Mutebi of Uganda further com-
mented: “Homosexuality is a sin and any bishop who teaches otherwise
is committing a sin. He must repent in order to be in communion with
us. If he does not, we cannot be in the same church as him.” Noting in
passing that bishops are necessarily men for Bishop Mutebi, and his
anachronistic insertion of a word coined only in 1869 into an ancient
biblical discourse (sodomy may be a sin, but homosexuality is hardly
coterminous with sodomy, and I strongly suspect that the bishop would
66 NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH

have little patience with my etymological niceties), I am forced between

a grudging respect for his insistence on his right to speak for, and as, the
Anglican universal and a desire to point out the neocolonial compro-
mises that allow for this utterance.
To introduce a critical piece of narrative information late in the
day, it is important to note that the resolution started off as a pro-
homosexual resolution, with the condemnation directed against
“homophobia.” This was amended to a resolution declaring homo-
sexuality to be against Scripture. The residue of the original resolu-
tion is found only in the language condemning the “irrational fear of
homosexuals.” The process of amending the resolution may be re-
garded as a resistance on the part of African bishops to having the
homosexual agenda foisted upon them, as a refusal to submit to the
dictates of a new Western position, and to use an earlier Christian,
masquerading as African, set of arguments against it. In a Fou-
cauldian paradigm, one could argue that the first pro-homosexual
resolution put forward by the liberal bishops marked an incitement
to discourse. Had that first resolution not been put forward, no such
condemnatory resolutions would have been passed.51
Why are African elites (bishops and presidents) invested in taking
positions against homosexuality in its new neoliberal meaning of
sexual orientation as a fundamental attribute of being human? I can
only conclude with a series of speculations. As I will suggest in the
next chapter, with regard to the political elites, it is possible to allege
that their apparent homophobia is symptomatic, a strategy for de-
flecting attention from pressing social problems that they have been
unwilling or unable to address. This case is more difficult to make
against the African bishops at Lambeth, given their pointed and vo-
cal awareness of what the forces of globalization are doing to their
congregants.
In this case, the antihomosexuality positions may possibly be read
as symptomatic in another way: an attempt to mobilize a Christian
universalism shot through with the legacies of colonialism to defend
institutions of the nation and family that are increasingly hamstrung
in the reproduction of social life under neoliberalism. In order to
achieve this, these bishops became part of an uneasy global family val-
ues coalition, relying on a nostalgic and aspirational, almost phantas-
mic, structure for the distribution of resources and affect—the nuclear
family—that both could and could not accommodate African claims to
speak for, and as, the Anglican universal. They needed to forget that
110 years earlier at Lambeth they could not represent themselves, that
their sexual and familial practices were grounds for exclusion from the
 NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH 67

Anglican Communion. Sharing the homophobia of some of their Eu-

ropean and North American colleagues may mark a cost of the histor-
ical amnesia of their anti-imperialism. In turn, the pro-homosexual
liberal bishops need to remember that in the name of civilization, im-
perialism has been dictating what Africans should and should not do
with their bodies for at least 200 years in order to enter the commu-
nity/communion of the human.
 Chapter 4

WHITE MAN’S BURDEN, WHITE MAN’S DISEASE

Tracking Lesbian and Gay Human Rights

Two satirical and borderline tasteless images open this chapter on les-
bian and gay human rights in Southern Africa. The first is a cartoon
by Dov Fedler, which appeared in the Johannesburg Star on August 29,
1995, shortly after Robert Mugabe banned GALZ (Gays and Lesbians
of Zimbabwe) from the Zimbabwean International Book Fair. This im-
age shows Robert Mugabe dressed up as Marie Antoinette, eating a
slice of cake while a crowd of people press their faces to a window,
empty food bowls in their hands. A small figure wearing a baseball cap
with the logo R.S.A. (Republic of South Africa) holds a sign reading
“What a Drag.” The speech bubble from Marie Mugabe’s mouth reads:
“The peasants are hungry? Let them bash gays.”
The second image is a less widely circulated but nonetheless highly
controversial image by Steven Cohen, a leading South African per-
formance artist. Produced shortly after the drafting of the interim
South African constitution and used as a banner in the 1994 Gay Pride
March in Johannesburg, it shows Nelson Mandela in Marie Antoinette
drag. This time the caption reads “Let them eat cock.” These images,
despite their differences in genre, publics, and political points, encap-
sulate many salient features of the debate concerning lesbian and gay
human rights in Southern Africa.
The recurring figure of Marie Antoinette allows for the staging of a
number of conflicting identifications. In the Fedler cartoon, she ap-
pears as the archetype of counterrevolution. Mugabe is portrayed as
the betrayer of the Zimbabwean liberation struggle who uses homo-
phobia to deflect attention from his increasingly autocratic rule and
Zimbabwe’s social and economic problems.
Cohen’s image is more complex, inviting an identification with the
compound national leader and drag queen. Therefore, the edge of its
satire is more difficult to locate. Much is signified in these two images,
but a crucial and resonant distinction emerges between the two. In the
depiction of the Zimbabwe case, within the reworking of Marie An-
toinette’s legendary remark, peasants and gays are opposed. In the Co-
hen image, gays and peasants are ambiguously aligned through the
reference to “them” in Marie Mandela’s proclamation, “Let them eat

68
 WHITE MAN’S BURDEN, WHITE MAN’S DISEASE 69

cock.” Throw in the substitution of “cock” for “cake,” and it is implied

that “cock” is an aristocratic commodity1 beyond the peasants’ reach.
Some credence is then given to the notion of homosexuality as a prob-
lematic transnational commodity.
If we remember Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bona-
parte, the revolution and the counterrevolution are always in drag.2
These images, shot through with the legacies of racism and misogyny,
speculate on Southern African lesbian and gay human rights as part of
a European enlightenment legacy, as a decadent Western import, as
counterrevolutionary, and as new accessories to the national body.
Mugabe and Mandela appearing in drag as Marie Antoinette push at
the limits of respectability, while simultaneously staging a regional
drama about lesbian and gay human rights on a global historical stage.
This chapter traces how several circuits of discourses, values, de-
sires, and commodities were set in motion in order to account for an
unevenly imagined and lived object—lesbian and gay human rights—
in and of Southern Africa. The contents of this object are highly mo-
bile. These rights are extrapolated from a category called lesbian and
gay identity or, less specifically, “sexual orientation,” which more of-
ten than not fails to map onto the bodily practices or more extensive
worlding(s)3 of the subjects it promises to describe. Rights based on
sexual orientation are also the newest particularity in the universaliz-
ing human rights legacy of the European enlightenment.4
Lesbian and gay human rights circulate transnationally and appear
as an extremely unstable placeholder for a set of desires, anxieties,
claims, and counterclaims around modernity and cultural authenticity
in the discourses of postcolonial nationalisms, which are themselves
transnational. Within these national discourses, they are frequently
described as a threatening imperialist import. It is asserted that their
point of origin is outside the space, norms, and psyche of the nation
and that their mode of circulation is dangerously foreign, embedded
as it is in Western NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), Western-
funded local NGOs, universalist human rights discourse, and problems
of “Third World” development at the state level.
Lesbian and gay human rights also circulate as a form of access to
international donor capital for local human rights activists and as
career-making capital for transnational academics and activists in the
north who find agency in local victimage. My own complicity in this can-
not go without saying, though raising it risks a certain self-aggrandizing
chest beating, which I would rather avoid. In tracking the complicity
of the intersections of my subject positions, I write as a privileged eco-
nomic migrant to the north, as a gay white (South) African, as a
70 WHITE MAN’S BURDEN, WHITE MAN’S DISEASE

displaced not-quite-not-native informant,5 and as a professor at a large

U.S. university.
I am dependent on some of my information about Southern Africa
from the very transnational circuits I criticize in this chapter. The In-
ternational Gay and Lesbian Association’s (ILGA’s) updated Web site
references the local press in ways that permit the construction of nar-
ratives counter to the notion of lesbian and gay identity as cultural uni-
versals. Fully unpacking the scripts that allow one to work is
undoubtedly an impossible task, but I believe that my positionality
and the interests that write me necessarily appear in my work in ways
that require vigilance, at the very least.
In interesting relation to their transnational circulation, lesbian and
gay human rights have emerged as a new but vulnerable player in the
postapartheid South African national hegemony. In South Africa, their
provisionally successful institution can be accounted for by the insis-
tence on their national character against their transnational form.
The temporality of lesbian and gay human rights is equally baffling.
They emerge in the moment of transnationalism, though in Southern
Africa the moment is also the delayed moment of postcoloniality. Zim-
babwe becomes independent in 1981, Namibia follows in 1991, and South
Africa’s first democratic elections are held in 1994. These new human
rights are committedly staged as a legacy of colonialism and as facilitat-
ing a new identity-form that is threatening to national values. They be-
come a relic of the colonial past that must be transcended and/or a sign
of the transnational future that must be feared. The emergence of debates
around these rights in the time of transnationalism further exacerbates
regional competition for cultural authenticity and foreign investment.
Much of what follows is a tracking of particular nationalist resistances
to the transnational circulation of lesbian and gay human rights claims.
The histories I discuss are fast moving, and most of them are very recent.
My narrations are being superseded on the ground as I write, but their
determining patterns are embedded in much longer histories that pre-
cede and condition the object of my inquiry, some dating back to at least
the mid-nineteenth century. While the periodization of globalization and
transnationalism is undoubtedly indispensable in describing a new world
order, continuities should not be forgotten: the unmarked whiteness and
implicit masculinity of the universal human subject, the extraction of the
social surplus from the periphery even as the metropole loosens its own
geographic bounds, and the affective power and potential for agency in
ethnic and national identifications (fictitious as they may be).
The shifting histories and geographies I need to traverse in order to
account for lesbian and gay rights in and of Southern Africa are inter-
 WHITE MAN’S BURDEN, WHITE MAN’S DISEASE 71

nally complex. They map onto the structuring temporalities of post-

coloniality unevenly and often confound the spatialities of transnation-
alism. The question of which populations have access to transnational
spaces, norms, and resources remains critical, and it is not enough to
say that it is the national that lies outside the transnational. This issue
will be elaborated upon when I discuss the Zambian case. The way hu-
man rights discourses circulate within national histories, across national
boundaries (regionally), and through transnational institutions further
compounds attempts to fix the “time” of lesbian and gay human rights
in Southern Africa.
This work is necessarily provisional. In it, I try to negotiate an argu-
ment about lesbian and gay human rights in Southern Africa that steers
between the Scylla of cultural nativism (the homophobia of the Southern
African state) and the Charybdis of cultural universalism (the gay white
missionaries in traveling armchairs). The inquiry began life as an attempt
to account for the regional national differences between South Africa and
the rest of the subcontinent in terms of responses to lesbian and gay
human rights claims. This discrepancy is not only apparent at the
national legislative level, but also transnationally, if we remember the
anti-anti-gay stance of South African bishops at Lambeth in 1998. This
question still drives much of the inquiry, though the attempt to answer
why some African nationalisms articulate homophobia and others have
incorporated lesbian and gay human rights has required moving beyond
regionally competing nationalisms into the sphere of the transnational.
The chapter is divided into two sections. The first section attempts
to contextualize and nuance the relation of questions of tradition(s)
and modernity and traditions of modernity in the staging of lesbian
and gay human rights in Southern Africa. The second section reviews
the attempts to capitalize lesbian and gay victimage both in the
transnational circulation of lesbian and gay human rights and in the
national context of South Africa. Some unavoidable overlap exists be-
tween these two framings of lesbian and gay human rights.

NATIONAL TRADITIONS AND MODERNITY

Attempts to found local lesbian and gay movements in the subconti-

nent (in Zimbabwe, Namibia, Swaziland, and most recently Zambia)
have been met with a hostility strongly expressed in nationalist terms.
People laying claim to lesbian and gay identity have been sustainedly
repudiated as “corruptors of the state, enemies of the people, impedi-
ments to national progress, un-African and victims of a white man’s
72 WHITE MAN’S BURDEN, WHITE MAN’S DISEASE

disease.”6 While I do, to some extent, argue for South African excep-
tionalism in this chapter, it must be noted that the idea of homosexu-
ality as un-African and nationally other in the South African national
context has considerable currency. In terms of public debates, this was
particularly evident in the controversy surrounding Winnie Madikizela-
Mandela’s trials on kidnapping and assault charges in the earlier part
of the 1990s. The defense claimed that it was her desire to rescue
youths from exposure to homosexual corruption at the manse of the
Reverend Paul Verryn in Soweto.7
In the aftermath of President Robert Mugabe’s banning of GALZ
from the Zimbabwe International Bookfair in Harare in July 19958 and
his subsequent attacks on homosexuality as a decadent Western im-
port, the difficulties of specifically African gay and lesbian identities
have been placed on national agendas. A certain banal truth exists to
allegations of U.S. cultural imperialism in particularly gay male iden-
tity in South Africa, a fact that is arguably true for much of the world.
Gay culture (in the forms of dress, music, commercial venues, and the
forms of intimacy they structure) alongside the more usual suspects
like Coca-Cola and McDonalds has become a potent American cultural
export. Twenty years ago, Australian gay activist and academic Dennis
Altman noted that he was tempted to begin his research report with
the observation that he had danced to the Village People’s “In the
Navy” on four continents.9
In the 1990s, Cape Town’s premiere gay bar was called “The Bronx,”
and a Johannesburg sex club was named “Gotham City.” There is a def-
inite superficial sameness to commercial gay life (representationally
white) in the major South African metropolises that is recognizably
North American urban. The homogeneity can be registered in terms of
the architecture, décor, music, and fashion on display in these gay com-
mercial venues. The place names may also represent the fantasy that
gay life is elsewhere. In and of itself, however, this should not pose a
problem for those who insist on African authenticity, for many of the
most valorized objects of “authentically African” South African culture
can be shown to be U.S.–African hybrids. I am thinking here inter alia
of the Sophiatown era’s appropriation of U.S. fashion, music, and id-
ioms, particularly from B movies.10
At the same time, there are clearly visible lineaments of local “homo-
sexual” cultural worlds, though these tend to be regional and/or race and
class specific. The most obvious examples would be “Gayle,” a subcul-
tural alliterative rhyming slang using women’s names (Dora for a drink,
Hilda for hideous, Rita for rent-boy), the distinctiveness of Cape Town
“moffie” styles of embodiment, and “township drag,” to name a few.11
 WHITE MAN’S BURDEN, WHITE MAN’S DISEASE 73

Lesbian and gay identity can be figured as Western imports, though

no one can claim a monopoly on acts that appear homosexual to a
Western eye. Western cultural influence is equally pervasive in the
wider “straight” society. President Mugabe is obviously less worried
about Western cultural imperialism when he puts on a suit and tie in
the morning, and no one accuses monogamous heterosexuality of be-
ing a decadent Western import (which, given the historical polygamy
of many sub-Saharan African societies, it clearly is).
Nevertheless, given the historical inequities of apartheid, gay white
men have the financial resources to render themselves far more visi-
ble in terms of media representations and have had more impact on
urban geographies, which can go some way in accounting for the
equation of gayness and whiteness in the popular consciousness, at
large. The difficulty of disentangling the spaces of gayness and white-
ness is particularly evident in the debates over where to hold the an-
nual Gay Pride march in Johannesburg (in the predominantly black
downtown or in the predominantly white northern suburbs) and what
to call it (a march, a parade, a Mardi Gras).12 Homosexuality’s assumed
whiteness is equally pertinent in the context of the United States, where
African Americans and other people of color laying claim to lesbian and
gay identity have had to negotiate this perception, alongside racism,
within white lesbian and gay communities.13 Variables of race and class
inflect questions of gay identity in familiar ways.
Several strategies for the achievement of gay and lesbian equality are
recognizable to an American eye. The idea of citizenship rights being con-
nected to the figure of the citizen-consumer is emergent. This is visible
in claims to political and civil rights being framed in terms of economic
clout. The South African Gay Pages is a new addition to the gay press and
claims to have the biggest circulation of all gay and lesbian publications.
They [The South African Tourist Industry] would be shocked to dis-
cover that their image of gay drag queens, limp-wristed madams and
butch dykes can be completely blown out of the water. We look, talk
and act like typical boring tourists with fat wallets. On much closer in-
spection a very large percentage of pink money is spent on holidays
and other forms of entertainment. It is also a fact that our average in-
come levels fall into the top income levels of society. Going away,
overseas, to the coast or for a quiet weekend in the country, is an in-
tegral part of our lives yet no South African advertising agency has
spent any money on leisure marketing to the wealthiest segment of the
population.14, 15

In a country with a 37 percent unemployment rate and approxi-

mately 6 million homeless people, this rhetoric can only speak to a
74 WHITE MAN’S BURDEN, WHITE MAN’S DISEASE

very small minority of South Africans who engage in same-sex erotic

practices.16 A clearly demarcated gay neighborhood17 has emerged in
Cape Town (the Waterfront/Greenpoint nexus) though much of the
gay commercial life (there are no lesbian venues) appears tourist
rather than community driven.18 Certain areas in Durban, Johan-
nesburg, and Pretoria aspire to gay-friendly status. These tend to be
subsumed in a more generalized and increasingly multiracial Bo-
hemia, though many gay bars have followed white flight to the sub-
urbs.19 Income levels, the different identifications of those engaging
in same-sex sexual acts, and the sustaining power of the extended
family unit make such a sociocultural space unthinkable in the
townships. Assimilation into gay middle-class whiteness is patently
not an option.
Following the development of capitalism, gay and lesbian identity
is dependent on certain material conditions.20 As a result, accusations
that gay and lesbian identity is a sign of cultural imperialism will in-
evitably contain a grain of truth. Nevertheless, the cultural imperial-
ism model needs to be nuanced by acknowledging that ideas,
strategies, and identities are transformed when they are used from be-
low. It may only be the privileged, traveling, cosmopolitan intellectual
(and the neocolonial elites) who recognize these identities as Western.
In addition, vulnerable groups can mobilize in their own interests the
perceived power and prestige of things Western. If we accept that les-
bian and gay identity follow, however unevenly, the development of
capitalism (which is now in its transnational mode), the question still
remains why in some national contexts lesbian and gay human rights
can be incorporated into the sphere of the national, whereas in others
they must be repudiated as antinational.
This brings me to a range of questions I cannot answer, but
merely pose. Avoiding economism, how can one track the relation of
the differential embedding of the economies of South Africa, Zim-
babwe, Zambia, and Swaziland in both the regional and global eco-
nomic systems to the contestation of lesbian and gay human rights,
nationally and regionally? How may this relation be nuanced by the
specificities of their colonial histories and their anti- and postcolo-
nial struggles?
The increased densities of exchange under globalization, the
global reach of the AIDS pandemic,21 and the emergence of interna-
tional gay and lesbian human rights must necessarily complicate the
ideas of national integrity and cultural authenticity previously im-
plied in understanding lesbian and gay rights as a problematic impe-
rialist import.
 WHITE MAN’S BURDEN, WHITE MAN’S DISEASE 75

TRADITIONS OF MODERNITY

The resistance to “gay and lesbian” human rights in Southern Africa is

frequently phrased along familiar faultlines in the more general discourse
of anticolonial nationalisms, paradoxically itself a transnational dis-
course. Such nationalist discourse is almost axiomatically generated from
a contradictory nexus of tradition and modernity. The emergent nation
must simultaneously posit itself as the vehicle of economic and cultural
progress—in short, as the agent of modernity—and as the custodian of a
fixed (in all senses of the word) identity conferring precolonial past—in
short, as the repository of tradition.22 Differently classed and gendered na-
tional subjects are required to embody these diverging spaces in the emer-
gent nation, and it is usually but not always the case that women and
rural populations are assigned the representational task of tradition. Men,
particularly urban men, are seen to embody progress into modernity.23
What position may the gay or lesbian national subject occupy in this
already temporally fraught project of the nation’s self-representation, as
simultaneously the voice of the past and the vehicle of the future? Is it
possible to speak of a lesbian or gay national subject at all under the
discourses of anticolonial and postcolonial nationalisms, given the trans-
national character of these subject positions? The previous chapter es-
tablished the difficulties of imagining a gay or lesbian Christian African
subject in similar debates about sexuality, authenticity, and race.
Framing this debate around lesbian and gay rights results in two con-
figurations within the nationalist rhetorics of the Southern African post-
colonial state. The first configuration posits African tradition fairly
homophobically and as monolithically conceived against Westernized
modernity, with homosexuality coming to represent a Western decadent
import and a disavowable excess of the process of economic modern-
ization that the state wishes to achieve. Modernity represents the hori-
zon of both prosperity and perversity. This configuration is a deeply
familiar one and plays out in South Africa and the neighboring countries
(Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe) that have also seen sig-
nificant public debates about the possibilities of African lesbian and gay
identities in recent years. Certain strands of African nationalism are ex-
plicit in their rejection of lesbian and gay citizenship rights, as discussed
in this book’s introduction. This rejection is frequently legitimized as a
defense of national, but more particularly racial, authenticity.24
Responses to these invariably racialized and developmental attacks
(white and decadent) on “homosexuality” in Namibia have displayed
a wider array of rhetorical strategies than the initial responses to the
Zimbabwe case. Activists have used the language of universal human
76 WHITE MAN’S BURDEN, WHITE MAN’S DISEASE

rights, which arguably reinforces notions of homosexuality as exces-

sive Westernization and have additionally asserted the existence of a
range of precolonial sexual practices and “traditions,” which could be
called “homosexual.” Within the configuration of tradition versus
Western modernity, they have attempted to reclaim “anthropological”
traditions of African sexualities that are appropriable under the sign
“homosexuality.”
The GALZ response to the Namibian fracas counterprojected the
charge of European taint onto SWAPO (South West African Peoples’
Organization), claiming that homophobia rather than “homosexual-
ity” is the corrupting Western import: “The minds of many of our
Southern African political leaders remain thoroughly colonised by Vic-
torian dogma which they now have the audacity to claim is the back-
bone of our African cultural heritage.”25 Whether or not research into
precolonial practices can produce authentically African homosexuali-
ties, I am doubtful whether the discovery of such practices can be ef-
fectively inserted into the debate in a simple reversal with
“homosexuality” holding the place of tradition in the Janus-faced tem-
poral discourse of anti- and postcolonial nationalism.
The discussion of Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters in chapter 2
showed the ways in which homosexual identity can be displaced from
the space of tradition along the lines of class (“the exclusive coteries
in Lagos”), religion (“The Emirs and their little boys”), and geography
(Joe Golder is an American, not a Nigerian). I maintain that the cate-
gory of tradition, far from being a stable placeholder, is continually
subject to revisions from the interested point of the present. To take on
the terms of the traditionalist argument is in some way to have already
lost the argument before beginning it.
If lesbian and gay identity are understood as an undesirable surplus
of the generally desired economic Westernization, what are the
African traditions that such identities are seen to flout? Zimbabwean
gay men and lesbians are under attack from their government and
many other sectors in their society. Members of Christian groups, such
as the Zimbabwe Assemblies of God Africa Church, have taken to the
streets in support of their president.26 This points to the profoundly hy-
brid nature of what gets mobilized under the sign of tradition in the
subcontinent. Christian norms and values, arguably Western imports
par excellence, are often invoked as “authentic African tradition” in
the context of rebutting claims to citizenship rights by gay men and
lesbians under the Southern African postcolonial state.
In Zimbabwe, African men are being urged to return to their villages
to take a “traditional cure.”27 One man expressed anxiety about taking
 WHITE MAN’S BURDEN, WHITE MAN’S DISEASE 77

the cure, fearing that it would be successful. He did not want to be

straight again, because, “in the city, I have got my husband and I am
married to him—sort of.” The existence of a “traditional” cure may
point to the existence of a “traditional” problem, implicitly challeng-
ing President Mugabe’s characterizing of homosexuality as an “im-
moral import,” but may also simply suggest the improvisatory genius
of “tradition.”
The existence of a Shona word hungochani,28 while not entirely
coterminous with the English “homosexual,” also suggests an indige-
nous provenance and character to some of these sexual activities. This
Zimbabwean gay man invoked the Shona animist belief in ancestor spirit
possession, saying that gay men were inhabited by the spirits of their
“aunties.” Like African Christianities, lesbian and gay identity also takes
on hybrid forms and articulations. The relation of questions of tradition
and customary law to citizenship in South Africa is enormously complex,
given the dual nature of “tradition” as a site of resistance to apartheid
and as part of apartheid’s legacy in the form of tribal homelands and at-
tendant customary law.29 Nevertheless, the new constitution implies that
the “equality clause” will trump customary law in cases of conflict.
The fracas around gay men and lesbians in Zimbabwe was clearly in-
flected by race relations in that country, where a small minority of
whites retained considerable economic clout for close to the first twenty
years of independence under a regime that became increasingly op-
pressive to the vast majority of its citizens. Recent developments in
Namibia show that gay men and lesbians elsewhere in the region are be-
ing subject to similar kinds of attack. President Sam Nujoma of Namibia
vowed to “uproot” homosexuality from Namibian society at the Second
SWAPO Women’s Congress at Gobabis on December 6, 1996, employ-
ing almost identical rhetoric to that of his Zimbabwean counterpart.30
What is at stake in such remarks is far from simple “homophobia,”
if homophobia can ever be said to be simple. It is tempting to see the
homophobia of strands of African nationalism as a site of displaced re-
sistance to a perceived encroachment on neocolonial nationalism by
the forces of globalization. This is in concert with factors of local and
regional provenance that will be discussed later. In addition, it marks
a struggle between national identity and the colonial legacy.
I now wish to speculate on a historical obstacle in the path of African
nationalism’s incorporation of lesbian and gay rights in South Africa,
and one that speaks to earlier transnational movements of labor and
capital. I am reliant here on T. Dunbar Moodie’s classic investigation
into male “mine marriages” in the Witwatersrand and the Orange Free
State gold mines in the heyday of migrant labor. This period ran from
78 WHITE MAN’S BURDEN, WHITE MAN’S DISEASE

the discovery of gold in 1886 to the formation of the National Minework-

ers Union in 1982.
As an undergraduate at the University of the Witwatersrand in the
mid-1980s, I remember a United Democratic Front (UDF) spokesper-
son answering a question from a gay white student on roughly the fol-
lowing lines: In the postapartheid South Africa, there will be no
homosexuality, because homosexuality is caused by apartheid’s de-
formation of the African family. I want to suspend reactions of horri-
fied dismissal, because although his conclusions have been proved
wrong, something can be learned from his framing of the question of
sexuality. He insists on connecting sexuality to questions of political
economy. Every aspect of life in South Africa under apartheid was in-
formed by the political economy of apartheid, and the regulation of
South Africans’ sexual lives was a priority for the apartheid state.31
The most culturally prominent form of African same-sex sexual re-
lations was short-term age and role-differentiated quasi-contractual
marriages between rural migrant mine workers in the large single-sex
compounds they lived in near the mines. The changing world of these
miners has been exquisitely captured and brilliantly theorized in T.
Dunbar Moodie and Vivienne Ndatshe’s Going for Gold: Men, Mines
and Migration (1994).32 Moodie analyzes these same-sex sexual rela-
tions as functioning within resistances to proletarianization by the
miners who come to the mines on contracts of varying lengths in or-
der to make money to establish independent homesteads in their rural
places of origin. Many of them were married to women in the coun-
tryside, as contact with “town” women was perceived as potentially
dangerous to their focus on establishing their rural homes.
So far this does not look very different to what has been termed “con-
tingent homosexuality” in prisons, for example. But what Moodie goes
on to establish as he recounts the changing patterns of migration over
the decades is the equally historically contingent nature of these min-
ers’ heterosexual relations as well. As mine wages rise and the rural re-
gions become more and more impoverished, the miners become more
involved with town women or bring their rural wives to the mine. The
conditions that made marriage to a young male miner attractive to the
older rural migrant disappear in the face of galloping proletarianization
and attendant heterosexualization of these miners’ relationships.
In a review of Moodie, Zackie Achmat astutely points out that the af-
fectionate content of these relationships (the fact that these men may
have loved each other) is elided in Moodie’s account. While I think
Achmat is correct in noting this, it should be pointed out that very little
space is accorded to how they may have felt about their heterosexual
 WHITE MAN’S BURDEN, WHITE MAN’S DISEASE 79

relations. What strikes me most about Moodie’s analysis of the miners’

shifting sexualities is his willingness to insert sexuality into a complex
web of social relations and the implications that forms of heterosexual-
ity, far from being naturally given, are historically contingent.33
Let us imagine how an anti-apartheid nationalist might read this in-
formation. There is no doubt that migrant labor, although it could be
understood by the miners themselves as something co-optable to their
interests, was a super exploitative form of labor. The migrants were not
paid a living wage, and the mining houses relied on the rural home-
stead to cover many of the reproductive labor costs. Migrancy did sep-
arate husbands and wives, children and fathers for long periods of
time. As the labor force changed over the decades, the miners with the
strongest rural links continued the tradition of male marriage. As the
rural areas from which the miners were recruited changed, this tradi-
tion became more ethnically marked: Mpondo, Shangaan, Sotho. Anti-
apartheid nationalism in South Africa has had to, and still continues
to, work hard to smooth over ethnic differences. In the project of na-
tion building, the miners who tended to engage in same-sex marriages
would have been a particularly reactionary component. These miners
would be more interested in getting back to their rural homes than or-
ganizing on the mines, more invested in the institution of migrant la-
bor, and more traditionalist with strong ethnic identifications.
Since I suspect that all recoverable same-sex practices will be histor-
ically contingent in similar ways and will never be able to be inserted as
authentic African tradition in ways that will be useful to postcolonial na-
tionalism, we need to configure the debate around the region’s lesbian
and gay rights in another way, one that may be more congenial to South-
ern African nationalisms by bracketing the question of Western taint
more effectively and situating the debate within the discourses of
African anticolonial nationalism rather than between such nationalisms
and the “West.” Given a population enormously sensitive to questions
of discrimination and with a vast majority having the experience of op-
pression vivid in their memories, a national culture with an allegiance
to concepts of equality is being forged in South Africa. Gays and lesbians
now almost find themselves part of this new South African hegemony.
Many confrontations clearly lie ahead, and social conservatives fed
by a strong Christian element within the ANC and in the wider society
(including white conservatives who criminalized “homosexuality” in
the first place) are going to resist gay and lesbian demands for equality.
This battle will also be fought around other issues, like abortion. Nev-
ertheless, the entrenchment of human rights discourse through at least
fifty years of anti-apartheid nationalist struggle is firmly on the side of
80 WHITE MAN’S BURDEN, WHITE MAN’S DISEASE

lesbian and gay South Africans. The following chapter will explore the
postapartheid state’s failure to respond effectively to the HIV/AIDS pan-
demic, claiming that questions of normative sex in relation to ideas of na-
tional and racial authenticity determine the terrain again. One of the
strategies of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), the leading advocacy
organization for people living with HIV in South Africa, has been to in-
voke rights language in terms of health care, revealing a sustained at-
tempt to use human rights as a kind of indigenous political tradition.
An entrenchment of human rights discourse can arguably be classi-
fied as a South African tradition. However, this tradition is in the histor-
ical or political sense, as opposed to the quasi-anthropological racial
sense invoked by national leaders (such as President Mugabe and Presi-
dent Nujoma) and paradoxically by scholars and activists searching for
authentic African homosexualities. That a human rights tradition in the
liberation struggle within South Africa and Southern Africa exists is ap-
parent if one looks at a document like the Freedom Charter adopted by
the Congress of the People on June 26, 1955, at Kliptown, outside Jo-
hannesburg. This was a key document for the liberation struggle, both
for the ANC and for later internal movements such as the UDF (United
Democratic Front), which emerged when the ANC was forced under-
ground and into exile. The Freedom Charter adopts many of the rights
claims of earlier human rights documents, such as the United Nation’s
Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, adapting many of its
principles to the South African Context and adding rights not usually in-
cluded in the panoply of liberal rights discourse, such as the right of the
people to own the country’s mineral wealth, the redistribution of land to
those who work it, and “free, compulsory and universal education.”34
Close attention to the language of those opposed to extending rights
to people laying claim to lesbian and gay identity reveals an awareness
that this tradition is also a site of contestation. When the equality clause
was debated in June 1995, only the African Christian Democratic Party
objected to the inclusion of sexual orientation, primarily on religious
grounds. However, it also asserted that “lifestyle activists were riding on
the back of civil rights movements.”35 This strikes me as language lifted
straight from U.S. debates around the status of lesbians and gay men as
another ethnic minority, because South Africans rarely framed their
struggle as a civil rights movement.
Following on Nujoma’s vow to uproot homosexuality in Namibia,
Alpheus Naruseb, SWAPO’s secretary for Information and Publicity,
added his voice to the fray, stating that:
It should be noted that most of the ardent supporters of these perverts
are Europeans who imagine themselves to be the bulwark of civilisation
 WHITE MAN’S BURDEN, WHITE MAN’S DISEASE 81

and enlightenment. They are not only appropriating foreign ideas in our
society but also destroying the local culture by hiding behind the facade
of the very democracy and human right we have created.36

Both the ACDP’s and Naruseb’s statements concede that human rights
are not inimicable to Southern African nationalisms, that they are an
internal or internalized tradition of the anticolonial struggle and can
consequently be mobilized by those laying claim to lesbian and gay
identities. Tradition, understood as a set of political principles and
strategies forged through struggle, can and should be mobilized in the
debate about African gay and lesbian identities. But tradition, homo-
sexual or heterosexual, imagined as the repository of an authentic
racial or national essence, despite its considerable affective power,
should be viewed with a little more circumspection.
Despite the legal successes for lesbian and gay subjects in South
Africa, the notion of homosexuality as representative of national oth-
erness is evident on the popular level. This is obviously more difficult
to archive, but is evident in popular cultural productions and in every-
day speech. For example, consider the township slang term denoting
the flood of immigrants (mostly from other African countries) who
have entered the country since apartheid’s demise. These people are
often called makwerekwere. However, this term’s etymology is con-
tested. Some maintain that it refers to the meaningless sounds such
immigrants make.37 Makwerekwere is also said to derive from the twit-
tering of queleas, small migratory birds that travel in large flocks and
are destructive to crops.38 Its homonymic relation to the English word
queer cannot go unnoticed, either. In this case, the reversal in this le-
gitimating reversal should be noted; it is not queerness that is foreign
but foreignness that is queer. However, the association still stands, ei-
ther way.
The association between foreignness and sexual deviance cannot be
proved entirely, as there may be some residue of the older English
meaning of queer as strange or unusual, without necessarily contain-
ing sexual content. Assuming that the queer in makwerekwere refers
to perceived sexual deviance takes one down interesting speculative
paths. Why should these immigrants be queer? Could the imputation
of queerness be a strategy for dealing with the anxiety that they are
stealing jobs from South Africans? Consequently, could calling them
“queer” be understood as a remasculinizing response to the fear of
economic castration? Could the imputation of queerness be a response
to the fact that many of the immigrants are seen to be removed from
recognizable familial ties and are understood as parasitic on, rather
than productive and reproductive members of, the national body?
82 WHITE MAN’S BURDEN, WHITE MAN’S DISEASE

In Phaswane Mpe’s 2001 novel, Welcome to Our Hillbrow (which is ex-

tensively discussed in my final chapter), the idea of the makwerekwere
as causing the HIV/AIDS pandemic in South Africa is powerfully pre-
sented and critiqued. I do not know the full range of the significations
of makwerekwere but feel obliged to note its emergence as a sign of a
whole range of signifiers around deviant sexuality that are not re-
ducible to rights claims in the South African context and inscribe
transnationalism in another way.
The anti-immigrant feelings, perhaps homophobically encoded in
makwerekwere, reflect the forces of economic globalization in two
ways. The increased mobility of labor across national borders has led
to these anti-immigrant sentiments, which have also been reinforced
by the new regime’s failure to meet many of the economic hopes and
expectations that black South Africans had for apartheid’s demise. The
new South African government has faced great difficulties in imple-
menting needed social services programs and job-creation schemes
under the tight monetarist policies of the World Bank and International
Monetary Fund. Problems also exist in attracting foreign investment in
the same moment as the opening up of markets in eastern Europe and
central Asia, while having to cope with the largest HIV/AIDS pan-
demic in the world.
An interregional contest exists around authentic “African identity”
being played out over the question of sexuality. South Africa’s emer-
gence from world pariah status following apartheid’s demise has al-
lowed its position as the region’s economic superpower to be felt with
a new moral authority. The fact that South Africa’s constitution em-
braces equal rights for those of divergent sexual orientations can be
mobilized by Namibia or Zimbabwe. These countries, and not the
racially more hybrid giant to the south, still claim the region’s au-
thentic African moral leadership that they had as members of the so-
called frontline states at the forefront of the fight against apartheid.
It cannot pass without comment that three of the five African so-
cieties that have seen major controversies around gay and lesbian is-
sues had a particular experience of colonialism. To varying degrees,
South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Namibia were all settler colonies, ren-
dering their indigenous inhabitants more open to Western norms.
This experience also posited the problem of white African identities,39
opening a gap between national and racial identities, in which “ho-
mosexuality” has come to represent a racial marker as well as an un-
easy developmental one. Regional national variations are further
inflected by the transnational circulation of lesbian and gay human
rights claims.
 WHITE MAN’S BURDEN, WHITE MAN’S DISEASE 83

CAPITALIZING VICTIMAGE TRANSNATIONALLY

Transnational activism’s role in the contests around lesbian and gay

rights in Southern Africa is an important one, riddled with complexities
and complicities. How does the Zambian debate produce the apparently
absurd sentence “homosexuality is a Norwegian conspiracy”? Perhaps
an unwitting conspiracy exists between homophobic regimes and local
and international activists in the institution of the hetero/homo binary
as a subject-making discourse in the Southern African context. The claim
and refusal of rights becomes an inaugural moment in the attempted
homosexualization of participants in same-sex corporeal intimacies. The
Zambian case allows this dynamic to be seen in its most blatant form.
On July 14, 1998, The Zambian Post publishes an article about Fran-
cis Chisambisha, who walked into their offices to announce that he is
gay. He then called on gays to form an NGO to fight for their rights.
The next day, a local human rights organization, Zambian Indepen-
dent Monitoring Team (ZIMT), takes up the case; its leader, Alfred
Zulu, states: “We have been visited by Netherlands and US-based gay
organizations who have expressed desire to sponsor the protection of
gay rights in Zambia and lobby for the removal of statutes that are
against those with a variant sexual orientation from the Penal Code.”40
He claims that 10,000 gays and lesbians are in Zambia.41 By Septem-
ber 3, ZIMT claims there are 500,000.42
The Lesbians, Gays, Bisexual and Transgender Persons Association
(LEGATRA) is formed and announces its intention to register as an
NGO with the Registrar of Societies.43 The state responds with vitriolic
hostility and threatens to use the antisodomy laws against anyone
“promoting homosexuality.”44 The Norwegian ambassador intervenes
on the side of LEGATRA.45 Ironically (and I think accurately), The Post,
on whose pages this is played out, attributes the Zambian public dis-
cussion to the aftermath of Robert Mugabe’s banning of GALZ from the
Zimbabwean International Book Fair. No one was arrested (this was
also true of Namibia, though extensive police harassment occurred in
Zimbabwe), LEGATRA never registered, and ZIMT got international
pink money to fight the laws. LEGATRA was disbanded and Chisam-
bisha sought political asylum in South Africa in December 1999.46
What agencies afford lesbian and gay identity in Zambia in this tale?
LEGATRA needed threats of state oppression and expressions of na-
tional homophobia in order to mobilize an international gay and les-
bian constituency and more problematically to fund its attempts to use
homophobia to produce a local constituency. “More than 20 gay and
lesbian Zambians” joined LEGATRA.47 Where were the 500,000, or
84 WHITE MAN’S BURDEN, WHITE MAN’S DISEASE

even the 10,000? While these numbers are clearly mythical, they are
important in establishing claims to a movement that the transnational
activists can step in and claim to be supporting.
Yet given the debate’s short-lived nature and the actual numerical
support LEGATRA admitted to being able to muster, it appears far
more likely that the movement is an effect of transnational organizing
rather than an indigenous grassroots movement.48 Paradoxically, the
Zambian government’s homophobic rhetoric can be given credence by
the very actors that wish to repudiate it. When Zambian government
calls homosexuality a Norwegian conspiracy, a recognition exists of
what is at stake in transnational lesbian and gay organizing. As absurd
as it may sound to well-intentioned Westerners, it cannot just be dis-
missed as a knee-jerk xenophobic homophobia.
What an organization like LEGATRA needs to exclude in the very
moment it claims to be speaking for them are Zambians whose erotic
practices may be organized along very different lines than those pro-
posed by the homo/hetero binary. The state needs to produce its popu-
lation as always and already heterosexualized in a reaction formation to
globalization’s traumas. The transnationally fuelled local organizations
need to produce a population always and already homosexualized and
in need of protection from the defensively homophobic state. What both
camps necessarily collude in foreclosing are the diversity of desires, prac-
tices, and possibly identities and communities on the ground. Transna-
tional activist organizations are clearly interested in a site for research
into such desires, practices, identities, and communities, yet under glob-
alization they are the only players with resources to place in the service
of knowledges that might undermine their very universalist rationale.
How intervening in, if not producing, Southern African controversies
works for transnational lesbian and gay organizations, above and beyond
helping to produce their raison d’être, is the subject for another inquiry.
The stakes of this unintended collision/collusion between Southern
African regimes, transnational activism, and donor countries are visi-
ble in a New Era editorial of February 10, 1997. This editorial, which
speaks to the Namibian debate following President Nujoma’s deroga-
tory remarks about gays and lesbians, is worth citing at length:

We are today forced to comment on the current verbal foray against

president Nujoma and the SWAPO by the minority gay and lesbian com-
munity in this country. This is not because we think it is an important
issue. We do realise however, that there are a bunch of lesbians, homo-
sexuals and sodomites, who have embarked on a concerted and or-
chestrated campaign to occupy this nation with its self-centred deviant
activities. It is even more unfortunate that certain sections of this na-
 WHITE MAN’S BURDEN, WHITE MAN’S DISEASE 85

tion’s supposedly respectable media can spend columns of precious

newsprint to go to the European Union, America and Canada, and incite
the international community to consider stopping donor support to
Namibia on account of a lesbian and homosexual issue . . . they think
this is the way they can blackmail a popularly elected majority govern-
ment. . . . The fight for the rights of lesbians and homosexuals started
and is still raging in Europe, America, Canada and all those societies
calling themselves advanced and civilised. In fact, the few pockets of
lesbian and gay activists in our African countries today are offshoots of
those in advanced countries. . . . The people of Namibia want food, shel-
ter, medication, an abundant and clean water supply and other basic ne-
cessities they were denied during the years of colonial plunder. The
government is busy with this programme and has no time to waste on
gay and lesbian issues.
While many of the stagings of lesbian and gay human rights (as Western
import or national threat) should be familiar by now, the passage ges-
tures toward a set of transnational networks that frame the debate about
lesbian and gay human rights in Southern Africa. The structure of a
scholarly project unpacking these networks would entail a dizzying ar-
ray of competing literacies. I will attempt one brief framing. Under glob-
alization, national programs for redistribution of social surpluses are
hamstrung. The provision of basic services, such as “food, shelter, med-
ication, an abundant and clean water supply,” are increasingly depend-
ent on aid from donor countries (though it is important to remember that
through debt service Africa is a net exporter of capital). These donor
countries are, or are imagined as, the custodians of a set of liberal values,
with tolerance of homosexuality among them. Yet the selectivity of these
ostensibly universal rights and values must be noticed as propaganda.
They ignore the very rights the editorial calls for, such as the right to eat,
the right to shelter, the right to clean water, and the right to health care.
The legacy of Cold War rhetoric is apparent in the use of these se-
lective, but imagined as universal, human rights as weapons against
unpopular Third World regimes. One is caught in the impossible posi-
tion of either defending nationalist invocations of homophobia and be-
ing aligned with the rhetorical overkill of the passage I cite or
celebrating “local” lesbian and gay human rights claims as successful
mobilizations of imperial power.
The presence of the term sodomite in the editorial marks the invo-
cation of religious discourse and the hangover of an earlier formation.
The subject of sodomy can claim no rights. The term reveals the re-
fusal to engage Christianity as a colonial legacy, as it implicitly works
a version of Christian universalism against the emergent human rights
universalism that would include lesbian and gay human rights.
86 WHITE MAN’S BURDEN, WHITE MAN’S DISEASE

CAPITALIZING VICTIMAGE NATIONALLY

South Africa was the first nation-state in the world to enshrine gay and
lesbian rights in its constitution.49 This was as much a world histori-
cal event as a national one. Section 8 of Act 200 of the Interim Consti-
tution (1993, ratified 1996) made discrimination on the grounds of
sexual orientation unlawful. This is the equality clause:
No person shall be unduly discriminated against, directly or indirectly,
and, without derogating from the generality of this provision, on one or
more of the following grounds in particular: race, gender, sex, ethnic or
social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, religion, conscience, belief,
culture or language.

The clause’s passage was contested. When the Theme Committee on

Fundamental Rights debated this equality clause on June 12, 1995,
sexual orientation’s inclusion in the equality clause was the only issue
considered. The National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality (NCGLE)
was formed to ensure that the clause be retained and applied. The con-
stitutional clause both reflected and inspired a growing lesbian and
gay movement, which had begun in the 1960s as a quietist white law
reform movement, but had increasingly aligned itself with the wider
liberation struggle.50
However, legal changes continue to be fought piecemeal. Although the
Western Cape Region has struck sodomy laws from its statutes, the Min-
ister of Justice, Dullah Omar, announced in December 1997 that his Jus-
tice Department was going to oppose the removal of national antisodomy
statutes from the law books, the constitution notwithstanding (ANC De-
cember 20 meeting). While the minister later recanted, this contestation
remains ongoing. Gauteng province has also repealed its sodomy statutes
and, in October 1998, the Constitutional Court declared all remaining
provincial sodomy laws unconstitutional. Several succesful lawsuits have
upheld the constitution in the arenas of employment discrimination, cus-
tody disputes, joint adoption, and immigration rights for the partners of
South African lesbian and gay citizens.51 Marriage is on the horizon.
In terms of legal recognition, South African gay men and lesbians
are on the whole successfully claiming full citizenship rights. While
acknowledging the limits of the law as a tool for social transformation,
and while much, though not all, of the increasing cultural presence
and visibility remains recognizably white, these are considerable
achievements for a fledgling lesbian and gay movement. I suggest
these achievements can be accounted for by a combination of national
and transnational factors.
 WHITE MAN’S BURDEN, WHITE MAN’S DISEASE 87

The lateness of South Africa in the postcolonial moment is significant.

In the drafting of the South African constitution, an attempt was self-
consciously made to learn from the failures of prior liberation move-
ments across the globe. The ANC’s Women’s League was adamant that
their national liberation movement was not going to repeat the sexist fail-
ings of decolonization. The ANC’s commitment to reserving 30 percent
of all its parliamentary positions for women was one result. The consti-
tution was to be the most inclusive and most progressive constitution.
Given the illegitimacy of the regime being replaced and the imperative
to incorporate the most recent or “advanced” form of human rights, the
timing of the South African constitution in the history of postcolonialism
facilitated the entrenchment of lesbian and gay human rights. Ironically,
this same timing in the moment of globalization has severely hampered
South Africa’s first democratically elected government to mount pro-
grams of national reconstruction and distributive justice.
Transnational circulations exist at the level of rhetoric that may re-
ward investigation. When Bishop Tutu calls South Africa “a rainbow
nation,”52 is he referencing Jesse Jackson’s “rainbow coalition” in the
United States?53 Is either party referencing the most visible and com-
modified emblem of lesbian and gay identity in the United States,
which is increasingly spread globally: the rainbow flag?
To return to the organizational ruse of national explanations, South
Africa, as a former settler-colony in which settlers remained in the mi-
nority, with an indigenous capitalist infrastructure operating a kind of
internal colonialism, is only uneasily classified as a postcolonial state.
This history, along with the extended duration and particular charac-
ter of the South African national liberation struggle, may also help to
account for the entrenchment of lesbian and gay human rights.
A comparison with the United States—often understood as an origi-
nary home54 of lesbian and gay identity and attendant human rights—
may be useful here. Although it is important to note similarities between
U.S. and South African contexts and debates around the racial and na-
tional character of lesbian and gay identity, the terms white and Western
and African and African American do not map easily onto each other,
and significant contextual differences also need to be apprehended. The
specificities of the South African context preclude easy translation, but
there is much to be learned in recognizing the differences.
A few points clarifying a crucial difference may be useful: The
American lesbian and gay civil rights struggle has often sought to de-
fine itself as another minority within the panoply of American multi-
culturalism.55 The question of minority rights in South Africa is not at
all part of a progressive rhetoric. It is a discourse largely belonging to
88 WHITE MAN’S BURDEN, WHITE MAN’S DISEASE

whites. (Affirmative action is seen as applying to a majority popula-

tion rather than minority ones.) Any attempt on the part of a South
African gay and lesbian movement to stage itself as an ethnic minor-
ity56 would align it with precisely the discredited apartheid ideology
that legally oppressed gays and lesbians, again with a massive racial
differential. To phrase a comparative question in relation to the United
States, what is the difference between affiliating with a national liber-
ation struggle and attempting to write oneself in as the next minority
protagonist in an ostensibly inclusive civil rights struggle?
This ongoing, contested, and fragmentary attempt to affiliate with
a national liberation struggle and position itself within, rather than in
opposition, to the new South African hegemony lends South African
gay and lesbian identity politics a particular character. At the risk of
stating the obvious, South African society is in the throes of enormous,
protracted, and sometimes painful transformation. The position of gay
men and lesbians is being negotiated in this wider racial and economic
context. During a march in Cape Town just prior to South Africa’s first
democratic elections, a throng of people followed Albie Sachs, long-
time ANC activist and now a judge on the Constitutional Court, and
Miss Langa, the ruling drag queen from the large black township of the
same name, outside the city. The crowd chanted: “We don’t want a
president. We just want a queen.” This street spectacle, which is as
culturally indebted to the protest marches of the apartheid era (the
crowd toy-toyid rather than walked) as to Euro-American gay pride pa-
rades, points to a fairly remarkable (and perhaps only temporary) al-
liance57 between black nationalism and the lesbian and gay movement
in the struggle to achieve full citizenship for their constituencies.
Accounting for the emergence of lesbian and gay human rights in
Southern Africa, and for their success and failure, necessitates a track-
ing back and forth between intranational, national, regional, and
transnational spaces. This tracking is complicated by the presence of
shifting temporal frames. The colonial, postcolonial, and globalization
trajectory maps unevenly at many points. (The settler colonial intro-
duces a further complicating variable.) The terms makwerekwere
(South African queered township slang for foreigners) and hungochani
(Shona Shangaaned word for homosexuals) reveal a historical conti-
nuity in the figuring of movements of labor into national otherness as
real or imagined same-sex corporeal intimacies, yet encapsulate radi-
cally different histories and largely incommensurate presents. It would
appear that globalization repeats as it ruptures.
In conclusion, I note how the circuits of discourses, values, desires,
and commodities swerve through and beyond my object of inquiry.
 WHITE MAN’S BURDEN, WHITE MAN’S DISEASE 89

Lesbian and gay human rights in Southern Africa cannot stand as a

discreet object under transnationalism, though outside of our transna-
tional moment, I doubt very much whether they could exist at all. The
kinds of literacy necessary to read transnationally are only emergent
and are necessarily collaborative. To map lesbian and gay human
rights in Southern Africa, one would need to be fluent in at least a
dozen languages. At the very least, one would also need a willingness
to read anthropological findings against several national historical
archives and possess a firm grasp on theories of nationalism and glob-
alization as well as of the colonial archive, fluency in the movements
of global capital and attentiveness to local economic structures, and a
knowledge of the complex process of the dissemination of human
rights discourse in Southern Africa over the last century. My failure is
assured. But I offer this collection of speculations, analyses of bits of
media texts, caveats, narratives, and reframings in the interest of re-
sisting those (both for and against) who assume they have already
mastered the contours of this unevenly lived and imagined subject:
lesbian and gay human rights in and of Southern Africa. We may have
to look through and beyond rights talk for an archive that better con-
tains the embodied, affective, and political experience of race, sex, sex-
uality, and freedom in Southern Africa.
 Chapter 5

THE INTELLECTUAL, THE ARCHIVE,

A N D T H E PA N D E M I C
Thabo Mbeki’s AIDS Blues

In the inaugural Z. K. Matthews memorial lecture at Fort Hare (October

12, 2001) and his speech at the funeral of Sarah Bartmann (August 9,
2002),1 Thabo Mbeki, the current president of South Africa, analyzed
sexually charged representations of African bodies as central episte-
mological features of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European
racism. Given President Mbeki’s increasing reluctance to give inter-
views on the subject of HIV/AIDS,2 I turn to these two speeches to ex-
plore how their implied critique of the sexual ideology of racism begins
to account for the South African regime’s difficulty in systematically or
coherently responding to the AIDS pandemic facing its citizens. Both
speeches insist on situating public health initiatives to fight the pan-
demic within a broader history of colonial and apartheid era racism.
Rather than dismiss Mbeki’s invocation of the history of colonial
racism in relation to present-day HIV/AIDS, this chapter argues that
Mbeki’s trenchant analysis of racism needs to be deepened and ex-
panded to include colonial racism’s representation of the sexual norms
and forms of whiteness. In these speeches, Mbeki performs a version
of African cosmopolitanism both through his critique of the racist
thinking of leading figures of the European Enlightenment and, more
interestingly, through an invocation of African American artists as a
counter to such racism.
The history of the mistakes, backflips, controversies, denials, and in-
consistencies of the first democratically elected South African govern-
ment’s response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic is well known and I cannot
rehearse it here in its entirety.3 It is marked by a series of scandals and
a few fragile victories for the millions of HIV-positive people in South
Africa.4 The pandemic’s history under the apartheid regime and during
the Nelson Mandela presidency is mostly one of silence. Although the
pandemic has undoubtedly grown massively since 1996, a history of
HIV/AIDS in South Africa would need to address public health ques-
tions in these diverging yet continuous eras. In 1998, the government
promoted (and perhaps even funded) Virodene, a drug it claimed might
“cure” HIV/AIDS and whose active component, dimethyl formamide,

90
 THE INTELLECTUAL, THE ARCHIVE, AND THE PANDEMIC 91

is a highly toxic industrial solvent banned for use on humans by a wide

variety of organizations, including several European governments, the
U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and China’s Na-
tional Poison Control Center. The regime then chose to take no action
against the company that made the drug and illegally tested it on hu-
man subjects in Tanzania.5
In 2001, the High Court in Pretoria was poised to refuse the multi-
national pharmaceutical companies’ exclusive patent rights. In hold-
ing up the 1997 Medicines Act, it encouraged the production and
distribution of much cheaper generic versions of antiretroviral drugs
and called on the government to distribute them.6 Later the same year,
the South African government flew in the face of conventional med-
ical and scientific wisdom by refusing to supply pregnant women with
nevirapene, a drug endorsed by the World Health Organization (WHO)
that limits mother-to-child transmission.7 The government has been
very slow in providing drug treatment.8
International funds for drug treatment have been held up or
blocked. In 2002, Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang refused
to disburse 72 million dollars for antiretrovirals to KwaZulu/Natal
province from the Global Fund.9 In 2003, doctors in government and
mine houses’ health clinics were encouraged not to prescribe or dis-
tribute antiretroviral drugs and were even in some cases forbidden to
do so by the minister of health, even when these drugs were avail-
able.10 According to a range of studies, infection rates have increased
five-fold since 1991. The most recent figures extrapolate an infection
rate of 25 percent of the total population, and as high as 32 percent in
KwaZulu/Natal.11 South Africa, with its more developed medical infra-
structure, has seen this increase in a time in which other sub-Saharan
African countries, arguably Uganda and notably Botswana, have made
successful inroads in both treatment and prevention.12
While the contested histories of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Southern
Africa serve as the primary context for what follows, the central ques-
tions of this chapter are historical and cultural rather than ones of epi-
demiology and public health policy. President Mbeki is unique among
publicly elected officials, as he uses medical history to make medical
policy.13 Much of the controversy around the administration’s HIV/AIDS
policy has centered on a scientific and medical issue: whether or not the
HIV virus causes AIDS. While he has engaged in that debate and invited
the contributions of many leading Western AIDS dissidents for sup-
port,14 Mbeki has also insisted on understanding questions of health and
disease in their present social, political, economic, and (as I will argue)
cultural contexts; for example, by calling attention to poverty’s effect on
92 THE INTELLECTUAL, THE ARCHIVE, AND THE PANDEMIC

human immune systems.15 In the two speeches under discussion, Mbeki

implies that the history of imperial racism needs to be taken into ac-
count to understand the public health crisis facing his country.
Sarah Bartmann, better known as the Hottentot Venus, was a young
Khoi-San woman taken to Europe in 1810 as an ethnographic exhibit.
She was dissected upon her death by Baron Cuvier, and her genitals
were preserved in formaldehyde until her 2001 return to South Africa
for burial. Mbeki’s speech at her funeral offers a scathing critique of
imperialist European notions on the value of raced, gendered, and sex-
ualized African bodies. This critique resonates powerfully with Presi-
dent Mbeki’s refusal to engage HIV/AIDS as sexually transmitted
diseases given the history of Western medicine’s historical inclination
to treat African bodies as guinea pigs in drug testing.16 The politics of
cultural representation are equally problematic in a neoliberal world
where imperial legacies are very much alive and the accusations of
murderous incompetence leveled at the first democratically elected
government of South Africa may bear the taint of colonial racism, as
the A.N.C. government has been quick to point out.17
Mbeki’s second speech, focusing on the responsibilities of the in-
tellectual in the figure of Z. K. Matthews,18 strongly implies that the
cultural critic and historian are already, in certain ways, central to the
debate. When and where culture should matter is a critical underlying
question in the South African AIDS controversy. In these speeches,
Mbeki emerges as something like a Gramscian organic intellectual for
his class,19 performing two of the three functions Edward Said attrib-
utes to the intellectual:20 an “epistemological function” that implicitly
reframes the debate about HIV/AIDS in racial terms, and a “biblio-
graphic function” that turns to African American artists in an attempt
to find alternate sources for thinking through both historical and con-
temporary racial and sexual exploitation.
I discuss the Sarah Bartmann speech first, because it is here that
Mbeki most explicitly lays out his critique of European racism. In the
Fort Hare speech delivered some nine months earlier, the implications
for valuing, demonizing, and developing the sexual dimensions of this
critique of racism for the present are almost preemptively worked out.
The two speeches seem to be concerned with much more than their
respective subjects, Sarah Bartmann and Z. K. Matthews. I do not wish
to construct a doubled unconscious of President Mbeki in these
speeches, even though it is most likely they were written by him and
not by a team of speechwriters.21 Instead, let us push at the various
forms of impersonal and transpersonal rationality (historical, logical,
poetic) that are deployed as the speeches circle the question of African
 THE INTELLECTUAL, THE ARCHIVE, AND THE PANDEMIC 93

sexuality’s place in an African Renaissance.22 Second-guessing and

pathologizing African presidents risks invoking a range of colonial
racist stereotypes about African depravity and incompetence. It is salu-
tary for the well-intentioned Westerner horrified by the South African
president’s positions to remember the utterly phobic and irrational re-
sponses to the epidemic from U.S. and U.K. government officials in the
Reagan/Bush and Thatcher years.23

FATAL COUPLINGS

On National Women’s Day, a day clearly with resonance in the context

of Sarah Bartmann’s burial, Mbeki develops a consistent reversal of
the terms civilized and savage to account for what happened to Sarah
Bartmann and to work out the implications of this history for present-
day South Africa. He invokes deeply racist asides in the works of the
French Enlightenment’s leading thinkers (Voltaire, Montesquieu,
Diderot ) in order to suggest that they and the ostensibly civilized cul-
ture they represent are the real barbarians. He uses the return of Sarah
Bartmann’s remains, which had lain for close to two centuries in
France before ending up in the Museum of Man in Paris,24 to remind
South Africa and the world of the ongoing problem of racism and to
insist that racism has a deeper historical temporality than designations
like “apartheid” or “democratic” South Africa can reach. At the same
time, the return of Sarah Bartmann’s remains to her native land marks
an attempt to heal a wound of history, to right a wrong; it is a public
ritual of mourning and restitution, not unlike the earlier Truth and Rec-
onciliation Commission hearings.25 I quote:
I speak of courage because there are many in our country who would
urge constantly that we should not speak of the past. They pour scorn
on those who speak about who we are and where we come from and
why we are where we are today. They make bold to say the past is no
longer, and all that remains is a future that will be.
The legacy of those centuries remains with us, both in the way in
which our society is structured and in the ideas that many in our coun-
try continue to carry in their heads, which inform their reaction on im-
portant matters.
Sarah Bartmann should never have been robbed of her name and re-
labeled Sarah Bartmann. Sarah Bartmann should never have been
stripped of her native, Khoi-San and African identity and paraded in Eu-
rope as a savage monstrosity.
Indeed, where did the monstrosity lie in the matter of the gross abuse
of a defenceless African woman in England and France! It was not the
94 THE INTELLECTUAL, THE ARCHIVE, AND THE PANDEMIC

abused human being who was monstrous but those who abused her. It
was not the lonely African woman in Europe, alienated from her iden-
tity and her motherland who was the barbarian, but those who treated
her with barbaric brutality.
Among the truly monstrous were the leading scientists of the day,
who sought to feed a rabid racism, such as the distinguished anatomist,
Baron Georges Cuvier, who dissected Sarah’s body after her death. It is
Cuvier who said after he had dismembered her:
“The Negro race . . . is marked by black complexion, crisped or
woolly hair, compressed cranium and a flat nose. The projection of the
lower parts of the face, and the thick lips, evidently approximate it to
the monkey tribe: the hordes of which it consists have always remained
in the most complete state of barbarism. . . . These races with depressed
and compressed skulls are condemned to a never-ending inferiority. . . .
Her moves had something that reminded one of the monkey and her ex-
ternal genitalia recalled those of the orangutang.”
The eminent French thinker Montesquieu had written:
“You will find in the climates of the north, peoples with few vices,
many virtues, sincerity and truthfulness. Approach the south, you are
leaving morality itself, the passions become more vivacious and multi-
ply crimes. . . .”
Sarah Bartmann was taken to Europe to tell this lie in the most dra-
matic way possible. She was ferried to Europe as an example of the sex-
ual depravity and the incapacity to think of the African woman in the
first instance and the African in general. . . .
The legacy of those centuries remains with us, both in the way in which
our society is structured and in the ideas that many in our country continue
to carry in their heads, which inform their reaction on important matters.26
What becomes clear in the speech is that its version of the logic of
racism works by reducing Africans to sexual and animal embodiment.
Racism is abhorrent because it reduced Sarah Bartmann to the status
of a carnal curiosity. While I do not disagree with President Mbeki’s
accurate characterization of nineteenth-century European racism, I
want to draw attention to his elision of the other vector of this reduc-
tion of the African body to fantasized embodiment: the laboring body.
Not only was Sarah Bartmann’s sexuality exploited, but her labor was
an object of ethnographic curiosity as well. It is on this matter of the
kind of labor that was involved in the creation of the Hottentot Venus
that Bartmann becomes a more complex figure. According to the con-
tract she signed with a Mr. Dunlop, the organizer of the Hottentot
Venus exhibits, Sarah Bartmann was to receive a share of her exhibi-
tion’s profits. This reduction to a sexualized corporeality is one pole of
what could be called the dialectic of the sexual ideology of racism. This
deeply racist construction of blackness as pornographic spectacle con-
 THE INTELLECTUAL, THE ARCHIVE, AND THE PANDEMIC 95

tinues to haunt the present and unavoidably informs the administra-

tion’s difficulty in publicly representing African sexuality. This task is
increasingly urgent in the face of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
This chapter undertakes a critique of a critique of racism. In doing
so, it will reproduce (in the form of citations) the racist texts that form
the original critique’s object. Citation is standard academic procedure,
but it is important to remember that a reproduction of racism—even in
critique—is a reproduction. This problem can be staged anecdotally. At
the Sarah Bartmann speech, several young members of the audience
wept and fainted upon hearing Thabo Mbeki, their revered president,
utter a sentence about Sarah Bartmann like, “Her moves had something
that reminded one of the monkey and her external genitalia recalled
those of the orangutang.” Perhaps not knowing who Baron Cuvier (the
author of that sentence) was, perhaps not recognizing the protocol of
citation, assuredly not having heard such sentiments about black peo-
ple ever before from their parents or teachers (especially not at a fu-
neral), and coming into consciousness in the postapartheid era, they
attribute that sentence with overwhelming shock to President Mbeki
himself.27 It is equally possible to imagine such a response at a funeral,
ostensibly honoring the dead, from people who are neither young, nor
sheltered, nor ignorant of the protocols of citation. I do not wish to dis-
miss the grief-stricken response to mistaken attribution as simply mis-
taken, but must instead hold it in place as I repeat Mbeki’s repetition.
This grief-stricken response to racism has an integrity that raises diffi-
cult questions about how the situatedness of intention and audience
mark a limit to the kind of textual criticism central to the argument of
this chapter.
We are left with the paradox that on National Women’s Day, the
speech presents a silent Sarah Bartmann. Bartmann’s archival record
is admittedly minimal, but is never quoted in Mbeki’s speech. In the
speech’s rhetorical slippage, what she gets to do is “tell this lie.” A
court deposition from November 28, 1810, represents the closest we
can get to testimony from Sarah Bartmann herself, in which she as-
serts that she came to England by her own consent, that she was to re-
ceive half the monies from her exhibition, and that she had no desire
to return to Africa.28 The scholarly secondary literature on Sarah Bart-
mann is rapidly increasing and cannot be engaged here, except to note
that she has functioned as a figure for many appropriations other than
the one President Mbeki performs here.
Suzan-Lori Parks in Venus (1997) produces Bartmann as a feminist
entrepreneur of sorts, yet the recuperation of her individual life-story
cannot counter the pervasive nineteenth-century European racism
96 THE INTELLECTUAL, THE ARCHIVE, AND THE PANDEMIC

and sexism that Mbeki recounts through the return of Sarah Bart-
mann’s remains.
I think there is more at stake in the efforts of feminists like Parks to re-
cover personal agency in the biography of Sarah Bartmann than just to
suggest complicity in her oppression. The historical claim that Bartmann
may have had a say in what happened in her life works to humanize her.
It allows her intentions, desires, and fears to become visible in the face
of racist and sexist forces that would have us continue to fixate on her
genitals. This revisionist humanizing, while risking “blaming the vic-
tim,” enhances rather than mitigates a sense of outrage at what hap-
pened to her in Europe and to her body after her premature death in 1815.
Having elucidated the black pornographic pole of the embodied di-
alectic of Enlightenment and racism through the figure of Sarah Bart-
mann, Mbeki again quotes Cuvier on the valorized white body, on how
the spiritual, the aesthetic, and the intellectual, in contradistinction to
labor and sex, serve as the defining features of valorized whiteness:

The white race, with oval face, straight hair and nose, to which the
civilised people of Europe belong and which appear to us the most beau-
tiful of all, is also superior to others by its genius, courage and activity,
(And that there is a) cruel law which seems to have condemned to an
eternal inferiority the races of depressed and compressed skulls . . . and
experience seems to confirm the theory that there is a relationship be-
tween the perfection of the spirit and the beauty of the face.29

Mbeki’s speech goes on to suggest that these spurious theories of em-

bodiment function as important ideological formations for the ex-
ploitation of the colonized under European imperialism. Johann
Joachim Winckelmann30 is cited as evidence for this assertion: “The
European, called by destiny to run the empire of the globe which he
knows how to enlighten by his intelligence, tame by his abilities, is
man par excellence; the others are nothing but hordes of barbarians.”31
The case of Sarah Bartmann exemplifies how sexual denigration
may be necessary for imperial forms of sovereignty. What the speech
does not explicitly address, but leaves hovering at the level of impli-
cation, is the problem of the valorized sexual content of whiteness. If,
within this dialectic, Africans are required quite literally to embody
corporeality or (to use Elizabeth Povinelli’s new invocation of an old
word) carnality,32 or lasciviousness, lust, and so on, what emerges is
the question of the appropriate sexual forms of aestheticized, spiritu-
alized whiteness.
One can look for answers in the very same thinkers that President
Mbeki invokes as well as in the long line of eugenic thinking on race
and sex.33 The other sexual ideology of racism, its fantasy of the
 THE INTELLECTUAL, THE ARCHIVE, AND THE PANDEMIC 97

meaning of whiteness, is also an achingly familiar one: sexual con-

tinence, monogamy, companionate marriage, idealized romantic
forms, what psychoanalysis might term sublimation. Anyone as well
acquainted with the history of nineteenth-century racial science as
the writer of this speech knows that sexual respectability has an
equally ugly racial history. It is only the obverse of the register in
which the shameful story of Sarah Bartmann is told. The speech is
given on National Women’s Day. Notions of respectability have his-
torically raised problems for Euro-American feminists, for these no-
tions have been deeply implicated in sexual double standards—the
Madonna/whore dichotomy central to the representation of women
in Western culture, the public/private split that can only valorize
women’s labor in the sanctified domestic sphere—that have histor-
ically worked to keep women out of positions of power in the pub-
lic sphere.34
Today we celebrate our National Women’s Day. We therefore convey our
congratulations and best wishes to all the women of our country. We
also mark this day fully conscious of the responsibility that falls on us
to ensure that we move with greater speed towards the accomplishment
of the goal of the creation of a non-sexist society.35

To pose deceptively simple questions here: what would sex in a non-

sexist society look like? And relatedly, what might the sexual, intimate,
romantic forms, practices, and identities of antiracism look like?
The Bartmann speech articulates categories of race and gender
through a venerable metaphysical view of mind and body oppositions
in figuring the human. Sarah Bartmann is marked by an excess of em-
bodiment. Paradoxically, this excess is also a reduction to embodi-
ment: She is only allowed to be all body, uncontained and unregulated
by mind or spirit. This simultaneous excess and reduction renders her
monstrous in relation to the aestheticized beauty of normative white-
ness, in which the body is subordinated to mind and spirit. In the bit
of Cuvier cited by President Mbeki earlier in the speech, the synec-
doche of white embodiment is the face (“oval face, straight hair and
nose”) corporeality ordered in the language of geometry. Within the
mind/body dialectic that is the deeper organizing principle for En-
lightenment racism the speech critiques, the feminine and African, are
aligned on the side of untrammeled embodiment—animality and sex-
uality. The speech recognizes this alignment as part of the historical
imperative to create a “non-sexist society” in South Africa:
The gravity and urgency of this task is emphasized by the particular
place attributed to African women by those who gave themselves the re-
sponsibility of “man par excellence.” They, more than the African male,
98 THE INTELLECTUAL, THE ARCHIVE, AND THE PANDEMIC

were presented as the very representation of what was savage and bar-
baric about all our people.36

Women have a particular place in this logic as they become more African
than African men and bear the fuller burden of racial and racist repre-
sentation. In President Mbeki’s words, Sarah Bartmann “was ferried to
Europe as an example of the sexual depravity and the incapacity to think
of the African woman in the first instance and the African in general.”
Attending this reduction to embodiment (“sexual depravity and the in-
capacity to think”) as the vector of racism are notions of the “mon-
strous” and the “demonic.” If, according to Cuvier, normative whiteness
as universal humanity is produced by “the relationship between the per-
fection of the spirit and the beauty of the face,” Sarah Bartmann, reduced
to compressed skull and animalesque genitals, exits these racist bound-
aries of the human. The reduction to pure carnality, and the consequent
refusal to allow her “perfection of spirit,” means that the excess of em-
bodiment cuts the other way, too. Excessive corporeality slips the bonds
of the mind/body dialectic in constituting the human and becomes mon-
strous and/or demonic as well as animalistic.37 Indeed, the relationship
between Mbeki’s critique of nineteenth-century racism and the current
AIDS pandemic could arguably be quite literally one of haunting.38
Fascinatingly, President Mbeki ends his speech with a snippet of
poetry from Langston Hughes:
Another African who lived in the Diaspora, this time in the United States
of America, for forebears having been transported out of Africa as slaves,
sang of rivers. This is the great African-American poet, Langston Hughes.”
President Mbeki then cites, in its entirety, the famous Langston Hughes
poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and ends with the invocation,
“May the soul of Sara Bartmann soul grow deep like the rivers.”39
Why invoke the poetry of Langston Hughes during a funeral oration
for Sarah Bartmann on South Africa’s National Women’s Day? The rel-
evance of a significant Harlem Renaissance African American poet,
whose sexual practices would not allow him to be held up in a sexual
respectability canon of race pride, is far from obvious. The relatively
recent claiming of Hughes as a figure for gay heroic sublimation in the
form of films like Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1992),40 which
posthumously depicts Hughes as the archetypical gay black poet, may
complicate the picture further. Although Hughes, a particularly fa-
mous U.S. poet of African descent, is a natural choice for a philo-
sophically antiracist and cosmopolitan president like Mbeki to invoke
in a critique of the corporealization of blackness, Hughes’s nonnor-
mative sexuality suggests that something more is being worked
 THE INTELLECTUAL, THE ARCHIVE, AND THE PANDEMIC 99

through here. Hughes is the only black writer cited in the speech, and
the introduction of Hughes proceeds associatively. The bank of the
Gamtoos River in the Eastern Cape41 will be the final resting place for
the remains of Sarah Bartmann: “Another African who lived in the Di-
aspora . . . sang of rivers.”
The river is not an entirely comfortable metaphor for national
homecoming, suggestive as it is of flow, movement, and fluid bound-
aries. Bartmann and Hughes are linked as diasporic Africans, who pro-
duce very different kinds of cultural products, ethnographic spectacle
for white Europeans, and poetry for a much wider and less historically
circumscribed audience. Hughes can be used to bring Bartmann home.
In this movement into poetry and into the diaspora, perhaps President
Mbeki is suggesting that the work of artistic creation, the realm of the
aesthetic, can and must emerge from the doubly reduced position of
the sexually and (within the racist imagination’s definition of it) the
racially deviant body.
This snippet of poetry reveals a more complex engagement with the
set of tropes for representing blackness that the speech establishes as
racist. We have Hughes representing his black blood and soul as part
of nature, yet instead of this reduction to the natural representing an-
imalesque sexuality, Hughes transfigures nature to claim a universal
human heritage for his black self. “Ancient, dusky rivers” represent his
soul, whose “muddy bosom” does not invite the kind of prurient at-
tention accorded to Sarah Bartmann. Instead, it is aestheticized and
spiritualized by turning “all golden in the sunset.” Hughes’s rivers sug-
gest a certain productive and reproductive fertility. The “rivers ancient
as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins”
offer a promise of human continuity in the face of the mutilated body
of Sarah Bartmann and the massive HIV pandemic facing South Africa.
The rivers (the Euphrates, the Nile, the Congo, the Mississippi, the
Gamtoos?) additionally mark a global reach, a turning outward in
thinking blackness and femininity beyond a national frame, and an at-
tempt to conceptualize race and sexuality in terms other than those
laid down by the legacy of Enlightenment racism.
While President Mbeki is content simply to cite the poem and not to
provide a reading of it, it is possible to discern a confounding of both
poles—black lasciviousness, white spirituality—in what I have called the
sexual dialectic of racism. Hughes can imagine his own black embodiment
as carnal, spiritual, and universal. It is possible to read the citation of the
poem as a gesture toward wresting the crisis in representing race, gender,
and sexuality from the grip of sexual respectability. This representational
crisis may be central to the president’s resistance in acknowledging the
100 THE INTELLECTUAL, THE ARCHIVE, AND THE PANDEMIC

AIDS crisis in South Africa. Citing Hughes suggests alternative sites for the
imagining of sexualized racial embodiment. Pan-African aesthetic pro-
duction might be just such a site.

STRANGE FRUIT

Within a fascinating speech given at Fort Hare in October 2001, Pres-

ident Mbeki elaborates the implications of his commitment to what I
have called one pole of the sexual dialectic of racism for the
HIV/AIDS epidemic facing South Africa. Fort Hare is Southern
Africa’s most important historically black university, the training
ground of the subcontinent’s political and intellectual elite from Nel-
son Mandela to Robert Mugabe.42 In contrast to Sarah Bartmann’s fu-
neral, where the president was addressing the women of South Africa
on National Women’s Day, the nation at large, and perhaps the
world, he is speaking to his own at Fort Hare. The Sarah Bartmann
speech is simply addressed to “Fellow South Africans.” The Fort Hare
speech begins:
Master of Ceremonies,
Professor Bhengu, Chancellor of the University,
Chairperson and members of the University Council,
Professor D Swartz, Vice Chancellor,
Premier Stofile,
Prof JP Hendricks, Executive Dean of African and Democracy
Studies,
Members of the Matthews family,
Workers, Staff and Students,
Ladies and Gentlemen43

Mbeki is addressing and claiming kinship with what the opening line
of his speech calls “the intellectuals and professional classes,” which
he defines as those who have a responsibility to the masses. The
pointed localism of the speech’s address is immediately counter-
pointed by its opening quotation:

In its Declaration to the Colonial Peoples, the Fifth Pan-African Con-

gress, held in Manchester in 1945 said: “We also call upon the intellec-
tual and the professional classes to waken to their responsibilities. . . .
Today there is only one road to effective action—the organization of the
 THE INTELLECTUAL, THE ARCHIVE, AND THE PANDEMIC 101

masses. And in that organization the educated colonials must join. Colo-
nial and subject people of the world, Unite.44

The speech opens with a contrast between Africans who have taught
in the cause of freedom and those who have instructed for servitude.
Of the latter, he writes:
these have studied in schools of theology where the Bible is interpreted
by those who have justified segregation; law schools where they are told
that they belong to the most criminal element in the country; medical
schools where they are likewise convinced of their inferiority by being
reminded of their role as germ carriers; schools where they learn a his-
tory that pictures black people as human beings of the lower order, un-
able to subject passion to reason.
Thus does it come about that some who call themselves our leaders join
a cacophony of voices that demand that we produce statistics that will
show that, indeed, we belong to the most criminal element in our country.
And thus does it happen that others who consider themselves to be our
leaders take to the streets carrying their placards, to demand that because
we are germ carriers, and human beings of a lower order that cannot sub-
ject its passions to reason, we must perforce adopt strange opinions, to save
a depraved and diseased people from perishing from self-inflicted disease.
Convinced that we are but natural-born, promiscuous carriers of
germs, unique in the world, they proclaim that our continent is doomed
to an inevitable mortal end because of our unconquerable devotion to the
sin of lust.45

Without ever mentioning the epidemic by name, the reference is nev-

ertheless irrefutable in the phrase “adopt strange opinions, to save a
depraved and diseased people from perishing from self-inflicted dis-
ease.” What else could be under discussion here? There is a dig at the
Treatment Action Campaign (“others who consider themselves to be
our leaders take to the streets carrying their placards”). We are left
with an immobilizing paradox: To say that Africans suffer from
HIV/AIDS is to participate in the vicious ideological edifice of Euro-
pean racism, and thus fail in the responsibilities of the African intel-
lectual and professional classes. To say that Africans contract
HIV/AIDS through sex is to compound the racism.46
We are at an impasse; there is no way out or forward here. Both
the historical racism that the speeches document and their critique
of this racism, insofar as this critique may undermine a comprehen-
sive public health policy that addresses the question of the sexual
transmission of HIV/AIDS, have lethal consequences for the lives
and bodies of Africans (the racism deliberately, the critique inadver-
tently). Nineteenth-century science was undoubtedly racist in ways
102 THE INTELLECTUAL, THE ARCHIVE, AND THE PANDEMIC

that were unproblematic to its practitioners. In the context of

HIV/AIDS and particularly in the context of the category “African
AIDS,” distinguished by its predominantly heterosexual transmission
and the greater virulence of its strains, twenty-first-century science
has inherited this legacy and may continue to do so.47
Mbeki’s awareness of this legacy, evident in his discussion of Sarah
Bartmann, can explain why the claims that the HIV virus is causally
related to the development of AIDS and that AIDS is a sexually trans-
mitted disease can become “strange opinions, to save a depraved and
diseased people from perishing from self-inflicted disease.” The prob-
lem becomes how to imagine and discuss African sexuality without
forgetting the continuing power of Enlightenment racism’s stigmatiz-
ing vocabulary, without internalizing its norms in such a way that the
slide from sexuality to depravity is fast and short, the link between dis-
ease and sexuality becomes some kind of racial inevitability. How else
may a discussion of African sexuality ensue when the pandemic makes
such discussion overwhelmingly urgent?
As in the Sarah Bartmann speech, the Fort Hare speech invokes a bril-
liant African American artist who, like Langston Hughes, was deeply in-
volved with a project of self-making that could draw on the impossibly
messy materials of race and sex handed down to her by history:
For his support he had the inimitable Billie Holiday, who sang “Strange
Fruit” in the way that she sang the Blues.

What might lynching in the American South in the first half of the twen-
tieth century have to do with the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Southern Africa
at the beginning of the twenty-first century? The song lyrics map onto the
speech’s themes of education for inferiority and sexual continence as the
expression of race pride in confounding ways. In the context of a critique
of imperial racism that focuses only on the pornographic blackness pole
of the sexual dialectic of racism, how can the assertion that Africans con-
tract HIV through certain kinds of sex acts be figured as something like a
lynching? I would argue that the Bartmann speech’s exclusive and re-
lentless focus on only one pole of the dialectic of the sexual ideology of
racism—the pornographic spectacle of blackness and a related naturaliz-
ing and universalizing of the spiritual aesthetic face of whiteness—can go
some way in accounting for the difficulty in acknowledging the central
place of sex in HIV transmission. However, the speech’s move into Pan-
African aesthetic production at its close may also mark another configu-
ration of the mind/body split in relation to sexualized racial embodiment.
The citation of “Strange Fruit” introduces two complicating refer-
ences. The song is written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher
 THE INTELLECTUAL, THE ARCHIVE, AND THE PANDEMIC 103

from the Bronx, who adopted the children of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg
after their parents were executed.48 This kind of cross-racial aesthetic
collaboration (interestingly almost under the sign of communism)
works to rebut the racialized poles of sin and virtue apparent in Mbeki’s
critique in the Sarah Bartmann speech and gives us a version of an in-
ternal U.S. cosmopolitanism.
Reading the song lyrics, we see a reworking of the poles of the di-
alectic of racism’s sexual ideology. Whiteness, normally moralized and
aestheticized (as seen in the pastoral scenes of the gallant south) is re-
vealed as sensuous and brutal, erotic and violent, mingling the scent of
magnolias with the sudden smell of burning flesh. The central horticul-
tural conceit of the “Strange Fruit” exposes the full range of white culti-
vation: “Black bodies swinging in the breeze” is literally one of the fruits
of whiteness. If the citation of the Hughes poem marks an attempt to
spiritualize African corporeality through revaluing the racist attribution
of carnality, the Fort Hare speech’s invocation of the Meeropol/Holiday
song corporealizes whiteness by revealing its murderous investment in
racialized bodies. Despite (or perhaps because of) the gruesomeness of
its subject matter, “Strange Fruit” is a scandalously beautiful, haunting
song, in which the task of aestheticizing embodied violence is handed
over to the black female voice. Sarah Bartmann’s voice was stolen by his-
tory through becoming the object of a prurient, ethnographic, scientific,
white gaze. Billie Holiday sings, even though she tragically never man-
ages to escape the nascently pornographic spectacle of the black female
body. Both these speeches, as they invoke great black artists, strain to-
ward a figuration of black corporeality and white spirituality different
from the one that can be found in the archive of Voltaire, Cuvier, Mon-
tesquieu, and Winckelmann.
The “Strange Fruit” citation can moreover be read as an invitation
to another figuration not only of African corporeality but, more point-
edly, of African infection. In Infectious Rhythm: Metaphors of Conta-
gion and the Spread of African Culture (1998), Barbara Browning
writes that Western accounts of African diasporic culture rely on the
metaphor of disease and contagion. However,
Artists and performers in the diaspora sometimes invert, ironically, the
metaphor, such that “Western influence” is itself shown as the
pathogen. Or more typically, they recuperate the notion of African “in-
fection” by suggesting that diasporic culture is contagious, irresistible—
vital, life-giving and productive. The life-giving plague redeems the very
qualities Western stereotypes have scorned, especially sensuality. Mar-
vin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” is not so much a negation of “infectious
rhythm,” as a celebration of its own curative powers.49
104 THE INTELLECTUAL, THE ARCHIVE, AND THE PANDEMIC

I started this line of inquiry thinking that these speeches use an astute
understanding of the history of European racism as an alibi for the
failure of the postapartheid South African state to deal effectively with
the massive HIV/AIDS crisis facing the South African nation. I now
think this accusation of antiracism as an alibi is too close to the alle-
gation of playing the race card.50 Mandisa Mbali offers a more nuanced
take on the alibi accusation: “[Mbeki] is still trapped in intellectual
boundaries defined by coercive and racist arguments common in colo-
nial and late-apartheid public health. He is fighting an enemy that no
longer exists at the expense of the lives of his own people.”51
I would argue that Mbeki’s insistence on the relevance of colonial
racism for understanding the pandemic is not only a problem of tim-
ing and that reports of the death of racism have been somewhat exag-
gerated. It is not that these speeches hide behind a history of European
racism; both the impasse and the racism are genuine. Instead, it ap-
pears that the way forward may not be through abandoning this
trenchant critique of the pornographic spectacle of blackness in the
ongoing racial imaginary, but through an expansion of it. The val-
orized forms of racist white embodiment (the spiritual, the monoga-
mous, the respectable, and the aestheticized) are equally part of
racism’s sexual history, and to look to them for safety marks complic-
ity with racism in another way. One can criticize the administration’s
HIV/AIDS policies by invoking the same history of colonial racism,
without dismissing Mbeki’s historical critique, seeing the critique as
necessary but not sufficient.

TOWARD AN ARCHIVE OF THE NEW

Rather than simply repeat this necessary but insufficient critique of

racism, how might we cathect these invocations of extraordinary cre-
ative lives in Mbeki’s speeches? How might we use the messiness of
race and sex to imagine ways of being in the world that transvalue the
painful and impossible history that the speeches outline for us, which
invoke but never develop a more African archive of African contagion
that is closer to what Browning riskily calls “infectious rhythm”? This
archive is potentially vast: It includes the artistic production of artists
in Africa and the diaspora, the sexual practices, cultures, and identi-
ties of Africans obscured, obliterated, and driven underground by the
experience of colonialism and apartheid.
Mbeki’s tentative appeal to Hughes and Meeropol/Holiday may be
a good place to start. There may be even better ones. It might be salu-
 THE INTELLECTUAL, THE ARCHIVE, AND THE PANDEMIC 105

tary, for example, to turn to the local and the living in claiming Pan-
African aesthetic production as an intellectual resource in the fight
against both AIDS and racism. Two recent postapartheid-era novels of-
fer radically different representations of Africanness and sexuality
than those to be found in repeated citations of Cuvier and can more
directly speak to the representational crisis of race and sex in relation
to the South African AIDS pandemic.
K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001), while never
explicitly addressing the HIV/AIDS pandemic, imagines a gay brothel
in Cape Town as a privileged site of national and racial reconciliation
in both celebratory and satirical ways. The brothel, called “Steamy
Windows” and decorated with reproductions of paintings by the Pre-
Raphaelite brotherhood, services clients from all over the world. And
one of the men who works there understands his fellow sex workers
as the successors to the pre-Raphaelites, as a brotherhood who uses
sex to render the social world more beautiful, perhaps even to remake
it. “Our commitment to being sexual visionaries with the fervour of
artists is the secret badge, the unspoken password that makes us part
of something bigger.” In a conversation with Sebastian, the proponent
of the brotherhood theory, Tshepo, a private school–educated black
South African and the newest recruit to Steamy Windows, turns on his
class and proclaims:
“Well, that is true,” I put in my five cents worth. “I mean, people always
say that black culture is rigid and doesn’t accept things like homosexuals
and lesbians. You know the argument—it’s very unafrican. It’s a lot of
crap. In my experiences that kind of thing comes from urbanised blacks,
people who have watered down the real origins of our culture and mixed
it with Anglo-Saxon notions of the Bible. It’s stupid to even suggest that
homosexuality and lesbianism are foreign to black culture. Long ago, long
before whites, people were aware of the blurs. They must have been.”52

Tshepo (or Angelo, as he calls himself professionally) has a revealing

exchange with Arthur, an African American client in the Mount Nel-
son hotel (a venue of opulent colonial fantasy). After being offended
by Arthur’s questions about his tribal origin/affiliation, he replies
“Xhosa” because he knows Arthur will not be able to pronounce it cor-
rectly. Tshepo then asks: “‘Do a lot of African Americans travel to
Africa?’ I use that term so that he mustn’t talk down to me, the poor
African. I am not a moegoe.” Arthur replies:
Are you serious? They won’t go anywhere where there isn’t air condi-
tioning, fast food and easy access. You guys, well maybe South Africa is
doing okay, but certainly from what we see on TV about the rest of the
106 THE INTELLECTUAL, THE ARCHIVE, AND THE PANDEMIC

continent, you’re still way behind. So nah, most people wouldn’t dream
of going to Africa. Americans in general, black or white.

Arthur is playing a recording of Barbara Hendricks singing “Sometimes

I feel like a motherless child” during this exchange. Echoes of Joe
Golder in Soyinka’s The Interpreters are clear, and Mbeki’s citation of
Langston Hughes and Billie Holiday cannot be far behind. It appears
that postapartheid South Africa in paradoxical ways is itself becoming
a site of an African diaspora, where a belated pan-Africanism rubs up
against nationalism, often in the mode of sexual fantasy. Two foreign-
ers with erotic capital but who are nonetheless important members of
the brotherhood are Andromeda, described by Sebastian as the “doyen
of our industry” and subculturally reputed to be a real Nubian prince,
by birth, and a fellow sex worker at Steamy Windows, and Cole, who
studied in Nigeria, but is said to be from somewhere in Francophone
Africa. It may be difficult to share Sebastian’s utopianism (and per-
haps the narrative voice’s) around the ethically and politically trans-
formative aspects of male sex work, even though there is a strong
self-consciousness about the legacy of racist and colonial sexual fan-
tasy and an obvious awareness of economic compromises. The histor-
ical fate of a gay massage parlor in Sea Point, the part of Cape Town
in which the fictional Steamy Windows is placed, may foreclose utopi-
anism altogether. On January 20, 2004, nine young men were mur-
dered in Sizzlers, a gay massage parlor in the Sea Point neighborhood
of Cape Town, South Africa. They were shot and then their throats
were slit.53
Incidences of criminal violence in contemporary South Africa are
frighteningly high, and the Sizzlers case received more police and me-
dia attention than most. The Quiet Violence of Dreams contains much
theorizing on matters of race, national belonging, sexuality, and vio-
lence that is missing from the postapartheid state’s response to the
HIV/AIDS pandemic. While much of this theorizing would not stand
up to academic scrutiny, the novel archives a set of experiences and
ideas concerning sex and identity that cannot be effectively explored
under a discursive regime of sexual respectability and shame.
Phaswane Mpe’s 2001 novel Welcome to Our Hillbrow suggests epis-
temological changes in the ways that the AIDS pandemic can be rep-
resented, rather than denied, and powerfully invokes a set of
experiences largely absent from President Mbeki’s discussion. In rep-
resenting African sexuality, the novel further escapes what I have
called the dialectic of the sexual ideology of racism. There are no white
characters—aestheticized, noble, sexually continent, or otherwise—in
the novel, and its engagement with the “blackness as pornographic
 THE INTELLECTUAL, THE ARCHIVE, AND THE PANDEMIC 107

spectacle” is more critical and circumspect than the rhetoric of the Fort
Hare speech. “Convinced that we [Africans] are but natural-born,
promiscuous carriers of germs, unique in the world, they proclaim that
our continent is doomed to an inevitable mortal end because of our
unconquerable devotion to the sin of lust.”
A lyrical matter-of-factness exists to Mpe’s descriptions of the sex lives
of his young black urban protagonists: “She was rolling her tongue
around Refentse’s, with her soft hands brushing his chest gently. He held
her tightly, not wanting to lose her. They kissed with mouths and tongues
as well as with the southern hemispheres of their bodies.”54 At the risk
of overreading “kissing southern hemispheres” as a euphemism for gen-
ital intimacy, we see the racism of Cuvier’s geography of lust deftly and
ironically taken on and reworked. Our protagonists have sex with each
other with southern hemispheric tenderness. In the words of the author,
“I was interested in looking at that part of sexuality that people don’t stig-
matise, the sexuality of people who are supposed to be educated and re-
spectable.”55 The gossips of Tiragalong (the rural, “traditional,” “African”
home of the protagonists) are seen somewhat sympathetically but have
little moral authority in the novel. They are more securely held within the
grip of the idea of sexual behavior as index of civilizational worth.
Here is what the Tiragalong grapevine has to say about Refilwe: “Her
mother was one of those women who could not say no to any drop of se-
men flowing aimlessly in the streets. So she had courted a stranger’s
sperm, as it flew its way round the streets of Hillbrow.”56 Bodily fluids like
tears, sweat, semen, and blood, here literalized by the vicious gossips of
Tiragalong, provide transpersonal yet deeply personal metaphors for the
kinds of connections in the environs of Hillbrow. The location of indis-
criminate sex is not the jungle, but the modern city. Even in this mildly
phobic description, we are in the grammar of assent: “could not say no”
rather than in the “sexual depravity as sign of incapacity to think” rheto-
ric of Cuvier et al. Some of these fluids are the HIV virus’s primary means
of transmission, yet they are also deeply symbolic of the human capacity
to feel, to create, and to work. Moreover, they know no national borders,
no allegiance to place, and can mark kinship in potently expansive ways.
The narrator tells us that what Refentse learns, and the second-
person mode of address strongly implicates the reader: “You had learnt
that you were as vulnerable as the drunks and womanizers that you
used to criticize for their carelessness: as vulnerable as the prostitutes pop-
ulating Quartz and other streets, pasted against the walls of the concrete
towers of Hillbrow.”57 The educated and the respectable are perceived as
potentially equally vulnerable to the disease. This shared vulnerability
holds potential for the kind of cross-class solidarity that the Fort Hare
speech calls for but not in the speech’s implicitly vanguardist terms.
108 THE INTELLECTUAL, THE ARCHIVE, AND THE PANDEMIC

This vulnerability of the body can almost ground both community

and intimacy without invoking the mind/body dialectic, which is the
raced and gendered metaphysics running the show in the Sarah Bart-
mann speech. Welcome to Our Hillbrow manages to establish a vital
web of connections between city and countryside, South Africa, and
the world for negotiating narrative representations of the AIDS pan-
demic. The novel’s representation of the AIDS pandemic reveals a
world of shared vulnerability against which the integrity of national
borders, and even the distinctness of individual bodies, can offer no
protection. We have race and sex refigured in ways that do not forget
the neoliberal, neocolonial world order that informs the intimate ex-
periences of the protagonists, but need not repeat the sexual ideology
of racism (in either the form of aestheticized white spirituality or the
critique of the spectacle of pornographic blackness) in order to do so.
But what is the use of sanctity if it does not shield you from AIDS?
They were going to see AIDS incarnated. They did not realize that sev-
eral of the people they had buried in the past two years were victims
of AIDS. It was easy to be ignorant of this, because this disease lent
itself to lies. Some people were thought to have died of flu or stomach-
ache. Bone throwers sniffed out the witches responsible and they were
subsequently necklaced. Stories of Refilwe’s decline brewed along the
village grapevines, spilling out into the streets of Tiragalong and
then to other areas; via the N1 . . . Telkom . . . Vodacom . . . MTN.
Refilwe, the Incarnation of AIDS. . . . Former beauty turned into a scare-
crow. An example of what Oxford, Johannesburg and Makwerekwere
could do to the careless thighs of the otherwise virtuous ones of
Tiragalong.58

Sanctity does not shield one from death, whether by AIDS, or witch-
craft, or witchcraft accusations.59 It is modern communications tech-
nology that fuels the prejudices against Refilwe: highways (N1),
telephones (Telkom), and cellular networks (Vodacom). The opposi-
tion between tradition (Tiragalong) and modernity (in the form of N1,
Telkom, and Vodacom) collapses even as the village grapevines con-
struct HIV/AIDS as a consequence of the failure to adhere to imag-
ined traditional moral standards: “What Oxford, Johannesburg and
Makwerekwere could do to the careless thighs of the otherwise virtu-
ous ones of Tiragalong.” The metaphor of incarnation in relation to
Refilwe reveals a radically different figuration of the mind/body split
from the more familiar one found in the Sarah Bartmann speech. It is
disease that is like spirit inhabiting loved and valued African bodies.
The problem of AIDS for the vilified cousin of Refentse and the
Tiragalong “migrant grapevine” becomes one of origin and causality,
 THE INTELLECTUAL, THE ARCHIVE, AND THE PANDEMIC 109

marking the fantasy that it can be contained by displacing it onto the

bodies of monkeys, foreigners, and practitioners of despised sexual
acts. The novel is careful to debunk these rural gossips, these self-
appointed custodians of an imagined traditional morality who, like
Mbeki’s Cuvier, need to locate sexual depravity elsewhere, in other
bodies that are not subordinate to civilized restraint. The novel is res-
olute in showing that the virus makes no such distinction, equally af-
fecting the children of Tiragalong, the educated, and the respectable.
The narrator tells us:
. . . certain newspaper articles attributed the source of the virus that
causes AIDS to a species called the Green Monkey, which people in
some parts of West Africa were said to eat as meat, thereby contracting
the disease. Migrants (who were Tiragalong’s authoritative grapevine on
all important issues) deduced from such media reports that AIDS’s
travel route into Johannesburg was through Makwerekwere; and Hill-
brow was the sanctuary in which Makwerekwere basked. There were
others who went even further, saying that AIDS was caused by the
bizarre sexual behaviour of the Hillbrowans. How could any man have
sex with another man. . . . Surely, this large group argued, it was the shit
that the greedy and careless penises sucked out of the equally eager
anuses, that could only lead to such dreadful illnesses?60

The term makwerekwere is revealing here. Mpe offers the following et-
ymology of the term: “Makwerekwere was a word derived from kwere
kwere, a sound that their unintelligible foreign languages were sup-
posed to make, according to the locals.”61 We are in a contested se-
mantic terrain. Other possibilities include derivation from the name of
a migratory bird, which visits only during the summer and leaves dur-
ing the lean times. I argued in the previous chapter that its homonymic
relation with the English word queer cannot be ruled out.62
The novel reminds us continually that the link between AIDS and the
makwerekwere is powerful fuel for the xenophobic popular imagination
that ultimately fails to protect Refilwe. Ironically, Tiragalong, the self-
imagined custodian of authentic African rural values, shares this xeno-
phobic and homophobic way of representing AIDS with the ostensibly
modern West. Early on in the history of the AIDS pandemic, Simon Wat-
ney noticed that gay men in the West suffering from HIV/AIDS were fre-
quently “Africanized.”63 It is in London’s Heathrow Airport that Refilwe
learns that “African” is equivalent to makwerekwere.
Instead of this heady mix of homophobia and xenophobia as an ex-
planation for the disease’s spread, the novel offers an almost fatalistic
explanation of contingency, misfortune, and bad luck: “At least AIDS
came by accident, unlike such malicious acts as sending lightning to
110 THE INTELLECTUAL, THE ARCHIVE, AND THE PANDEMIC

strike Tshepo. One could not keep on condemning people for diseases
they had not purposively passed around.”64 In this passage, we see
that AIDS, unlike the witchcraft-induced lightning that kills Tshepo, is
beyond human agency, that it operates without malice. The descrip-
tion of the “greedy and careless penises” and “the equally eager
anuses” further marks the narrative’s sustained depiction of sex and
sexuality in the language of transpersonal part objects,65 revealing that
sexuality cannot effectively be privatized or contained in discreet mar-
ital beds in missionary positions of various sorts, but must be a mat-
ter for collective vision and practice.
The HIV/AIDS pandemic renders urgent this recognition of the pub-
lic character of representations of sexuality. Representations of African
sexuality acquire life and death consequences in the current context of
South African public health, and these representations need to escape
the grip of what this chapter terms the sexual dialectic of racism.
The novel self-consciously recognizes the imperative of producing
alternative representations of the epidemic than the ones allowed by
the Tiragalong grapevine, without leaving Tiragalong behind. The nar-
rator describes the protagonist of Refentse’s short story:
But then she discovered like you did Refentse, that a conscious decision
to desert home is a difficult one to sustain. Because home always trav-
els with you, with your consciousness as its vehicle. So her second res-
olution was to pour all her grief and alienation into the world of
storytelling. You had her write a novel about Hillbrow, xenophobia and
AIDS and the prejudices of rural lives.66

The act of individual imagination is what is imagined as redemptive

here. The art of storytelling is what allows Refentse’s protagonist to
carry on, to sublimate grief into art, to invite the world to share in
mourning. The novel ends with a moving meditation on its own recre-
ated world as it ponders Refentse’s afterlife:
Life was going on, as it would continue to go, long after you bid this
world farewell. Soon, you would arrive in heaven, where you would
meet Refentse, Lerato and the others. You would chat with them about
the continuation of life. You would share with each other your under-
standing of what the reality of Heaven is; that what makes it accessible,
is that it exists in the imagination of those who commemorate our
worldly life. Who, through the stories they tell of us, continue to cele-
brate or condemn our existence even after we have passed on from this
Earth. Heaven is the world of our continuing existence, located in the
memory and consciousness of those who live with us and after us. It is
the archive that those we left behind keep visiting and revisiting; dig-
 THE INTELLECTUAL, THE ARCHIVE, AND THE PANDEMIC 111

ging this out, suppressing or burying that. Continually reconfiguring the

stories of our lives, as if they alone hold the real and true version.67

This definition of heaven, collectivity, or memory contains endlessly

revisable multitudes. It bears something like a relation to strands of
African animism, the belief that the ancestors continue to animate the
living, that the world of the living and the world of the dead never lose
their intimacy, that they remain at each other’s mercy, but that ulti-
mately the dead know more.
For Welcome to Our Hillbrow, it is imperative that the narrator’s (and
reader’s) attachment to the loved persons of Refilwe and Refentse never
be severed, as the living tell, retell, and reinterpret their stories. Yet the
consolation of this archive that the living can revisit and hold dear
seems resistant to a collective refashioning on the part of the living. We
are, in the novel’s final words, welcomed to the archive of “our Heaven.”
Is narrative agency the only kind of agency left to the living? Judge
Edwin Cameron writes of the AIDS pandemic: “By preventing through
treatment, we give all people affected by the epidemic hope. And when
hope returns . . . the ignorance, fear and hatred will begin to subside.
So, by showing hope through treatment, we will also address the stigma
that surrounds this disease.”68 Refilwe returns home to Tiragalong, to
Hillbrow, unaware of her options for living. Political action needs to be
added to the novel’s aesthetic solution. The sustained efforts by groups
like the Treatment Action Campaign69 to ensure treatment for the mil-
lions of South Africans living with HIV/AIDS in the face of a recalcitrant
national regime and the intransigent multinational pharmaceutical cor-
porations must supplement keeping Refilwe alive in the heaven of our
Hillbrow.70 The recent national and international civil disobedience
campaign by the T.A.C. marks a sustained attempt to hold responsible
those institutions and individuals who could do much to prevent these
deaths.71 The subsequent suspension of the disobedience campaign
marks the commitment of the T.A.C. to work as closely as possible with
the government in ensuring treatment for its core constituency.
The cultural critic cannot determine how the analysis and experi-
ence of race and sex beyond the silencing phantasm of sexual re-
spectability might underpin new policy initiatives. However, this
conversation cannot begin under the regime of the respectability pole
of the dialectic of racism’s sexual anatomy. Thinking about President
Mbeki as a paradoxical figure—both a powerful president and an ad-
versarial intellectual in the face of the received wisdom concerning
HIV/AIDS—I conclude that his epistemological impulse to reframe and
the bibliographic impulse (in Saidian terms) to find alternative sources
112 THE INTELLECTUAL, THE ARCHIVE, AND THE PANDEMIC

for these challenges to the legacy and continued vitality of Enlighten-

ment racism are not wrong-headed; rather, they do not go far enough.
A critique of racism that invokes the aestheticized, spiritualized,
sexually continent face of whiteness as the response to the racist
stereotype of overly embodied self-destructive blackness is, as some
audience responses to the Sarah Bartmann speech demonstrate, a cri-
tique that is doomed to repeat the failures of its object. The invocation
of pan-African aesthetic production in the speeches to problematize
both poles of the sexual dialectic of racism marks an important
archival/bibliographic opening for the rethinking of Cuvier et al.
I have added Duiker and Mpe to President Mbeki’s Hughes and
Meeropol/Holiday to suggest that there is an archive in the present and
closer to home that needs to be brought to bear on intellectual at-
tempts to rediscover and reframe. Mpe’s novel is itself such an inter-
vention, and in this chapter, it is intended to stand in synecdochal
relation to the experiences of millions of South Africans living and dy-
ing with HIV/AIDS, to offer one representation of this profoundly het-
erogenous experience. Mpe’s novel suggests, to me, that the real
archive in which Africans are working through problems of sexuality
and the material and ideological legacies of imperialism consists of the
lives of all those affected by the pandemic. Neither the president nor
intellectuals can fight the pandemic until they learn from that great
archive how to represent African erotic practices without being
shamed by the phantasmatic sexual norms of whiteness . . . or being
reduced to them.
 Chapter 6

A N E L E GY FOR A F R I C A N C O S M O P O L I TA N I S M
Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow

“Johannesburg is Monte Carlo on top of Sodom and Gomorrah”

—Winston Churchill

My chapter title appears to contain a contradiction: African cosmopoli-

tanism. African is a word that designates a geographic, if not racial,
specificity. In contrast, cosmopolitanism aspires to a worldliness un-
bound by either geography or race and suggests that multiple specifici-
ties exist.1 I think this contradiction is shared by Phaswane Mpe’s 2001
novel, Welcome to Our Hillbrow. It further mobilizes us to imagine a
cosmopolitanism in Africa, in Hillbrow, an inner-city neighborhood in
Johannesburg, as well as a cosmopolitanism that is African in the world
of postapartheid South Africa.
Hillbrow, as its name suggests, straddles a ridge immediately to the
northeast of Johannesburg’s central business district. It is (and has
been for some time) the most densely populated area of South Africa,
if not the entire continent. In the white apartheid-era popular imagi-
nation, it was the destination of every teenage runaway, a lively haven
of drugs, dreams, and discos. Initially home to succeeding waves of
white European immigrants, its high-rise buildings and abundant
restaurants and shops offered its inhabitants an experience of urban-
ity, unlike that to be found in the wealthy sprawl of the suburbs to the
north or the impoverished sprawl of Soweto to the city’s southwest.
Hillbrow was one of the first areas of Johannesburg to “go gray,” be-
fore the repeal of the Group Areas Act, and was the only constituency
ever to send a gay representative to the whites-only parliament in the
apartheid era. It continues to enjoy a lively street life, coupled with a
high crime rate, and is considered a no-go zone for respectable white
people and tourists. In the late 1990s, it also became the home of
waves of often illegal immigrants from elsewhere in Africa.
Who is the “our” of our Hillbrow? Both the potential expansiveness of
the “our” and the geographic place to which we are being welcomed
(Hillbrow) work against the elite overtones of the cosmopolitan to invoke
the lineaments of an insurgent and rooted, yet open, cosmopolitanism.
Hillbrow is, and historically has been, a new and often transitory home

113
114 AN ELEGY FOR AFRICAN COSMOPOLITANISM

for many different kinds of people. It has had its capacity to extend a wel-
come tested under a variety of political and social conditions, where ci-
vility based on notions of cultural, racial, or national sameness cannot
take root. Instead, as this chapter argues, different kinds of connections—
new forms of intimacy, some of them impersonal or transpersonal—
between people/s need to be imagined.
Strictly speaking, the novel is an elegy or a eulogy. Its opening
words are: “If you were still alive, Refentse, child of Tiragalong . . .”2
(the narrator uses the second-person mode of address with intermit-
tent invocations of Refentse’s name throughout). In the last section,
the subject of the elegiac address shifts to Refentse’s first girlfriend, Re-
filwe. I hope the “for” in my chapter title will be double-edged, si-
multaneously suggesting that African cosmopolitanism is the dead
subject of the elegy and that the elegy is a poetic gift or an argument
for an African cosmopolitanism that is very much alive.
What is an elegy but an invitation to join the speaker/writer in her
mourning? Likewise, what is mourning but a way of incorporating the
loved and lost object in order to be able to continue in the face of its
passing, rather than be crippled by its loss? These are the terms in
which we, the readers, are welcomed to Hillbrow. By setting Mpe’s
novel in dialogue with scholarly attempts to reanimate certain strands
of psychoanalysis in the face of the devastation of the U.S. AIDS crisis
of the 1980s and 1990s, this essay further invokes a queer cosmopoli-
tanism. Douglas Crimp reminded activists that mourning needed to be
added to militancy in his 1989 essay “Mourning and Militancy.”3
Subsequent queer scholars of color like José Esteban Muñoz and
David Eng also have made powerful arguments for the further de-
pathologizing of melancholia in the face of so much premature death.
Muñoz argues that melancholia can be “a mechanism that helps us
(re)construct identity and take our dead with us to the various battles
we must wage in their names—and in our names.”4 David Eng and
Shinhee Han suggest that melancholia marks a nascent ethical and po-
litical attempt to keep the loved object, or (in the case of the racialized
immigrant, the lost homeland, culture, or symbolic order) a refusal to
consign it, and the many possibilities it may contain for political and
subjective agency, to oblivion. Melancholia for these thinkers asserts
a refusal to move on, a psychological keeping alive of the dead against
the imperative of mourning.5 The cosmopolitanism brought about by
using these queer theorists to illuminate Mpe’s novel needs to be force-
fully separated from the imperialist fantasy of my Churchillian epi-
graph, largely through the imagining of shared suffering.
 AN ELEGY FOR AFRICAN COSMOPOLITANISM 115

In this chapter, I will suggest that Mpe’s novel performs a melan-

cholic response for its readers in the face of the deaths it describes,
and that this melancholia is envisaged as useful for a storytelling
that perhaps could mobilize militancy. Fiction self-consciously be-
comes, for Welcome to Our Hillbrow, a way of never laying the dead
to rest. The novel works equally hard to distinguish the melancholic
work of fiction from other projects that strive to keep the dead
alive—most notably the abundant witchcraft practices and allega-
tions that have become a feature of social life in the new South
Africa.6 Whether the continued attachment to the dead in the form
of melancholia can be mobilized by the living in the interests of their
own survival is a question that the sublimating, aestheticizing end
of the novel may beg.
Although the novel’s real interest lies in its remarkable, subtle shifts
in the narrative voice as it imagines the audience as cosmopolitan
Africans through the mediating magic of reading and in its meditations
on questions of belonging and migration, loss and responsibility, sex-
uality and death, a brief narrative summary may be useful in orienting
the reader to the world of our Hillbrow. In six chapters, revealingly en-
titled “Hillbrow: The Map,” “Notes from Heaven,” “The Journey from
Alexandra,” “Refilwe,” “Refilwe on the Move,” and “The Returnee,”
our nameless narrator recounts the sexual misadventures of a group of
mildly incestuous young friends from Tiragalong as they live, study,
and work in and out of Hillbrow.
Refentse is in love with Lerato, who cheats on him with his friend
Sammy. Refentse had previously cheated on Lerato with Sammy’s
girlfriend, Bohlale. Refilwe is a former girlfriend of Refentse’s from
Tiragalong, who dislikes Lerato and spreads rumors that she is the
daughter of a foreigner. Refentse commits suicide. Refentse’s mother,
back in Tiragalong, is accused of witchcraft when she attempts to
keep her son away from Lerato and is consequently murdered. Once
in heaven, Refentse watches a film that reveals that Lerato is the
daughter of Piet, father of Tshepo, a beloved Tiragalong friend of
Refentse. Piet is also killed as a consequence of witchcraft allega-
tions in Alexandra. Refilwe goes to study in Oxford. She then falls in
love with a Nigerian man, who resembles Refentse; discovers that
she is HIV positive; and comes home to die. Underlying the melo-
drama of this narrative are the pressing preoccupations of contem-
porary South Africa—xenophobia, AIDS, witchcraft, crime, urbanization,
democracy—all presented in the lives and stories of the denizens of
our Hillbrow.
116 AN ELEGY FOR AFRICAN COSMOPOLITANISM

THE AFFECT WORLD OF THE COSMOPOLITAN

In an extended essay on Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (1939), Ed-

ward Said, shortly before he died, makes the argument that identity,
whether national, cultural, religious, or communal, is always unre-
solved, and that the claim that Moses was an Egyptian does this work
for Jewish identity in the thought of Freud. Said further claims that the
personal experience of the foreign element at the core of identity is “a
necessary psychological experience.”
. . . identity cannot be thought or worked through itself alone; it can-
not constitute or even imagine itself without that radical originary
break or flaw which will not be repressed, because Moses was Egypt-
ian, and therefore always stood outside the identity inside which so
many have stood, and suffered, and later, perhaps, even triumphed.
The strength of this thought is, I believe, that it can be articulated in
and speak to other besieged identities as well—not through dispensing
palliatives such as tolerance and compassion but, rather, by attending
to it as a troubling, disabling, destabilizing secular wound—the
essence of the cosmopolitan, from which there can be no recovery, no
state of resolved or Stoic calm, and no utopian reconciliation even
within itself.7
Mpe’s novel works through the problem of contemporary (South)
African identity in ways that reveal it to risk “the essence of the cos-
mopolitan,” keeping the ongoing historical wounds of rapid urbaniza-
tion, xenophobia, resurgent witchcraft, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic
open, and exposing the fantasy of coherent national and/or commu-
nal identities as false palliatives. I argue that the novel’s deployment
of a narrative structure of affect, which is close to Freudian concep-
tions of melancholia, allows it to perform the important ethical and
cultural work of the cosmopolitan. Said’s Freud offers the cosmopoli-
tan experience as one of continual loss of identity by hanging on to the
originary break in identity, as well as an ethical transvaluation of this
loss by an insistent reminding that the self/other relations are struc-
tured not only in antagonistic reaction formation, but that the self is
indebted to the other in more proximate and intimate ways. The cos-
mopolitan experience may bear some relation to a depathologized
melancholia that seeks to refigure identity and sociality.
However, the novel implies that “the cosmopolitan” is not an indi-
vidual or even an attribute of an individual. Instead it is something like
a structure of feeling, a web of relations between the living and the
dead, the rural and the urban, the healthy and the sick, the kinsman
and the stranger, Africans and the world.
 AN ELEGY FOR AFRICAN COSMOPOLITANISM 117

THE MULTIPLICITY AND INDIVISIBILITY OF PLACE OR NO SAFE PLACE

The difficulties of a democratic South Africa negotiating its relation to its

apartheid past is evident in a range of South African public fora, most fa-
mously the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. The
HIV/AIDS pandemic’s impact on the renegotiation of South African iden-
tity and its place in the world are best encapsulated in a scandalous im-
age, found on posters and t-shirts in HIV/AIDS activist circles. Among
the most iconic images of South African’s liberation struggle is a photo-
graph by Sam Nzima. In it, the body of Hector Petersen, one of the
youngest schoolchildren shot and killed by the police in the Soweto riots
of 1976, is being carried by one of his schoolmates. This famous image
has acquired a second iconic life in the context of HIV/AIDS by having
the caption “Who is killing South Africans now?” appended to it. This
appropriation and recirculation of the image marks an assertion of hor-
rifying continuity in a national narrative of rupture, liberation, and trans-
formation. In the words of the South African satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys: “In
the old South Africa, we killed people, now we are just letting them die.”8
Mpe’s novel, while never making so strong an accusation, reveals a
similar contestation of the new national story. Like the reconstituted
image of Hector Petersen, it invites consideration of the political work
of reconfiguring the meanings of the death of young black South
Africans. The novel opens by recalling a celebration of a victory by the
South African national soccer team (affectionately known as Bafana
Bafana, “the boys, the boys” in Zulu) gone wrong. In the late 1990s,
the successes and tribulations of national sporting teams were often
charged with carrying the optimism and ebullience of the freshly dem-
ocratic nation entering the world community of nations.
You would remember the last occasion in 1995, when Bafana Bafana
won against Ivory Coast, and in their jubilation, people in Hillbrow
hurled bottles of all sorts from their flat balconies. A few bold souls,
boasting a range of driving skills, swung and spun their cars in the
streets, making U-turns and circles all over the road. You would recall
the child, possibly seven years old or so, who got hit by a car. Her midair
screams still ring in your memory. When she hit the concrete pavements
of Hillbrow, her screams died with her. . . . Shosholoza . . . drowned the
choking sobs of the deceased child’s mother.9
The spectacle of the street celebrations exemplifies the exhilaration of
the Hillbrowans reveling in their new nation, but the costs of this ex-
uberance are poignantly noted in the child’s death. The tragic irony of
her death is highlighted by the subsequent scene in which the sound
of the crowd singing “Shosholoza” (a popular freedom song in the
118 AN ELEGY FOR AFRICAN COSMOPOLITANISM

days of the anti-apartheid struggle) drowns out the sobs of the be-
reaved mother. This opening vignette prepares the reader for the many
ways in which popular patriotism, in itself a cause for celebration, will
repay its constituents with death by homicide (accidental or other-
wise), AIDS, and xenophobia over the course of the novel.
This use of celebratory patriotic song in the context of national
sporting triumphs as the soundtrack for scenes of violence and danger
is not an isolated incident. Later, we are offered this description of a
carjacking in the adjacent predominantly white suburb of Parktown:
All the time you and your friends were lying there, flat on your stom-
achs, people were jubilantly singing Amabokoboko ayaphumelela . . . in
the streets because the South African rugby team, the Springboks, had
just won the World Cup.10

Our protagonists are not only ambiguously situated in relation to the

emergent nation at large, figured in terms of these sporting triumphs,
but also in relation to the most significant geographic counter to Hill-
brow, which is Tiragalong, a rural town outside Polokwane (formerly
Pietersburg) in Limpopo province. The “migrant grapevine of Tira-
galong” competes with our narrator in interpreting the novel’s cen-
tral events, though ultimately the intimate web of connections
between city and countryside reveal this to be a false opposition. The
attempt to work through the thematics of urban migration marks the
novel’s sustained and self-conscious dialogue with its long tradition
in South African letters. Refenste’s story is in many ways a classic
version of the Jim comes to Jo’burg11 genre: a young man from the
countryside is destroyed by the evils of city life and city women. The
narrator writes: “The lure of the monster was, however, hard to re-
sist; Hillbrow had swallowed a number of the children of Tiragalong,
who had thought the city of Gold was full of career opportunities for
them.”12
Mpe’s profound ambivalence about city life places his novel in the
legacy of memoirs like Bloke Modisane’s Blame Me on History
(1986)13 and Ezekiel Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue (1959),14 and
against the pastoral terror and loathing of Johannesburg in a novel
like Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948).15 The novel’s nar-
rator, self-consciously staging himself as a writer, is explicit about in-
serting his narrative into the history of South African letters,
reanimating a range of living and dead writers. The narrator refers to
a range of other writers and novels—J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the
Barbarians (1980), Herman Charles Bosman’s Oom Schalk Lourens
short stories, Nadine Gordimer’s Six Feet of the Country (1956), Zakes
 AN ELEGY FOR AFRICAN COSMOPOLITANISM 119

Mda’s Ways of Dying (1995)—in direct and oblique ways as he de-

scribes Refentse and Refilwe’s attempt to narrate their experiences.
However, Mpe’s elegy, while engaging questions of exile, criminal-
ity, and suicide, does not envisage any of the earlier literary outcomes
as a stopping point for his narrative. Two strategies emerge that may
explain the novel’s avoidance of these literary historical outcomes.
One is an assertion of moral equivalence between city and countryside:
You, Refenste, child of Tiragalong (and as you insisted in the days be-
fore your death, also of Hillbrow) never shared such sentiments. It was
your opinion that the moral decay of Hillbrow, so often talked about,
was in fact no worse than that of Tiragalong.16

The second narrative strategy is an insistence on the back and forth

connections between Tiragalong and Hillbrow:
You discovered on arriving in Hillbrow, that to be drawn away from Tira-
galong also went hand-in-hand with a loss of interest in Hillbrow. Be-
cause Tiragalong was in Hillbrow. You always took Tiragalong with you
in your consciousness whenever you came to Hillbrow or any other
place. In the same way, you carried Hillbrow with you always.17

These back-and-forth connections take a number of forms, both inti-

mate ones, like the psychological form of personal experience de-
scribed previously and read in terms of melancholic refusal to give up
the lost object, and significant historical ones. What the Tiragalong
gossip migrants, in their continued attempts to blame the HIV virus on
foreigners and loose women, fail to realize is that they themselves are
most likely key participants in the disease’s spread. This is not to ren-
der them responsible. Much recent social science work reveals that
systems of migrant labor, instituted over the course of the twentieth
century, have produced norms and forms of transactional sex, family
life, and gendered attitudes that have proved conducive to the spread
of HIV.18 Tiragalong, as much as it wishes to deny it, is very much part
of the set of problems that it wishes to confine to places like Hillbrow.
Tiragalong and Hillbrow are further linked through the circulation
of images in the mass media. Little boys in Tiragalong learn the styles
of masculine modernity from images of Hillbrow gangsters, thus sub-
verting any notion of the countryside as an uncontaminated place for
the reproduction of social norms and values—in a word, tradition:
Heroes of grimy courage and exceptionally vicious greed were followed
by the voracious camera lenses of modern technology, and the little boys
of Tiragalong emulated their TV heroes, driving their cars made of wire
with wheels of tennis balls.19
120 AN ELEGY FOR AFRICAN COSMOPOLITANISM

The novel also makes it clear that Hillbrow is not just a place of dan-
ger and excitement for the new arrivals from Tiragalong but also a
place of domestic comfort and ease:
The following day you woke up, washed yourself thoroughly; quite a
treat. Water being such a scarce resource in Tiragalong, you only used
to take a proper bath once a week. Sure there were taps at most street
corners in Tiragalong. But the water taps were often as dry as a desert.
So here you received a treat; warm, hot and cold water right in the flat.20

Hillbrow here enables the respectable forms of embodiment of Tiraga-

long, urbanity as hygiene rather than depravity. Refentse carries Tiraga-
long into Hillbrow in multiple ways. He is told by his cousin: “Hey you!
You do not go around greeting every fool in Hillbrow. He looks harm-
less. But not all people who greet you in Hillbrow are innocent well-
wishers.”21 We see here that Hillbrow offers possibilities for different kinds
of relationship to oneself and to strangers. It offers something that Tira-
galong appears not to: that is, the possibility of what Lauren Berlant calls
“stranger intimacy,” also known as citizenship.22 Tiragalong manners re-
signify the city’s possibilities. The streets, filled as they are with strangers,
exceed or refute kinship as the primary explanation of social connection:
It was during your second month as a lecturer that you saw your friend
from the shelter being wheeled away in a wheelbarrow in the direction
of Hillbrow hospital in Klein Street. He did not say Aibo! This time. This
pained you. In the five years that you had known him, you had become
friends without ever saying anything to each other, except for the mu-
tually warm greetings.23

Here we see some of the risks and dangers of loving strangers. Civil-
ity, even (and perhaps especially) under very difficult conditions, be-
comes a kind of performative social reproduction in the face of the
failure of the historically besieged forms of family and kinship, but
that it is also materially vulnerable. The prostitution in Hillbrow,
which the novel repeatedly gestures to as a reality on the ground and
as an important phobic component of the Tiragalong popular imagi-
nation, may give us a debased form of the ethical problem of loving
strangers in somewhat literal ways. However, prostitution is described
in ways that suggest new possibilities for collectivities robust enough
to cope with the questions of human differences and commonalities
that the xenophobic denizens of Tiragalong/Hillbrow can only pose in
divisive moralizing terms.
Refentse learns many things from these forms of sociality in Hill-
brow (and alongside him, the reader, through the second-person mode
 AN ELEGY FOR AFRICAN COSMOPOLITANISM 121

of address): “You had learnt that you were as vulnerable as the drunks
and womanizers that you used to criticize for their carelessness: as
vulnerable as the prostitutes populating Quartz and other streets,
pasted against the walls of the concrete towers of Hillbrow.”24 A recog-
nition of shared vulnerability to both desire and illness makes the dif-
ferences between the imagined custodians of virtue and the profligate
victims of the city immaterial. The novel frequently describes sex—
whether commercial sex between strangers or romantic sex between
characters given psychological interiority—in the impersonal and
transpersonal language of body parts or bodily fluids (semen, penises,
anuses, blood, sweat). This apparent self- and social alienation may
have the opposite effect in the sense that the frailty of the flesh be-
comes universal and the cultural, national, moral, and gendered dif-
ferences needed to police reader’s sympathy may fall away.
This sense of a shared, almost transcendant vulnerability of the
body as a ground for both community and intimacy is seen as some-
thing that needs to be continually renarrated and redescribed, avoid-
ing any essence of the human, while perhaps allowing for a reader’s
voyeurism to turn ethical:
Euphemism, Xenophobia, Prejudice. AIDS. You wrote your story to think
through all these issues, child of Tiragalong and Hillbrow. But your story
was neither long nor sophisticated enough. You realized when it was
published that it would never be sufficient. You became keenly aware
that no matter what other stories you might write, none of them would
ever be sufficient to answer such imponderables. . . . There would always
be another story of love, betrayal, friendship, joy and pain to add to your
narrative granary. There would always be the need to revise, reinforce,
contradict. For every new personal experience adds to our knowledge of
life and living, death and dying. Every act of listening, seeing, smelling,
feeling, tasting is a reconfiguring of the story of our lives.25

I would add reading and writing to the previous list of human activi-
ties. Our narrator addresses Refentse in heaven: “You did not own life
when you were alive. Now that you are alive in a different realm, you
know for sure that you do not own life.”26 Yet neither God nor the devil
nor the ancestors own life. It appears that the ever-expanding promis-
cuous web of connections that is Tiragalong, that is Hillbrow, that is
the world, that is heaven, constitute life and death. The novel’s hu-
manism broaches the possibility of an African universalism.
The increasingly global embrace of the “welcome” in the novel’s ti-
tle is visible in both political and intimate registers. The narrator di-
rectly accuses the corrupt policeman cousin of Refentse:
122 AN ELEGY FOR AFRICAN COSMOPOLITANISM

Many of the makwerekwere, you accuse of this and that are no different
to us sojourners, here in search of green pastures. . . . You would want
to add that some makwerekwere were fleeing their war-torn countries
to seek sanctuary here in our country in the same way that many South
Africans were forced into exile in Zambia, Zaire, Nigeria and other
African and non-African countries during the Apartheid era.27

The opposition between the foreign and the local is confounded by

ethical obligations of reciprocity produced by the history of the South
African liberation struggle. More subtly, we see in the likening of both
local men and makwerekwere to spreading pumpkin plants an asser-
tion of Ubuntu, or African humanity, between the stranger/foreigner
and us. We first encounter the simile xenophobically:
And then makwerekwere stretching their legs and spreading like pump-
kin plants filling every corner of our city and turning each patch into a
Hillbrow coming to take our jobs in the new democratic rainbowism of
African Renaissance.28

The same simile is invoked again when Refentse’s mother meets Ler-
ato in heaven and recognizes her as not the daughter of a foreigner but
of the brother of the beloved Tshepo: “If we met in Tiragalong or in its
neighbouring villages, I would have said that indeed, men do spread
like pumpkin plants.”29 The makwerekwere have simply become men
in their shared likeness to the cultivated wildness of the spreading
pumpkin plant putting down its roots in response to the stimulus of
the sun and water, thriving both against and for the gardener’s will.
This commonality is restated explicitly in terms of Refilwe’s experi-
ences in England:
Our Heathrow strongly reminded Refilwe of our Hillbrow and the
xenophobia it engendered. She learnt there, at our Heathrow, that
there was another word for foreigners that was not very different from
Makwerekwere or Mapolantane. Except that it was a much more
widely used term: Africans.30

In a political register, historical experience can produce collectivity ei-

ther through reciprocity of exchange or through shared oppression. If
all people are makwerekwere somewhere, what happens to the central
difference for the Tiragalong gossips? It is perhaps in the dream se-
quence in which Refilwe falls in love with the young Nigerian at Ox-
ford that the stranger/kinsman dichotomy is resolved. Refilwe counters
the xenophobia of contemporary urban South Africa embodied in char-
acters like Refentse’s cousin by simultaneously recognizing the famil-
iarity and the strangeness of both exile and her new love interest.
 AN ELEGY FOR AFRICAN COSMOPOLITANISM 123

The stranger-who-was-not-a-stranger teased her quite often that night.

He came carrying the taste that stood the test of time [advertising logo
for Castle Lager] in his hands, despite the fact that one hardly ever saw
any South African brew in our Jude the Obscure [Refilwe’s Oxford pub
hangout]. He visited her in dreams that substituted Vicker’s Place [Re-
filwe’s Hillbrow flat] for Morrell Hall [Refilwe’s Oxford dorm].

He is a stranger who is not a stranger, who comes bearing gifts from

home—the wistfully ironic “taste that stood the test of time.” He al-
lows her, in her dreams, to substitute Hillbrow and Oxford—not make
the one become the other, but allow the places to be interchangeable,
to allow the dislocations of self-imposed exile to become expansive.
Their union is doomed. Shortly after getting together, they discover
they are both HIV-positive and return to their respective national
homelands to die. However, the novel refuses the conventions of what
might be termed (inter)national romance. A union between a Nigerian
and a South African is not allowed to solve the problems of xenopho-
bia, AIDS, witchcraft, and sexual shame that lie at the novel’s center.
The fantasy that exile might also be something of a solution is quickly
dismissed. This penultimate gesture of the novel recognizes that the
complex and overdetermined sociopolitical realities of contemporary
urban South Africa are irretrievable for genres of romantic allegory. Re-
filwe’s death takes us back to the opening death of the young girl on
the streets of Hillbrow and is resonant of the title: Welcome to Our Hill-
brow. The terms of this welcome become clear: to be embraced by the
hospitality of the cosmopolitan, we need to accept the invitation to
share the work of mourning, or perhaps more accurately we are en-
couraged to inhabit the novel’s melancholia.

AIDS, MOURNING, POLITICS

Welcome to Our Hillbrow suggests a vibrant interconnectedness be-

tween urban and rural worlds, home and exile for negotiating this en-
tity I am calling African cosmopolitanism. As a route to the imagining
of collectivity across difference, this cosmopolitanism has two dark
undersides—witchcraft and the AIDS pandemic—which paradoxically
may also be its conditions.
The novel’s narrative strategies mimic its descriptions of both the
disease and witchcraft in interesting ways, with important differences.
Writing, like witchcraft, is imagined as having animating and healing
powers. The narrative voice shows us a movie in heaven and can move
with surprising grace between the worlds of the living and the dead. Yet
124 AN ELEGY FOR AFRICAN COSMOPOLITANISM

writing, unlike witchcraft, seeks to keep the dead alive in the memories
of the living, and more particularly in the endlessly revisable stories
that the living can tell about the dead. The novel subtly but sustainedly
reminds us that reading and writing are a kind of world-making magic.
Acknowledging a unifying and arbitrary vulnerability to HIV/AIDS
becomes the condition of welcome to our Hillbrow. To engage in love,
and sex, and to be desiring subjects is to share in this vulnerability. The
novel is clear that the virus respects neither national boundaries nor
even the integrity of discrete individual bodies. Questions of origins and
certainties of identity can offer no protection. While certain protagonists
in the novel, particularly Refentse’s corrupt policeman cousin, provide
the familiar “AIDS is the wages of sinning by other people” argument,
the novel shows that everyone can be affected.31 The novel both presents
and debunks all phobic folk narratives, which seek inoculation from the
disease through the assertion of identity-based virtue and sin:
. . . certain newspaper articles attributed the source of the virus that
causes AIDS to a species called the Green Monkey, which people in
some parts of West Africa were said to eat as meat, thereby contracting
the disease. Migrants (who were Tiragalong’s authoritative grapevine on
all important issues) deduced from such media reports that AIDS’s
travel route into Johannesburg was through Makwerekwere; and Hill-
brow was the sanctuary in which Makwerekwere basked. There were
others who went even further, saying that AIDS was caused by the
bizarre sexual behaviour of the Hillbrowans. How could any man have
sex with another man. . . . Surely, this large group argued, it was the shit
that the greedy and careless penises sucked out of the equally eager
anuses, that could only lead to such dreadful illnesses?32

The Tiragalong migrants, themselves displaced people of a sort, would

like to claim safety from HIV/AIDS in that they are not green monkey
eaters from West Africa, nor homosexuals who have anal sex. Yet, the
people who die in the novel are the young, educated respectable peo-
ple from Tiragalong. The previous passage is further noteworthy for
the description of sex in terms of part-objects—body parts that are un-
ruly and have a life of their own that are not subject to rule by will.
The novel is not willing to deny the humanity of desire, as doing so
would risk embracing the migrants’ hypocrisy that the narrative voice
is at pains to escape. Yet Tiragalong and its values, no matter the crit-
ical distance taken by the protagonists, remain part of home.
The narrator tells us of the protagonist of Refentse’s short story:

But then she discovered like you did Refentse, that a conscious decision
to desert home is a difficult one to sustain. Because home always trav-
els with you, with your consciousness as its vehicle. So her second res-
 AN ELEGY FOR AFRICAN COSMOPOLITANISM 125

olution was to pour all her grief and alienation into the world of story-
telling. You had her write a novel about Hillbrow, xenophobia and AIDS
and the prejudices of rural lives.33

Writing allows for Refentse to work through these questions of identity

and morality in ways that further complicate their connection. The pro-
tagonist of Refentse’s story is a woman and is in this important respect
very different from himself. However, she too is a writer pouring all her
grief and alienation into “the world of storytelling.” Like him, unlike
him, she mimes his vulnerabilities and enacts his imagined solutions.
Home is not reducible to identification with place or people but be-
comes the telling and retelling of stories of loved and lost people.
The kind of home that the narrator has Refenste imagine for his pro-
tagonist shares attributes with the structure of Freudian melancholia.
However, great care must be taken in making this analogy, since the
narrative voice is not marked by despair or self-loathing (the affective
markers of the melancholic). It appears that the loved objects, Refentse
and Refilwe, are not given up. Instead, they have become part of the
fabric of this narrative voice, and both they and the novel’s readers can
be hailed as “Child of our World and other Worlds.”34 The novel sug-
gests that melancholia, which is always an implicitly pathological
structuring of relation between subject and lost objects in psycho-
analysis, can also be an ethical relation.
The final paragraphs of the novel reveal a sense that Hillbrow is a
global place, that the problems of xenophobia, AIDS, and premature
death that can be found there circulate between Tiragalong, Hillbrow,
Alexandra, Oxford, Lagos, and heaven and earth. Furthermore, the
work of mourning needs to be reconfigured.
Normal mourning overcomes the loss of the object. . . . Each single one
of the memories and situations of expectancy which demonstrate the li-
bido’s attachment to the lost object is met by the verdict of reality that
the object no longer exists; and the ego, confronted as it were with the
question whether it shall share this fate, is persuaded by the sum of the
narcissistic satisfactions it derives by being alive to sever its attachment
to the object that has been abolished.35

The narrator is unable to forget Refilwe or Refentse or to sever his at-

tachment to them. His act of writing could be seen as analogous to the
Freudian ego here, marking persuasion “by the sum of narcissistic sat-
isfactions that it is alive.” However, instead of helping to sever the at-
tachment, the act of writing and the understanding of writing as
endlessly revisable helps keep the lost objects alive with and within him.
How, in Muñoz’s words, can the writing protagonists of the novel
take “their/our dead with us to the various battles we must wage in
126 AN ELEGY FOR AFRICAN COSMOPOLITANISM

their names—and in our names”?36 I think Mpe’s novel can move its
protagonists and readers from a xenophobic, exoticizing position in re-
lation to the African HIV/AIDS pandemic to the melancholia of a cos-
mopolitanism that can embrace other people’s dead. How this
translates into political work is a question that may require yet another
archive. To complete another circle here, we may need melancholia
and mourning, as well as militancy.
 Notes
INTRODUCTION

1. Cited in Zaverdinos, “Mugabe Hounds Gays.”

2. Ibid.
3. For a very brief history of the scandal, see Andrew Meldrum,
“Canaan Banana, President Jailed in Sex Scandal, Dies.”
4. Reported in the East Africa Standard (September 30, 1999). Cited at
www.mask.org.za/sections/AfricaPerCountry/kenya/kenya1.html.
5. www.iglhrc.org/site/iglhrc/section.php%3Fid%3D5%26
detail%3D184.
6. Grace Bibala, “Homophobia Entails a High Economic Cost,”
www.nationaudio.com/News/EastAfrican/111099/Business/
Business_Opinion0.html.
7. www.sodomylaws.org/world/namibia/nanews10.htm.
8. See chapter 4.
9. Cited in Sean Loughlin, “Two Republicans Criticize Santorum for
Remarks About Gays.” www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/04/24/
santorum.gays/.
10. See Joseph Massad’s “Re-orienting Desire: The Gay International
and the Arab World,” 361–85.
11. See Oliver Phillips’ “The Invisible Presence of Homosexuality:
Implications for HIV/AIDS and Rights in Southern Africa” for a
tracking of the relationship between homosexuality and
HIV/AIDS in the context of “African heterosexual transmission,
155–66.”
12. See Christian Aid’s debunking of the success of Ugandan HIV
programs. Christian Aid claims that government statistics do not
take into account areas ravaged by civil war in the north of the
country, which may have particularly high rates of HIV infection.
www.avert.org/:aidsuganda.html.
13. www.mask.org.za/sections/AfricaPerCountry/uganda/uganda.html.

127
128 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

14. See Paula Treichler, “AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical

Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification, 31–70.”
15. Achille Mbembe, interview with Christian Hoellner,
www.stanford.edu/~mayadodd/mbembe.html.
16. See V. Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa.
17. The debate over the causal primacy of material interest (and the
forms of sovereignty most useful to imperial interest) and
subjective factors in the history of imperialism in Africa is an old
and long one. See Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher’s classic
“The Imperialism of Free Trade,” as well as Africa and the
Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism. Philip Curtin’s The
Image of Africa gets at this dynamic in the language of another
scholarly era. One cannot overread Lord Seely’s famous remark
that the British Empire was acquired in a fit of
absentmindedness.
18. The scope of “race” in defining and othering Africans is too vast
to even broach. From racism to negritude, Pan-Africanism to
tribalism, anthropology to anticolonial nationalism—all contain
discourses of race. In relation to African literature, the essays in
Marxism and African Literature, edited by Georg Gugelberger,
offer a Marxist critique of ethnicity. Christopher Miller in
Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in
Africa, suggests that ethnos may be necessary for ethics.
19. Ellis, Sexual Inversion.
20. See Jonathan Ned Katz’s The Invention of Heterosexuality for a
brief genealogy and etymology of homosexuality.
21. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol.1, 43.
22. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 40–41.
23. Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” In
Standard Edition of the Collected Works of Sigmund Freud.
7:145. In German: “Die psychoanalytische Forschung
widersetzt sich mit aller Entschiedenheit dem Versuche, die
Homosexuellen als ein besonders geartete Gruppe von den
anderen Menschen abzutrennen. Indem sie auch andere als die
manifest kundgegeben Sexualerregungen studiert, erfährt sie,
dass alle Menschen der gleichgeschlechtlichen Objektwahl
fähig sind und dieselbe auch im Unbewussten vollzogen
haben.” Gesammelte Werkes: 44. Here Freud is explicit in
disagreeing (widersetzt) with minoritizing theories of
homosexuality and in insisting that all people have made a
 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 129

homosexual object choice (gleichgeschlechtlichen Objektwahl)

in their unconscious.
24. Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien, “Race, Sexual Politics, and
Black Masculinity: A Dossier,” 106.
25. See Siobhan Somerville, Queering the Color Line.
26. John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity.”
27. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Cultural Talks in the Hot Peace:
Revisiting the Global Village.”
28. See inter alia Tom Boellstorf, “The Perfect Path: Gay Men,
Marriage, Indonesia,” 475–509; and Peter Jackson and Nerida
Cook. Gender and Sexualities in Modern Thailand.
29. Lauren Berlant, “Two Girls, Fat and Thin.”
30. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 22–36.
31. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes
Its Object.
32. Ann Laura Stoler’s work takes on this task but has little to say
about how imputations of homosexuality may be one way of
metropolitan recoding of native practices, and the “homosexual”
questions present in her work are more concerned with anxieties
about the behavior of colonizing men. See Carnal Knowledge
and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule.
33. Mahmood Mamdani offers an important caveat about South
African exceptionalism more generally, arguing that “the
discourse of apartheid . . . idealized the practice of indirect rule
in the British colonies to the north.” Citizen and Subject:
Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, 27.
34. Cindy Patton’s “Inventing African AIDS” remains the most
telling account of the mapping of the disease onto colonial and
racist understandings of Africa to produce the category of
“African AIDS.” See Cindy Patton, Inventing AIDS.
35. For a record of the president’s public denials, evasions, and
contradictory utterances on the South African HIV/AIDS pandemic,
see “Statements by South African President Thabo Mbeki on the
subject of HIV/AIDS, October 1999–March 2004.” www.tac.org.za.
36. Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies of African
Homosexualities, edited by Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe.
Signe Arnfred, ed. Re-thinking Sexualities in Africa. This second
anthology is deeply committed to a sustained awareness of
130 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

colonial legacies in both the practices the various essays seek to

describe and the kinds of knowledges that can be produced
about them.
37. See inter alia Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
38. Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and
Sex in an African Society, 7.
39. John Addington Symonds, A Problem in Modern Ethics, 2.
40. As a partially ironized native anthropologist of gayness here, I
invoke the folkloric and the anecdotal. Many gay couples are
unnerved by the sometimes well-meaning, sometimes hostile
question: “Which one of you is the man in the relationship?”
41. HIV & AIDS in Africa: Beyond Epidemiology, edited by Ezekiel
Kalipeni, Susan Craddock, Joseph R. Oppong, and Jayati Ghosh,
6–9.
42. Catherine Campbell, “Letting Them Die:” Why HIV/AIDS
Prevention Programmes Fail, 19.
43. John Le Carré, The Constant Gardener, 532.
44. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s classic: “Can the Subaltern
Speak?”
45. See Lauren Berlant for the explanatory power of “intimacy” as a
notion that can hold the affective and the ideological together in
ways that neither term is reducible to the other: “yet the inwardness
of the intimate is met by a corresponding publicness . . . For
intimacy refers to more than what takes place within the purview of
institutions, the state and an ideal publicness.” Intimacy, 1–8.

1. AFRICAN SODOMY IN THE MISSIONARY POSITION

I would like to thank Beth Povinelli for suggesting the phrase “corpo-
real intimacies and their signifying regimes” as a way of conceptual-
izing the shifting overdeterminations in the rendering of certain bod-
ily practices as sexual, as African or not, as unspeakable, as political,
as private in specific historical moments. What was offered as a sug-
gestion for an expanded title resonated far beyond that, and this would
have been a very different chapter had she not made the suggestion.
My thinking here has been much enabled by her critical acumen and
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 131

generosity. I would also like to thank the members of the Lesbian and
Gay Studies Workshop and the African Studies Workshop at the
University of Chicago, who read and commented upon earlier drafts of
this chapter.
1. Hannington is killed ostensibly because he attempts to enter
Buganda from the west, fulfilling a prophecy concerning in-
vaders that come through “the back door.” I eschew all double
entendres here.
2. That “readers” is the designation given to the Christian converts
cannot pass without comment. Literacy in addition to faith may
be an important social marker here.
3. David Apter, The Political Kingdom in Uganda: A Study in
Bureaucratic Nationalism, 71. I provide this summary, not in the
interest of information retrieval (and I bring the full force of
whatever conceptual intelligence I have to interpreting these
events), but in order to orient my readers. Nevertheless, despite
my best efforts, I have reproduced some axioms of colonial his-
toriography in my summary. The specter of my imagined reader
haunts me here and raises the thorny questions of who writes
for whom, and where and when, under globalization.
4. See inter alia Dennis Altman, “Global Gaze/Global Gays.”
417–36; D. Herbert and Richard Parker, Sexuality, Politics and
AIDS in Brazil; Steven O. Murray, “The ‘Underdevelopment’ of
Modern Gay Homosexuality in Mesoamerica”; Matthew Roberts,
“Emergence of Gay Identity in Gay Social Movements in
Developing Countries: The AIDS Crisis as Catalyst,” 243–64; and
the various essays in Thinking Sexuality Transnationally, edited
by Elizabeth A. Povinelli and George Chauncey.
5. See Lauren Berlant’s introduction to Intimacy. Berlant uses “inti-
macy” as a way of rearticulating the domains of public and private:
“yet the inwardness of the intimate is met by a corresponding pub-
licness.” I am partially arguing that what the missionaries call
sodomy may have functioned as an “institution of intimacy” in
Ganda society. See also Christopher Lane’s The Burdens of
Intimacy: Psychoanalysis and Victorian Masculinity for a similar
use of the term. Lane is more interested in questions of interiority
and ineffability. In the case of Mwanga, since the historical record
is mostly constituted by missionary reports, any certainty in reach-
ing Mwanga’s desire is almost an impossibility for me. Lane’s sus-
tained argument on the impossibility of desire cohering into iden-
132 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

tity means that his allegiance to psychoanalysis is not that far from
my putative historicism here. It is only through a series of histori-
cal and anthropological ruses that I can begin to grasp the linea-
ments of the unknowability of the explosive, excessive intimate
practices I am attempting to review in this chapter.
6. The Anglican missionaries published long extracts from their diaries
in the Church Missionary Intelligencer and Record published by the
Church Missionary Society in London. Letters from the Catholic
missionaries were published in the bulletin of the White Fathers,
Missions d’Afrique des Pères Blancs. Alger, 1873–1887.
7. J. P. Thoonen’s Black Martyrs draws extensively on the
“Processus Ordinarius,” which was began in Uganda in 1887 to
collect the facts of the martyrdom. The “Processus Apostolicus”
provides the sworn testimonies of witnesses in response to a
questionnaire drawn up by the Sacred Congregation. The
“Processus Ordinarius” and a comprehensive summary of the
“Processus Apostolicus” can be found in Positio Super Martyrio et
Signis.
8. Edward Stock, The History of the Church Missionary Society, 414.
9. Sarah Stock, The Story of Buganda and the Victoria Nyanza
Mission.
10. Cited in Thoonen, Black Martyrs, 168.
11. Roland Oliver, The Missionary Factor in East Africa, 103.
12. Marie de Kiewet-Hemphill, “The British Sphere, 1884–1894.”
13. Thoonen, Black Martyrs, 279–81.
14. The witness in the apostolic process who recounts this event
uses the phrase “evil purpose.” See Thoonen, Black Martyrs, 170.
15. Robert Pickering Ashe, Two Kings of Uganda; or, Life by the
Shores of Victoria Nyanza, 218.
16. Thoonen, Black Martyrs, 171.
17. Ibid., 99.
18. R. W. Beachey, A History of East Africa, 1592–1902, 193.
19. Harry H. Johnstone, The Uganda Protectorate, Vol. II, 685.
20. Apter, The Political Kingdom in Uganda: A Study in Bureaucratic
Nationalism, 63.
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 133

21. An interesting example of Victorian fascination with the

medieval, overlayed with speculations of noble savagery free
from the deprivations of a modern division of labor, can be
found in John Ruskin’s “The Nature of Gothic” from The Stones
of Venice, Part II (1853). Rudeness, wildness, and savageness are
all terms with positive valences in Ruskin’s lexicon: “If,
however, the savageness of Gothic architecture, merely as an
expression of its origin among Northern nations, may be
considered, in some sort, a noble character, it possesses a
higher nobility still, when considered as an index, not of
climate, but of religious principle.” Robert Herbert, ed., The Art
Criticism of John Ruskin, 94.
22. Many adminstrators and commentators remarked on the special
status of Uganda in Africa. Hesketh Bell, the governor in 1905,
writes: “The policy as far as I am told is to run this territory, as
far as possible, as a purely native state and to see whether these
people are able to govern their country with honesty and
justice.” Winston Churchill claimed of Uganda: “Uganda is a
native state. It must not be compared with any of those colonies
where there is a white population established, nor again with
those inhabited by tribes of nomadic barbarians.” See William
Harold Ingrams, Uganda: A Crisis of Nationhood, 26–27.
23. Interestingly, the White Fathers in charge of the Roman
Catholic Mission in Buganda do not initially report “unnatural
vice” as a motivation for Mwanga’s hostility toward both
groups of Christians in his kingdom. See Thoonen, Black
Martyrs, 168–69.
24. Jonathan Goldberg, “Sodomy in the New World: Anthropologies
Old and New,” in Fear of a Queer Planet, 3–18.
25. More generally, a reticence on the part of anthropologists to
discuss sexual matters can be attributed to forces of growing
professionalization within the field over the second half of the
nineteenth century. (See Kuklick, The Savage Within; The Social
History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945, 27–74.) The
reticence on the part of the missionaries can perhaps be
attributed to a strange but prevalent logic that infused some of
the debates around the 1886 Labouchere Amendment, which
notoriously criminalized male same-sex sex acts even when
committed consensually and in private. In short, it was feared
that to name, even punitively, was in some way to incite; that to
represent these acts even in proscription was to encourage their
134 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

proliferation. This logic is repeated in 1921, when an extension

to the Labouchere Amendment was proposed to include indecent
acts between women. It passed through the House of Commons
but was blocked in the House of Lords by Lord Desart’s
following argument: “You are going to tell the whole world that
there is such an offence, to bring it to the notice of women who
have never heard of it, never thought of it, never dreamed of it. I
think that is a very great mischief.” Cited in Philip Hoare, Oscar
Wilde’s Last Stand, 126.
26. Cited in Stock, History of the Church Missionary Society, 411–12.
27. Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from
the Nineteenth Century to the Present, 23–25.
28. In actuality, Ganda dress resembled Arab robes more closely.
29. For a sense of the complexity of this moment, see Michel
Foucault’s classic The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, and the
important work of Arnold Davidson on the emergence of the
pervert as figure and category of European thought, particularly
Arnold Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical
Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts.
30. Siobhan Somerville, “Scientific Racism and the Emergence of the
Homosexual Body,” 243–66.
31. Neville Hoad, “Arrested Development or the Queerness of
Savages: The Imperial and Neo-imperial Uses of Male
Homosexuality,” 133–58.
32. Richard Krafft-Ebing and Max Nordau are probably the two most
prominent fin de siècle figures to theorize inversion/homosexuality
in terms of a variety of degenerative processes. Krafft-Ebing’s
discussion of “male antipathic sexual feeling” always attributes
same-sex desire to degeneration of mind, body, and spirit: “By the
side of the functional signs of degeneration attending antipathic
sexual feeling are found other functional, and in many cases
anatomical, evidences of degeneration.” Richard Krafft-Ebing,
Psychopathia Sexualis, 360. Nordau’s attacks on aestheticism
suggest a wider cultural climate of degeneration in which
abnormal sexual behavior is implicated: “[H]e commits a serious
error if, in the aesthetic schools of the last few years, he sees the
heralds of a new era. They do not direct us towards the future, but
point backwards towards the past . . . and what the ignorant hold
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 135

to be outbursts of gushing youthful vigour and turbulent

constructive impulses are nothing but the convulsions and spasms
of exhaustion. Cited in Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side, 15–16.
33. A commonplace in the chapters of Darwin’s Descent of Man,
which addresses questions of sexual selection in humans is that
ornamentation belongs to savages and/or women in the human
world. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 556–57.
34. Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Oscar Wilde, Effeminacy and the
Queer Moment, 27.
35. I suspect that these racialized images of Wilde have more to do
with the pleasures and anxieties associated with the cross-racial
and transvestite attributes of American minstrelsy. See Eric Lott,
Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working
Class.
36. See Harford Montgomery Hyde’s Famous Trials 7: Oscar Wilde,
70–96.
37. After the 1895 trials, conspiracy theories abounded that the
conviction of Wilde was assured because of the need to cover up
a liberal prime minister’s (Lord Rosebery) affair with Douglas’s
brother, Viscount Drumlanrig. See Hoare, Oscar Wilde’s Last
Stand, 106.
38. See William Cohen’s Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian
Fiction for a careful consideration on the constituents of a sex
scandal in this period in England.
39. See chapter 3 for a more extensive discussion on the historical
and geographic variability of the social meanings of
homosexuality. For an exquisitely careful tracking of the
meanings of sexual acts and their textual representation in the
frame of the multiple contextualizations that a “transnational
feminist cultural studies” approach facilitates, see Jyoti Puri,
“Concerning Kamasutras: Challenging Narratives of History and
Sexuality,” 603–39.
40. See Linda Dowling’s Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian
Oxford.
41. Cited in Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from
the Nineteenth Century to the Present, 18.
42. Alan Moorehead, The White Nile, 296.
136 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

43. For a discussion of Burton’s varied sexual proclivities, see Frank

McLynn’s Burton: Snow upon the Desert, 15–16, 41–42, and
51–53.
44. Cited in Bleys, The Geography of Perversion, 70.
45. See footnotes 59 and 60.
46. For the French, it is the English vice. The English word bugger is
derived from Bulgarian. The word berdache is derived from a
Turkish word and is then applied to cross-gendered Native
Americans.
47. See Edward Said’s classic Orientalism. For a more focused
consideration of male same-sex desires under orientalist optics,
see Joseph A. Boone’s “Vacation Cruises; or, The Homoerotics of
Orientalism,” 89–107; and Todd A. Smith, “Gay Male
Pornography and the East: Reorienting the Orient,” 13–21.
48. See particularly the best-selling works of Sir Richard Francis
Burton, A Pilgrimage to Mecca and Medinah, which was first
published in 1893, and his 1886 translation of The Arabian Nights.
49. Cited in Stock, History of the Church Missionary Society, 425.
50. I think here of the portrayal of Simon, the peddler in Maria
Edgeworth’s Harrington (1816), and the portrayal of Fagin in
Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1846), to name two popular
novels which traffic in, with varying degrees of critical distance,
stereotypes of Jews as child-killers.
51. See Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body, for an introduction to this
literature.
52. Apter, The Political Kingom in Uganda: A Study in Bureaucratic
Naturalism, 70.
53. Ibid., 98.
54. J. Brierley and T. Spear, “Mutesa, the Missionaries and Christian
Conversion in Buganda,” 602.
55. Cited in Thoonen, Black Martyrs, 105.
56. Ibid., 132.
57. Brierley and Spear, “Mutesa, The Missionaries and Christian
Conversion in Buganda,” 603–4.
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 137

58. I would like to thank my colleague Mikael Karlstrom for

reviewing this chapter for me and sharing his work on “the
quotidian and corporeal reproduction of social form” in
contemporary and colonial Ganda society. See his The Cultural
Kingdom in Buganda: Popular Royalism and the Restoration of the
Buganda Kingship.
59. Thoonen, Black Martyrs, 279–80.
60. Ibid., 154.
61. Allegations of “sins of the flesh” were repeated in the 1897 clash
between Mwanga and the katikoro, Apolo Kaggwa, over British
demands (supported by the katikoro) that Mwanga cease
“training” household servants and reduce his “boys” from 200 in
number to 5. John Rowe, “Erieza Kintu’s Sulutani Anatakola—A
Nineteenth-Century Historical Memoir from Buganda,” 313–19.
62. Thoonen, Black Martyrs, 187.
63. Presidential Address, January 25, 1994. For discussions of the
Zimbabwean case, see Oliver Phillips, “Zimbabwean Law and
the Production of a White Man’s Disease.” Human Rights and
Homosexuality in Southern Africa, 471–91.
64. SWAPO Press Release, January 28, 1997. On November 6, 1998,
the Namibian Minister for Home Affairs proposed introducing
legislation to criminalize homosexuality, asserting “It is my
considered opinion that the so-called gay rights can never
qualify as human rights. They are wrongly claimed because it is
inimical to true Namibian culture, African culture and religion.”
The Rainbow Project Press Release, November 9, 1998.
65. In 1995, President Daniel arap Moi claimed that “words like
lesbianism and homosexuality do not exist in African
languages.” In 1998, President Moi told the Daily Nation “Kenya
has no room or time for homosexuals and lesbians,” as reported
by the Sapa-Panos news agency on August 14. “Homosexuality is
against African norms and traditions, and even in religion it is
considered a great sin.” See: www.ilga.org/Information/
legal_survey/africa/kenya.htm#*Background.
66. See Neville Hoad, “Between the White Man’s Burden and the
White Man’s Disease: Tracking Lesbian and Gay Human Rights
in Southern Africa.”
138 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

67. As Arnold Davidson points out: “Nineteenth-century psychiatry

often took sexuality to be the way in which the mind is best
represented. To know a person’s sexuality is to know that person.
Sexuality is the externalization of the hidden, inner essence of
personality.” Davidson, “Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality,” 47.
68. In all fairness, it must be noted that if the missionaries can be
believed, Mwanga did tend to try to test the loyalties of good-
looking boys more often than ugly ones: “Mugagga, Kizito and
Gyavira, all good-looking boys, were much importuned by King
Mwanga. On this account they were the objects of Charles
Lwanga’s special care.” Cited in Thoonen, Black Martyrs, 165.
69. Ham Mukasa, “Some Customs of the Waganda.”
70. Marie de Kiewet-Hemphill, Light and Darkness in East Africa, 26.
71. See chapter 3.
72. Arthur Phillips in Survey of African Marriage and Family Life, 191.
However, Phillips also notes how this not withholding of
recognition did not equate with a recognition of polygamous
unions as true marriages, especially as far as the intrusion of the
state was concerned. “Thus it has been held by the superior
courts of the British territories in East Africa that a marriage under
native custom is not a marriage within the meaning of article 122
of the Indian Evidence Act (which relates to the privilege
attaching to communications between husband and wife during
marriage).” See Rex v. Amkuyo (East African Law Review, 1917,
14) and Robin v. Rex (Kenyan Law Review, 1929–30, 134), cited in
Phillips, Survey of African Marriage and Family Life, 179.
73. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations.
74. See Robert Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn
of the Twenty-First Century.
75. CMS Bulletin 1887–1890, 11.
76. The refusal to see Africans as the subject of history has a long and
shameful history, perhaps best encapsulated by Hegel’s notorious
remarks: “At this point we leave Africa not to mention it again.
For it is no historical part of the world, it has no movement or
development to exhibit. Historical movements in it—that is in the
northern part—belong to the Asiatic or European World. . . . What
we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical,
Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere
nature. . . .” G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 199.
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 139

2. DECOLONIZING THE BODY

1. See Chris Dunton, “‘Wheyting Be Dat?’ The Treatment of

Homosexuality in African Literature,” 422–48, for a more
extensive study of literary treatments of the idea that
homosexuality is definitively un-African.
2. I am indebted here to Gayatri Spivak’s thinking on reading and
the ethics of alterity. See inter alia “Writing Wrongs,” 523–81.
3. Lest I risk projection here, the novel insists on the sexual allure
of Noah repeatedly: “And he was good-looking too. When they
brought him back, naked except for his black underpants, he
had indeed the lean, lithe torso of one of the not-so-holy
companions of the Agony. . . . The man’s hand was hooked into
the boy’s pants, the only firm hold on a sweat-slippery body . . .”
(Soyinka, The Interpreters, 114–17).
4. See also Chukwuemeka Ike’s The Naked Gods for a thoroughly
satirical depiction of campus life under decolonization.
5. The novel offers the following scathing snapshot of corruption
in the case of the power plant: “And the chairman—for his
subsidiary company registered in the name of his two-month-
old niece had been sole contractor for project Ijioha—cleaned
out a few thousands in immediate compensation and filed
claims for a few thousands more. ‘I always say it, the Write-Offs
pay better than fulfilled contracts.’ And to Sekoni, ‘the expert
says that was junk, Engineer, junk’” (Soyinka, The Interpreters,
28). Harry Garuba notes the appearance of a larger-than-life-
size statue of Sango, the Yoruba god of lightning, in front of the
headquarters of the National Electric Power Authority of
Nigeria. Sekoni’s power plant may satirize more than the
corruption of neocolonial development, or the satire may
function in terms of the animist materialism Garuba outlines in
his essay. Harry Garuba, “Explorations in Animist Materialism:
Notes on Reading/Writing African Literature, Culture and
Society,” 261–85.
6. In voidancy, defecating becomes the most socially and
symbolically significant act in making meaning of decolonizing
Nigeria. (Soyinka, The Interpreters, 71–72).
7. A standard spiritual attributed to Harry Thacker Burleigh
(1866–1949), and covered by a staggering array of recording
artists from Paul Robeson to Elvis Presley and Portishead.
140 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

8. Kwame Anthony Appiah is particularly astute on this question.

In an article that shares a title with Soyinka’s Myth, Literature
and the African World (1976), thus performing precisely the
problem of intra-African difference and solidarity, he argues:
“For even if his writing were addressed solely to other Africans,
Soyinka could not presuppose a knowledge of Yoruba
traditions. . . . Even when addressing other Africans, . . . he
can only take for granted an interest in his situation, and a
shared assumption that he has the right to speak from within a
Yoruba cultural world. He cannot take for granted a common
stock of cultural knowledge. Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Myth,
Literature and the African World,” 107–8.
9. J. Lorand Matory, Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender
and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion, 215.
10. My subtitle refers to the iconic description of an African
woman’s sexual and economic power in what in many ways—
some regrettable—remains the central novel about Africa in
English letters: Joseph Conrad’s 1899 Heart of Darkness,
100–101.
11. Soyinka, The Interpreters, 22.
12. See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 39.
13. Abdulrazak Gurnah suggests that this feeling of “the liberating
ecstasy of self-abandonment” is present in Egbo’s relationship with
Simi as well, and is pervasive in Soyinka’s figuring of male
heterosexual desire more generally. See Abdulrazak Gurnah, “The
Fiction of Wole Soyinka,” 65–66.
14. See Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger, eds., The Invention of
Tradition. See also Mahmood Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject:
Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism.
15. Appiah suggests that Egbo’s dilemma here may be generalizable
to African writers. The “cultural worker” milieu of The
Interpreters may encourage this leap. Subjective identity must
negotiate the competing claims and diverging temporalities of
race, nation, and ethnicity: “For African writers, the answer is
not so easy. They are Asante, Yoruba, Kikuyu, but what does this
now mean? They are Ghanaian, Nigerian and Kenyan, but does
this yet mean anything? They are black, and what is the worth of
the black person?” Appiah, “Myth, Literature, and the African
World,” 102.
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 141

16. See Adeboye Babalola, “A Portrait of Ogun as Reflected in Ijala

Chants.”
17. Peter McKenzie, Hail Orisha: A Phenomenology of a West African
Religion in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, 493.
18. Gurnah, “The Fiction of Wole Soyinka,” 70.
19. Biodun Jefiyo, Wole Soyinka, xv–xviii.
20. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 180.
21. Chris Dunton, “‘Wheyting Be Dat?’ The Treatment of
Homosexuality in African Literature,” 422–48.
22. In a discussion of Sagoe’s response to Golder, Gurnah notes:
“Sagoe cannot accept the contradictions that Golder represents,
contradictions which are a crucial element in Yoruba myth”
(Gurnah, “The Fiction of Wole Soyinka,” 69).
23. See Gaurav Desai, “Out in Africa,” 139–64.
24. Eric, or Little by Little, by Frederick William Farrar (1858)
inaugurates the schoolboy novel of moral corruption and
character building.
25. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-
Consciousness.
26. For Baldwin’s own difficult relationship to Pan-Africanism as
worked through in his fiction, see Barbara Hudson and Andrew
Shin, “Beneath the Black Aesthetic: James Baldwin’s Primer of
Black American Masculinity.”
27. http://ingeb.org/spiritua/sometime.html.

3. NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 77.

2. Philip Jenkins, “Defender of the Faith,” 46–49.
3. See Daniel Balint-Kurti, “Anglican Rift over Homosexuality
Deepens.”
4. Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy, 27.
5. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire:
Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, 7.
142 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

6. Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third

World.
7. Rosi Braidotti and Judith Butler, “Feminism By Any Other Name:
Interview,” 31–67.
8. Edward Stock, History of the Church Missionary Society, 645–46.
9. James Solheim, “Sexuality Issues Test Bonds of Affection Among
Bishops at Lambeth Conference.” www.episcopalchurch.org/
ens/nsexuality.html.
10. Raymond Williams’s elaboration of a periodizing impulse remains
indispensable here as dominant understandings of all four of my
key terms in this chapter jostle with emergent, residual, and
resistant understandings. See Raymond Williams, Marxism and
Literature, 129–35.
11. www.episcopalchurch.org/presiding-bishop/lc98res.html. The
president of the World Bank responded sharply to a film made
with the cooperation of the Lambeth Bishops: “Programs
initiated by the World Bank have nearly eradicated River
Blindness in Africa for 30 million people. . . . We’re the major
fighter in the world against AIDS. We’re the major fighter in the
world against malaria. None of that is in your film. None of it. I
am not angry about the film. I’m upset. I’m upset because it
paints a picture of our institution which is quite simply
wrong. . . . I work with 10,000 people in the bank who are
committed to poverty eradication. We do not get up every
morning and think what we can do to ruin the world. . . .” The
World Bank president outlined the limits to the World Bank’s
capacity to cancel debt. Even if the 180 countries participating in
the bank “want me to forgive debt,” despite a “balance sheet of
150 billion dollars, I can forgive 23 billion dollars,” he said.
“Why? Because the only capital I have is 23 billion dollars.”
Since the amount that the bank can borrow to assist countries is
restricted by the bank’s capital, he appealed to the bishops:
“Look at the realities of what you are suggesting.”
www.churchnet.org.uk/news/files3/news035.html.
12. Solheim, “Sexuality Issues Test Bonds of Affection among
Bishops at Lambeth Conference.”
13. David Skidmore, “Lambeth Struggles over Homosexuality in
Emotional Plenary Session.” www.anglicancommunion.org/
acns/lambeth/lc098.html.
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 143

14. Solheim, “Sexuality Issues Test Bonds of Affection among

Bishops at Lambeth Conference.”
15. Ibid.
16. Cited in Julia Duin, “African Bishops Reject Aid.” See also Mike
Crawley, “African Anglicans Shun US Money over Gay Policies.”
17. Moses Jolayeni and Andrew Ahiante, “Obasanjo Backs African
Bishops.” Posted on allafrica.com, October 29, 2004.
http://localhost/archives/000386.html.
18. Balint-Kurti, “Anglican Rift over Homosexuality Deepens,”
2005.
19. Crawley, “African Anglicans Shun US Money over Gay Policies,”
2005.
20. Patrick Brantlinger, “Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of
the Myth of the Dark Continent,” 166–203; Maggie Kilgour, From
Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of
Incorporation.
21. John Lubbock, The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive
Conditions of Man. John Ferguson McLennan, Primitive Marriage
Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture Vol. 1; Lewis Morgan,
Ancient Society: Or, Researches in the Lines of Human Progress
from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization.
22. I refer here to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in
1833. Racial formation in the United States, as a “miscegenated
metropole,” has its own particular history, arguably more
containable within a national frame during the nineteenth
century, though the reverse possibly pertains now.
23. On Israel, see Amir Sumaka’i Fink and Jacob Press, eds.,
Independence Park: The Lives of Gay Men in Israel. On Taiwan,
see Cindy Patton, “Stealth Bombers of Desire: The Globalization
of ‘Alterity’ in Emerging Democracies.” On Romania, see Carl
Stychin, “From Integration to Civilisation: Reflections on Sexual
Citizenship in a European Legal Order.”
24. James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings
of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt.
25. Ibid., 167.
26. For a lucid theorizing of the problematic gendered legacies of
nationalist discourses for anticolonial struggles, see Joseph
144 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

Massad, “Conceiving the Masculine: Gender and Palestinian

Nationalism,” 468–83. While specifically concerned with the
Palestinian case, Massad is suggestive on the way nationalist
discourse presents both the nationalist agent, and to a lesser
extent the national subject as masculine.
27. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A
Derivative Discourse.
28. See Joseph Massad, Colonial Effects: The Making of National
Identity in Jordan.
29. The reasons for this failure are complex, and I can do no more
than gesture to a combination of postcolonial governmental
corruption, the massive allocation of national resources to debt
service, and the continued underdevelopment of many African
economies and societies. Readers interested in tracking the
ongoing failures of neoliberal development initiatives in Africa
and elsewhere are referred to the excellent Web site of Christian
Aid—www.christianaid.org.uk/. The church is always potentially
on all sides.
30. For an extended consideration of the particularities of the South
African situation and a general overview of the relationship of
lesbian and gay rights to Southern African nationalist traditions,
see my “Tradition, Modernity and Human Rights: An
Interrogation of Gay and Lesbian Rights Claims in Competing
Southern African Nationalist Discourses,” 32–43.
31. GALZ Press Release, February 4, 1997.
32. Simon Watney, “Missionary Positions: AIDS, Africa and Race,”
89–106.
33. South Africa is a notable exception, marking the achievement of
considerable lesbian and gay human rights under a sympathetic
constitutional provision and a neoliberal global order that works
hard to delegitimate claims around substantive justice. My
“Between the White Man’s Burden and the White Man’s
Disease: Tracking Lesbian and Gay Human Rights in Southern
Africa,” 559–84, attempts to account for the differences of the
South African case in terms of the South African experience of
colonialism and the timing of the South African liberation
struggle; the lateness of the South African regime change in the
postcolonial moment; and the character and long duration of the
national liberation struggle.
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 145

34. Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality.

35. John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality.
36. See Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, David Halperin,
100 Years of Homosexuality; and “How to Do the History of
Homosexuality,” 87–123.
37. For the bare bones of the historical and what Gore Vidal calls
“anthropological haymakers” for stable, modern understandings
of homosexuality, see inter alia Gil Herdt’s flawed but classic
Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia. Certain essays argue for
repeated boy-to-man fellatio as a normative event in the learning
of proper masculinity! Kenneth Dover’s Greek Homosexuality
offers an early and frank acknowledgment of the valorization of
pederasty among the ancient Greeks. The anthology, Hidden
from History, edited by Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and
George Chauncey contains essays revealing a range of historical
and cultural actors and experiences which, while subsumable
under the sign “homosexuality,” continually push at its limits.
38. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian
Existence.”
39. Katie King, “There Are No Lesbians Here: Lesbians, Feminisms
and Global Gay Formations,” 33–48 notes that in the context of
the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women at Beijing in 1995,
“the phrase ‘sexual orientation’ was offered as the new
universal, not lesbian.”
40. Desai, “Out in Africa,” 2003.
41. This homophobia is thoroughly documented in Chris Dunton and
Mai Palmberg, Human Rights and Homosexuality in Southern
Africa.
42. Steven O. Murray and Will Roscoe, Islamic Homosexualities:
Culture, History and Literature, 28–37.
43. Joseph Massad, “Re-orienting Desire: The Gay International and
the Arab World,” 361–85.
44. I use this statistic as a rough indicator of the continuing
impoverishment of much of sub-Saharan Africa. There is often
no reliable statistical data for many African countries since 1984,
and since much of the economy of these countries takes place
informally, the numbers need to be treated with some
circumspection. David Ransome, “The Dictatorship of Debt,” 9.
146 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

45. Dennis Altman, Global Sex, 21.

46. These institutions have come under attack by both insiders and
outsiders for the failure of the neoliberal economic principles
they impose on what used to be called the Third World to
produce development. For the most cogent insider critique, see
World Bank former chief economist, Joseph Stiglitz,
Globalization and Its Discontents. In response to these critiques,
the international financial institutions appear at least willing to
consider debt forgiveness and some state sovereignty over
capital control.
47. Solheim, “Sexuality Issues Test Bonds of Affection among
Bishops at Lambeth Conference.” 1998.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. Dipesh Chakrabarty in Provincializing Europe: Historical
Difference and Postcoloniality argues that this provincializing
should be one of the aims of postcolonial studies.
51. Massad, “Re-orienting Desire: The Gay Internation and The Arab
World,” 361–385.

4. WHITE MAN’S BURDEN, WHITE MAN’S DISEASE

Sections of this work were presented at the Sawyer Seminar Winter Sym-
posium in March 1998 at the University of Chicago and at the Southern
African Sexualities Conference at the University of Sussex in June 1998.
I would like to thank participants at these venues for their contributions,
particularly Rachel Holmes, Mark Gevisser, and Oliver Phillips. A shorter
version appeared under the title “Tradition, Modernity and Human
Rights: An Interrogation of Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Rights Claims
in Southern African Nationalist Discourses,” and thanks to Gerald Kraak
for his editorial finesse. (Development Update: The Quarterly Journal of
the South African NGO Coalition and Interfund 2, 2 (1998): 32–43.)
1. Thanks to Joseph Massad for pointing this out to me.
2. “And just when they appear to be engaged in the revolutionary
transformation of themselves and their material surroundings, in
the creation of something that does not yet exist, precisely in
such epochs of revolutionary crisis they timidly conjure up the
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 147

spirits of the past to help them; they borrow their names,

slogans and costumes so as to stage the new world-historical
scene in this venerable disguise and borrowed language. Luther
put on the mask of the apostle Paul; the Revolution of 1789–1814
draped itself alternately as the Roman republic and the Roman
empire, and the revolution of 1848 knew no better than to
parody at some points 1789 and at others the revolutionary
traditions of 1793–5.” Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of
Louis Bonaparte,” 146–47.
3. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in
Cultural Politics. The essays “Reading the World: Literary Studies
in the Eighties” (95–102) and “Explanation and Culture:
Marginalia” (103–117) introduce and elaborate upon this notion
of “worlding,” while keeping the practitioner of cultural studies
clearly in view.
4. See Thoonen v. Australia, Communication no. 488-1992, E.
Heinze, Sexual Orientation: A Human Right. Martinus Nijhoff,
1995; R. Ermanski, “A Right to Privacy for Gay People Under
International Human Rights Law.” The emergence of an
organization like IGLHRC (International Gay and Lesbian Human
Rights Commission) testifies to the attempt to have sexual
orientation rights acknowledged under international law.
Mainstream human rights organizations like Amnesty
International have also set up caucuses to deal with sexual
orientation rights, though this process has been contested.
5. Here I am riffing on Homi Bhabha’s famous formulation in “Of
Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,”
125–33.
6. For selective instances of this rhetoric, inflected by invocations
of Christianity in the Swazi case, see T. Shongwe, “Gays Are
Sick, Says the King,” 1–2; V. Ginindza, “Away with All the
Lesbians and Gays,” 6. For extensive referencing of the
Namibian fracas, see the following publications between
December 12, 1996 and March 13, 1997: The Windhoek
Advertiser, The Namibian, The Windhoek Observer, Southern
African Chronicle, and New Era. For a useful synopsis of
Zimbabwean President Mugabe’s notorious remarks, see the
NCGLE flyer “Exposing Mugabe’s Ongoing Anti-Gay Campaign
of Lies.” For an excellent discussion of the Zimbabwean case,
which rigorously situates the controversy in colonial and
148 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

postcolonial historical contexts with an emphasis on legal

aspects, see Phillips, “Zimbabwean Law and the Production of a
White Man’s Disease,” 471–91. The invocation of nationalist
rhetoric in the Zambian debate following the attempt to register
LEGATRA (Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transgender Persons
Association) as an official NGO can be found in the pages of The
Post from August 31, 1998 to September 17, 1998.
7. Rachel Holmes traces this rhetoric in the trials and appeals of
Winnie Mandela in “White Rapists Made Coloureds (and
Homosexuals): The Winnie Mandela Trial and the Politics of
Race and Sexuality,” 284–94.
8. For a lucid account of the Zimbabwe Book Fair drama, see
Dunton and Palmberg, Human Rights and Homosecuality in
Southern Africa.
9. Dennis Altman, The Homosexualization of America, the
Americanization of the Homosexual.
10. See inter alia Bloke Modisane’s Blame Me on History.
11. On “gayle,” see Gerrit Olivier, “From Ada to Zelda”; Cameron
and Gevisser, Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lines in South
Africa Today, and Ken Cage, Gayle, The Language of Kinks and
Queens. On township drag, see Mark Gevisser, “Mandela’s
Stepchildren: Homosexual Identity in Post-Apartheid South
Africa,” in Different Rainbows, ed. Peter Drucker; and the
documentary film, Dark and Lovely, Soft and Free, Paulo
Alberton and Graeme Reid. On Cape Town’s “moffie” culture,
see Dhianaraj Chetty, “A Drag at Madame Costello’s: Cape Moffie
Life and the Popular Press in the 1950s and 1960s.”
12. See Jennifer Spruill, “Imagining a Gay and Lesbian Movement in
South Africa: Class, Community and the Spaces of Politics.”
13. Marlon Riggs’s film Tongues Untied is a moving portrayal of this
dual dynamic in the U.S. context. Kobena Mercer’s Welcome to
the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies touches on
these problems in Britain.
14. This rhetoric, previously present in both gay claims and in
homophobic responses in the United States, has been recently
refuted by Lee Badgett. See M. V. Lee Badgett, “Some Readings
Related to Lesbian and Gay Economics: An Annotated
Bibliography,” 111–16; and “Towards Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 149

Perspectives in Economics: Why and How They Make a

Difference,” 49–54.
15. South African Gay Pages (October 1995): 28. The editorial in this
edition of the magazine ends with the following exhortation:
“Your fierce advertising support will change the face of gay life
in South Africa exactly like it has changed everywhere in the
modern world. Help us move medieval South Africa into the 21st
Century. Your money matters.” The ironies of this rhetoric
abound when one considers that sectors of the gay and lesbian
community are simultaneously calling for “sexual orientation” to
be included in affirmative action programs. See Department of
Labour, National Seminar on “Sexual Orientation and the
Workplace,” March 26, 1988.
16. For the unemployment statistics (and how they were derived),
see the Central Statistics Services’ October Household Survey
1994–1997 (this can be accessed at www.css.gov.za). For an
indication of the enormous housing crisis in South Africa, see
M. Soggat and T. Amphudi, “A Human Flood Drowns
Gauteng.”
17. Neighborhoods like the Castro in San Francisco or Chelsea in
New York, where gay people form majority populations and the
urban geography is marked by a proliferation of commercial
venues specifically catering to them, or by city demarcations like
the North-Halstead designation in Chicago, are a distinctive
feature of big U.S. cities.
18. For a nuanced and compelling reading of sexuality and space in
post–apartheid Cape Town, see Glen Elder, “Love for Sale:
Marketing Gay Male P/leisure in Contemporary Cape Town,
South Africa.”
19. Here I have to rely on that particularly problematic form of
evidence: personal experience. When I left Johannesburg, my
home town, in August of 1991, there were no gay bars in the
affluent white northern suburbs. I have been home yearly since
and a number of bars and clubs have opened up (and closed
down) in the Rosebank area, the largest shopping/business
district in the northern suburbs. While many older venues closer
to the downtown in Braamfontein and Hillbrow remain open,
the racial demographics of their clientele have shifted (some
places more dramatically than others). In recent years many gay
bars have moved to Melville and a cluster of bars and clubs in
150 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

Braamfontein called “The Heartland” has opened, closed, and

reopened. At times, “The Heartland” is boomed off, allowing for
a kind of gated community experience of gay nightclubbing.
20. This is John D’Emilio’s thesis in “Gay Identity and Capitalism,”
467–78.
21. See Roberts, “Emergence of Gay Identity in Gay Social
Movements in Developing Countries: The AIDS Crisis as
Catalyst,” 243–64.
22. For the formative statement of this argument see Partha Chatterjee’s
Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse.
23. The classic text that outlines the shifting representational and
institutional place of women in third-world nationalism is
Jawaryadena, 1986. Massad, Colonial Effects: The Making of
National Identity in Jordan, 468–83, maps out how the agent of
national liberation is figured as masculine as a result of the
ideological legacies of colonialism and how this affects the
differential positions of men and women in anti- and
postcolonial national struggles.
24. The relationship of authentic blackness to homosexuality in the
United States has been seen as similarly problematic. I am
thinking here of Cleaver’s hostile remarks about James Baldwin
in “Notes on a Native Son.” Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 97–111.
25. See GALZ, “Statement on Namibia.” Harare (February 4, 1997).
26. See Sowetan (August 11, 1995).
27. One man describes the cure as taking the blood of a cow. The
blood is then ritually transformed into medicine, which is
applied onto two cuts along the sides of the erect penis. These
interview clips are taken from a radio feature on the aftermath of
the GALZ controversy, which aired on All Things Considered,
National Public Radio, August 16, 1995.
28. The word hungochani in Shona may refer to Shangaan, suggesting
the displaceable otherness of these practices and implying the
dislocations of transnational movements of labor in the mines,
where same-sex “mine marriages” became increasingly associated
with certain ethnic groups—shangaan among them. See Marc
Epprecht, “Men, Mines, and Sex: A Re-review of Moodie and
Harris,” 31–36. See also Mark Epprecht, Hungochani: The History
of a Dissident Sexuality in Southern Africa.
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 151

29. For theories of the relation of colonial rule to African tradition

more generally, see Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger’s
classic, The Invention of Tradition. For more contemporary
discussions of how these issues affect South African women, see
Susan Bazilli, ed., Putting Women on the Agenda. Mahmood
Mamdani in Citizens and Subjects discusses the ways “African
tradition” functions as a legacy of both colonialism and
apartheid.
30. See E. Günzel, “Nujoma Blasts Gays.”
31. See Neville Hoad, “Introduction” in Sex and Politics in South
Africa: Equality/Gay & Lesbian Movement/the Struggle.
32. T. Dunbar Moodie, with Vivienne Ndatshe, Going for Gold:
Men, Mines, and Migration. See also P. Harries, Work, Culture,
and Identity: Migrant Laborers in Mozambique and South
Africa.
33. See Zackie Achmat, “Apostles of Civilised Vice: Immoral and
Unnatural Vice in South African Prisons and Compounds,
1980–1990,” 92–110.
34. For a complete text of the Freedom Charter, see Raymond
Suttner and Jeremy Cronin, Thirty Years of the Freedom Charter.
35. NCGLE Newsletter, October 1995.
36. The Namibian (January 31, 1996).
37. “And when I worked in the clothing factory they called us
makwerekwere because South Africans say that the voices of black
immigrants scrape against their ears, like insects.” B. Tshabangu,
“Dogs. I Remember the Guard Called Us Dogs.”
38. “I have heard it said that “kwere, kwere” is more than a
mocking imitation of foreign languages—it is an attempt to
replicate the twittering of queleas, small but extremely
destructive birds that travel in flocks of hundreds of thousands.
One minute the queleas are nowhere in sight; the next they have
swept through fields like locusts, devastating the harvest.” Rob
Nixon, “South Africans Only,” 4, 29.
39. This problem is touched upon regionally rather than nationally
in Dennis Altman’s discussion of Australian gay activists’ place
in Asia, “Global Gaze/Gays,” 417–36.
40. Cited in G. Machona, “Zulu Defends Homosexual.”
152 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

41. The Post (July 15, 1998).

42. Ibid., (September 3, 1998).
43. Ibid., (August 31, 1998).
44. Mail and Guardian (September 4, 1998).
45. The Post (September 18, 1998).
46. www.mask.org.za/sections/africapercountry/abc/zambia/
zambia_001.htm.
47. This number is given by LEGATRA’s project manager in a Post
article of August 31, 1998.
48. Jennifer Spruill argues that many of the postconstitutional legal
achievements were also won without the benefit of a grassroots
movement. See Spruill, 2005.
49. Ecuador in its new constitution of 1998 included explicit
prohibitions on discrimination against sexual minorities.
(Constitution of Ecuador, 1998, Article 23, section 3.)
50. See Mark Gevisser, “A Different Fight for Freedom: A History of
South African Lesbian and Gay Organisation 1950s to 1990s,”
14–88.
51. In the arena of employment benefit rights, the Pretoria High
Court ruled against the police medical aid, Polmed, for refusing
to allow a lesbian police office to register her partner as a
dependent. For further details see: http://mg.co.za/mg/za/
archive/98feb/04-news.html). In April 1998, the Johannesburg
High Court overturned a previous court order allowing a welfare
agency to remove a child from its lesbian mother and place it in
the care of its grandparents (http://mg.co.za/mg/za/archive/
98apr/21-news.html). Also in April 1998, six gay and lesbian
couples with the support of the NCGLE lodged urgent applications
to overturn Home Affairs Minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s
decision not to allow permanent residence rights to the foreign-
born partners of gay men and lesbians. The petitioners were
successful in a ruling that overturned the Aliens Act in February,
1999. http://mg.co.za/mg/za/archive/98apr/28-news.html and
http://mg.co.za/mg/za/archive/99feb/14-news.html.
52. For a representative piece of rhetoric on South Africa as the
rainbow nation, see Lizeka Mda’s “Has the Rainbow Nation
Faded Forever.”
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 153

53. In 1986, Jesse Jackson founded the National Rainbow Coalition

of which he is president. The Rainbow Coalition is a national
social justice organization devoted to empowerment, education,
and mobilization. See Keep Hope Alive, 1989.
54. Given that close to half the states had sodomy statutes on the
books, until Lawrence v. Texas (2004) rendered such statutes
unconstitutional, this fantasy of the United States as the national
home of lesbian and gay human rights is, at best, ironic.
55. The following quote from Barry Adam may be taken as typical of
this way of narrating lesbian and gay struggles in the U.S. context:
“Like the Irish and Italians in the first decade of this century, or
the blacks of today, gay men and lesbians have taken on many of
the traits of ethnicity to assert their political will. Increasingly
organized through an indigenous press, in neighborhoods, at
work, and at church, lesbians and gay men have forged a social
movement that, like others, seeks to give them a voice in their
own future and defend themselves against the violence of the
state and others.” Barry D. Adam, The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian
Movement, 128.
56. This is not necessarily true of a place like Zambia, where an explicit
attempt was made to link lesbian and gay identity struggles with
those of ethnic minorities. ZIMT promised to sponsor six gays, six
lesbians, and some San people to attend the WCC meeting in
Harare in December 1998, where they would attend “forums and
exhibitions of minority rights.” The Post (July 15, 1998).
57. It would be interesting to compare this fraught alliance with the
equivocal relationship between the Black Panthers and the Gay
Liberation groups in the United States in the 1970s. Huey Newton’s
statements in the Black Panther’s Newsletter is a crucial document
arguing for American black nationalist support for gay liberation:
“During the past few years, strong movements have developed
among women and homosexuals seeking their liberation. . . .
Whatever your personal opinions and your insecurities about
homosexuality and the various liberation movements among
homosexuals and women (and I speak of homosexuals and
women as oppressed groups), we should try to unite with them in
revolutionary fashion.” “Letter from Huey Newton.” In The Gay
Liberation Book, L. Richmond and G. Noguera, 142. Also see
D’Emilio, Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, The Archive, and
The Pandemic Politics, and the University, 240–46.
154 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

5. THE INTELLECTUAL, THE ARCHIVE, AND THE PANDEMIC

This work was first presented at the “Sex and Secrecy” Conference of
the International Association for the Study of Sexuality, Culture and
Society, Johannesburg, South Africa, June 2003. I would like to thank
the convenors at WISER, Graeme Reid and Liz Walker, and the mem-
bers of the panel and the audience for their questions. In Johannes-
burg, a conversation with Mark Gevisser set me to thinking about
Mbeki and the Blues. Bernth Lindfors shared his expertise on Sarah
Bartmann with me. John McKiernan Gonzalez provided references on
the relation of medical history to medical policy more generally. Can-
dace Vogler helped enormously with thinking through the mind/body
split in Enlightenment racism. Joseph Massad helped me keep the dan-
gers of a critique of a critique of racism in focus. Barbara Harlow’s
reading of the penultimate draft tightened the argument. They all have
my heartfelt thanks. All errors remain my own.
1. I follow Mbeki in referring to her as Sarah Bartmann rather than
Saartjie Bartmann, the more common version of her name.
Saartjie is a Dutch diminutive of Sarah.
2. For a collection of Mbeki’s vacillating positions in his own words
on the connection between the HIV virus and AIDS, the related
efficacy of antiretroviral drugs in treatment of the disease and his
defense of the public health policy of his regime, see www.
tac.org.za/.
3. For a mostly excellent summary of this history, I refer you to
Samantha Power, “South Africa’s AIDS Rebel,” 54–67. For an
ongoing sense of this policy drama as it unfolds, readers might
find it necessary to subscribe to the Treatment Action
Campaign’s (T.A.C.) newsletter
(mailto:newssubscribe@tac.org.za).

4. The number of HIV-positive people in South Africa is hotly

contested. The Department of Health, Actuarial Society of South
Africa (ASSA), and the Human Sciences Research Council
(HSRC) have all separately used the results from surveys of
pregnant women at public antenatal clinics, patients in public
hospitals, migrant workers, bank workers, and truckers to
estimate the size of the epidemic. This is not a simple task,
particularly given the difficulties of extrapolating infection rates
for the general population from these specific social groupings.
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 155

These three institutions, with different agendas, calculate

epidemic sizes ranging from 4.8 million to 6.6 million for 2002.
The difference of nearly 2 million people is not insignificant, but
an HIV epidemic of 4.8 million people in 2002 would still be
massive. For a contestation of earlier and slightly higher W.H.O.
numbers see Rian Malan, “AIDS in Africa: In Search of Truth.”
For a disputing of the current South African numbers, see
“Apocalypse When?” www. noseweek.co.za/look/ns_article.
tpl?IdLanguage⫽1&IdPublication⫽5&NrIssue⫽52&NrSection⫽
1&NrArticle⫽629. Nathan Geffen’s rebuttal of Malan’s
arguments is available at www.tac.org.za/newsletter/2004/
ns20_01_2004.htm.
5. See Thabo Mbeki on the Virodene scandal at www.anc.
org.za/ancdocs/history/mbeki/1998/virodene.html and “The
Real Virodene Scandal.” Mail and Guardian, Print Edition
(March 6, 1998).

6. See Sarah Boseley, “At the Mercy of the Giants.” for an account
for the build-up to the case; and Power, 2004, 61, for how the
Clinton regime backed down from its campaign on behalf of the
pharmaceuticals against the Medicines Act.
7. Wherever possible, I have tried to provide a source for these factual
claims from the government’s perspective by citing a relevant
document from the African National Congress’s Web site, as well as
a second, usually more critical source from the South African press.
See “Hasty Action No Solution to Mother-to-Child Transmission.”
www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/anctoday/2001/at45.htm. For the court
case forcing the government’s hand to provide the drug, see Paul
Graham, “A Street-Wise Judgment.”
8. During the time lapsed from the ruling, the price of generics has
risen, and once again cost is being used as a reason for not
implementing distribution of antiretroviral treatments. See
“Don’t Pop the Champagne Yet.” Mail and Guardian, Print
Edition (January 27, 2004).
9. For a defense of the government’s initiatives on HIV/AIDS, see
James Ngculu’s speech at www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/
speeches/2003/sp0513.html. See also Power, 2004, 65.
10. See “Government Rejects ‘Populist’ Use of AIDS Drugs.” Mail
and Guardian, Print Edition (April 30, 2003).
156 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

11. For an early government acknowledgment of the seriousness of

the epidemic with the typical reservations about funding drug
treatments, see Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. “The Issue of
HIV/AIDS, AZT, and Rape.” www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/pr/
1999/pr0527.html. See footnote 3 for citations concerning the
controversy over the size and breadth of the epidemic.
12. See Power, 2004, 65. For skepticism about Uganda’s success and
the possibility of it continuing, see “The Missing Condoms.”
New York Times, Week in Review (September 4, 2005): 9.
13. For careful consideration of the difficulties in assessing the
relation between medical history and medical policy, albeit in a
very different context (the nineteenth-century United States), see
John Harley Warner, The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice,
Knowledge, and Identity in America 1820–1885; and Against the
Spirit of the System: the French Impulse in Nineteenth-Century
American Medicine.
14. For a defense of Mbeki’s involvement with David Rasnick, a U.S.
scientist who disputes the connection between HIV and AIDS,
see Dr. Zweli Mkhize, the Minister of Health for KwaZulu/Natal,
on the HIV/AIDS debate in April 2000. www.anc.org.za/
ancdocs/misc/zweli0428.html.
15. For a summary of the extensive and occasionally contradictory
documentation on Mbeki’s AIDS dissidence, see Drew Forrest,
“Behind the Smokescreen.”
16. The A.N.C. objected to former U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s
criticism of the South African regime’s response to the pandemic
in the following terms: “We find it alarming that President Carter
is willing to treat our people as guinea pigs, in the interest of the
pharmaceutical companies, which he would not do in his own
country.” Mike Cohen, “S. Africa’s A.N.C. Criticizes Carter.” See
also Power, 2004, 60, for a brief account of the problems with
Western pharmaceuticals and new drug testing in South Africa.
17. For a fairly representative and glancingly accurate accusation of
racism as the underlying cause of criticism of the A.N.C.
government, see Mbulelo Goniwe, “D. P Becoming Choice of
‘Rightwing Dinosaurs.’ ” www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/pubs/
mayibuye/mayi9801.html#DP.
18. Z. K. Matthews, one of the most important black South African
intellectuals in the first half of the Twentieth century, was best
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 157

known for mobilizing Christianity against the inequities of the

emergent apartheid state, advocating for better education for
black South Africans, and refusing education for servitude. He
was the first African headmaster of a high school and an
important figure in the growth of Fort Hare, South Africa’s
premier black university. See Z. K. Matthews, Freedom for My
People.
19. Antonio Gramsci, “The Intellectuals,” in Selections from the
Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey
Nowell-Smith, 6–23.
20. Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual.
21. Mbeki cultivates a reputation as his own speechwriter. See, for
example, Mbeki, Africa: The Time Has Come, a collection of his
speeches up to 1998.
22. For Mbeki’s elaboration of the idea of an African Renaissance,
see his address to the African Renaissance Conference on
September 28, 1998. www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/mbeki/
1998/tm0928.htm.
23. See inter alia on the United States, Douglas Crimp, ed., AIDS:
Cultural Analysis, Cultural Criticism. David Wojnarowicz, Close to
the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, and on the U.K., Simon
Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media.
24. See Carmel Schrire, Digging through Darkness, 174–78.
25. The literature on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)
is large and growing. For an early and moving account, see Antjie
Krog, The Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of
Forgiveness in the New South Africa; Mark Sanders, “Ambiguities
of Mourning: Law, Custom, and Testimony of Women before
South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” offers a
careful account of women’s testimony in the TRC that could
speak to the difficulties the speech has in mourning Sarah
Bartmann.
26. www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/mbeki/2002/tm0809.html.
27. I would like to thank Catherine Burns for bringing this video,
made by students at UWC, to my attention.
28. See Bernth Lindfors, “Courting the Hottentot Venus,” 107–19, in
which the deposition is reproduced in its entirety. See also Sander
158 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and

Madness; T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized
Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French; and
Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus. Angela Carter’s novel, Black Venus, offers
another interesting fictional version of the life of Sarah Bartmann.
29. www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/mbeki/2002/tm0809.html.
30. Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68) was a Prussian
antiquarian, most famous for his insistence on the centrality of
Greek culture to Enlightenment Europe’s self-understanding and
for the centrality of ideals of masculine beauty to Greek culture.
Imputations of European sexual deviance lurk behind this
invocation of Winckelmann.
31. www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/mbeki/2002/tm0809.html.
32. See Elizabeth A. Povinelli, “Gridlock: Intimacy, Genealogy,
Carnality.”
33. See inter alia La Reine Helen Baker, Race Improvement or
Eugenics; a Little Book on a Great Subject; Nancy Stepan, The
Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender and Nation in Latin America;
Allan Chase, The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New
Scientific Racism.
34. See Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, for the definitive
account of the Madonna/whore dichotomy in Western culture.
35. www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/mbeki/2002/tm0809.html.
36. Ibid.
37. For the most theoretically elaborated account of how racism
works through the framing of the African as an animal, see
Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 193–96, 236–40.
38. See Candace Vogler, “Much of Madness and More of Sin:
Compassion for Ligeia.” On the usefulness of haunting as a
concept-metaphor in cultural studies more generally, see Avery
Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological
Imagination and on the power of haunting as a mode of
negotiating colonial problematics of embodiment and social
space, see Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and
History in Colonial Africa.
39. www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/mbeki/2002/tm0809.html.
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 159

40. Isaac Julien, Looking for Langston.

41. It is unlikely that Sarah Bartmann ever saw the Gamtoos, as she
most likely came from the Western Cape. The choice of her
burial site was determined by the politics of the present—
attracting tourism to the economically depressed Eastern Cape, a
bolster to the regional heartland of the ruling A.N.C.
42. Zolani Ngwane, The Politics of Campus and Community in South
Africa: An Historical Ethnography of the University of Fort Hare.
43. www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/mbeki/2001/tm1012.html.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Deborah Posel makes a similar point (“Mbeki’s position on AIDS
amounted to a denial of the salience of sex in its transmission”)
in “The Scandal of Manhood: Unmaking Secrets of Sexual
Violence in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” 27.
47. See footnote 6 for citations relating to problematic drug testing in
Southern Africa. The problem of Third World drug-dumping also
speaks to ongoing imperialist racism in relation to global
“medical” practices. See John Dunne’s attack on W.H.O. for
failing to prevent the export of substandard and expired drugs to
the Third World, Drug Quarterly 1, 2: 39–41. The question of
expiration dates and their reliability for specific drugs
complicates the issue. While the pharmaceuticals undoubtedly
benefit from the practice, there is the possibility of some local
benefit as well, alongside the obvious and considerable risks.
48. David Margolick, Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Cafe Society, and
an Early Cry for Civil Rights.
49. Barbara Browning, Infectious Rhythm: Metaphors of Contagion and
the Spread of African Culture, 6–7.
50. For a genealogy of the emergence and deployment of the race-
card as a trope in U.S. culture see Linda Williams, Playing the
Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom
to O. J. Simpson.
51. Mandisa Mbali, “Mbeki’s Strange AIDS Discourse,” Mail and
Guardian, March 22, 2002.
52. K. Sello Duiker, The Quiet Violence of Dreams, 250.
160 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

53. www.equality.org.za/news/2004/03/17sizzlers.php
54. Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 110.
55. Phaswane Mpe, quoted in Lawrence Tait, “Welcome to Our
Literature.”
56. Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 82.
57. Ibid., 59.
58. Ibid., 121.
59. For a lucid explanation of the proliferation of witchcraft practices
in the new South Africa, see John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff,
“Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millennial Capitalism,”
in Codesria Bulletin 17; “Occult Economies and the Violence of
Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony.”
60. Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 4.
61. Ibid., 20.
62. Neville Hoad, “Between the White Man’s Burden and the White
Man’s Disease: Tracking Lesbian and Gay Human Rights in
Southern Africa,” 559–84.
63. Simon Watney, “Missionary Positions: AIDS, Africa and Race.”
64. Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 55.
65. Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis define a part-object as follows:
“Type of object towards which the component instincts are
directed without this implying that a person as a whole is taken
as love-object. In the main part-objects are parts of the body, real
or phantasied (breast, faeces, penis) and their symbolic
equivalents. Even a person can identify himself or be identified
with a part-object.” J. Laplanche, and J. B. Pontalis, The
Language of Psychoanalysis, 301.
66. Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 55.
67. Ibid., 124.
68. Speech to the Second Annual Conference of People Living with
AIDS, Durban, South Africa, March 10, 2000. www.tac.
org.za/about.htm.
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 6 161

69. I append this section of the T.A.C.’s Web site, so readers can
read the goals, rationale, and objectives of the organization in
its own words. The formation of the organization was
announced at the memorial service of the Delmas treason
trialist and important political anti-apartheid and self-identified
gay activist, Simon Nkoli, by its president, Zackie Achmat.
Achmat, himself a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, has
expressed the enormous emotional difficulty he has in fighting
the A.N.C.: “The emotionally torturous thing for me to do was
to recognize we had to take on the A.N.C. Our A.N.C.” Quoted
in Power, 2004, 65.
70. The T.A.C. and several key allies recently agreed to suspend the
campaign of civil disobedience with Deputy President Jacob
Zuma in the hope of ironing out key questions around
reductions of prices of medicines, treatment programs for the
public sector, and a national plan for the prevention for HIV
infection and the treatment of people with AIDS. T.A.C. NEC
Resolution, April 29, 2003. For an excellent brief history of the
Treatment Action Campaign, its iconic leader, Zackie Achmat,
and the postapartheid South African state’s failure to respond
effectively to the HIV/AIDS pandemic in South Africa, see again
Power, “The AIDS Rebel: An Activist Fights Drug Companies, the
Government, and His Own Illness,” 54–67.
71. See the list of actions at www.tac.org.za/.

6. AN ELEGY FOR AFRICAN COSMOPOLITANISM

1. Cosmopolitanism is enjoying something of a revival as a term of

cultural criticism, see, for example, Cosmopolitics: Thinking and
Feeling Beyond the Nation.
2. Phaswane Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 1.
3. Douglas Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” 107.
4. Jose Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the
Performance of Politics.
5. David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, “A Dialogue on Racial
Melancholia,” 324–71. Freud himself defines mourning as
follows: “Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved
162 NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the

place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal and so on.”
Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 243. See also Anne
Cheng, The Melancholy of Race.
6. See John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, “Alien-Nation: Zombies,
Immigrants, and Millennial Capitalism.”
7. Edward Said, Freud and the Non-European, 54.
8. Cited in Campbell, Letting Them Die, 188.
9. Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 1–2.
10. Ibid., 22.
11. Jim Comes to Jo’burg is a 1951 film that dramatizes the pleasures
and dangers of urban living.
12. Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 3.
13. Bloke Modisane, Blame Me on History.
14. Ezekiel Mphahlele, Down Second Avenue.
15. Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country.
16. Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 17.
17. Ibid., 6.
18. See Campbell, Letting Them Die.
19. Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 5.
20. Ibid., 10.
21. Ibid., 12.
22. See Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington
City.
23. Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 16.
24. Ibid., 59.
25. Ibid., 61.
26. Ibid., 67.
27. Ibid., 18–19.
 NOTES TO CHAPTER 6 163

28. Ibid., 26.

29. Ibid., 70.
30. Ibid., 102.
31. “I was interested in looking at that part of sexuality that people
don’t stigmatise, the sexuality of people who are supposed to be
educated and respectable.” Phaswane Mpe, quoted in Lawrence
Tait, “Welcome to Our Literature,” 9.
32. Mpe, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 4.
33. Ibid., 55.
34. Ibid., 124.
35. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” 255.
36. Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance
of Politics, 74.
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 Index
Achmat, Zackie, 78, 151n, 161n Bafana Bafana, 117
Adam, Barry D., 153n Baker, La Reine Helen, 158n
Africa, as time-spaces, xv; and Baldwin, James, 44–45, 141n, 150n;
sovereignty, xxvii, 6, 52–59; and Another Country, 44
noble savage discourse, 5; as Balint-Kurti, Daniel, 141n, 143n
Europe’s childhood, 12 Banana, Canaan, xii, 127n
African Christian Democratic Party, Barfoot, Alison, 55
80–81 Bartmann, Sarah, xxii, 90, 92–98,
African National Congress, 79–80, 154n, 157n, 159n
155n; Women’s League, 87 Basotho, and definitions of sex,
African Renaissance, 93 xxvi
Ahiante, Andrew, 143n Bazilli, Susan, 151n
Alberton, Paulo, 148n Beachey, R. W., 132n
All Things Considered, 150n Behan, Brendan, Borstal Boy, 49,
Altman, Dennis, 63, 72, 131n, 146n, 141n
148n, 151n Bell, Hesketh, 133n
Amadiume, Ifi, xxiv, xxv; and Male Berdache, 136n
Daughters, Female Husbands: Berlant, Lauren, xix, 120, 129n,
Gender and Sex in an African 130n, 131n, 162n
Society, xxvi Bhabha, Homi, 36, 147n
Amnesty International, 60 Bibala, Grace, 127n
Amory, Deborah, xxvi Black Panthers, 153n
Amphudi, T., 149n Bleys, Rudy, 136n
Anderson, Benedict, xix, 129n Boellstorf, Tom, 129n
Anglican Church, xxi, 3; history, Boone, Joseph A., 136n
49–50; and imperialism, 50–51; Boseley, Sarah, 155n
and homosexuality, 51–52 Bosman, Herman Charles, 118
Annan, Kofi, 52 Boswell, John, 59, 145n
Anti-Semitism, 12, 136n Botswana, 91
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 140n Braidotti, Rosi, 142n
Apter, David, 5, 12–13, 131n, 132n, Brantlinger, Patrick, 143n
136n Brierley, J., 136n
Arap Moi, Daniel, xii, 15, 137n British Uganda Agreement of 1900,
Arnfred, Signe, Rethinking 3, 5
Sexualities in Africa, xxvii, 129n Browning, Barbara, 103–4, 159n
Arnold, Matthew, 42 Buganda, xi, xix, xx; and
Artistic production, 47, 112 missionaries, 1, 7; history of
Ashe, Reverend A. P., 4, 132n martyrs, 1–2; Muslims, 4;
Asylum cases, 61 knightly and feudal nation, 5;
political organization, 12–13;
Babalola, Adeboye, 141 cosmology and politics, 14, 18,
Badgett, Lee, 148n Burleigh, Harry, 139n

179
180
Burton, Sir Richard Francis, 10, 136n
Butler, Josephine, 10
Butler, Judith, 142n
Cameron, Edwin, 111, 148n
Campbell, Catherine, xxviii, xxxiii,
130n, 162n
Cannibalism, 56
Carter, Angela, 158n
Carter, Jimmy, 156n
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 146n
Chase, Allan, 158n
Chatterjee, Partha, 144n, 150n
Chauncey, George, 131n, 145n
Cheng, Anne, 162n
Chetty, Dhianaraj, 148n
Chisambisha, Francis, 83
Christian Aid, 127n
Christian Missionary Society, 1,
132n, 138n
Christianity, and racial authenticity,
26; as colonial legacy, 85; and
literacy, 131n
Churchill, Winston, 113, 114, 133n
Cleaver, Eldridge, 150n
Coetzee, J. M., Waiting for the
Barbarians, 118
Cohen, Ed, 135n
Cohen, Mike, 156n
Cohen, Steven, 68
Cohen, William, 135n
Cold War, xv, xxx, 18, 41, 52; and
human rights rhetoric, 85
Colonialism, and nuclear family,
57, 67
Comaroff, Jean, 160n, 162n
Comaroff, John, 160n, 162n
Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness,
xxix, 28, 140n
Constant Gardner, The, xxix–xxxii
Cook, Nerida, 129n
Cooper, Frederick, 50, 141n
Cosmopolitanism, 35, 47, 161n; and
melancholia, xxviii, 114–17; and
Africa, 44–45, 103, 113–26, 140n
INDEX
Crawley, Mike, 143n
Creighton, Bishop Michael F., 55
Crimp, Douglas, 114, 157n, 161n
Cronin, Jeremy, 151n
Cuba, 61
Cultural relativism, 18, 60, 64
Curtin, Philip, 128n
Cuvier, Baron, 92–96, 103, 107, 109
Darwin, Charles, 9, 135n
Davidson, Arnold, 134n, 138n
Debt relief, 53
Decadence, 5–6; and homosexuality,
40; and the U.S., 42
Decolonization, and bodies, 21; and
femininity, 29; and diaspora,
34–46; and the church, 50; and
nation-states, 52–53
De Kiewet–Hemphill, Marie, 4, 132n
D’Emilio, John, xviii, 129n, 150n,
153n
Desai, Gaurav, 61, 141n, 145n
Dickens, Charles, 136n
Diderot, 93
Dinesen, Isak, Out of Africa, xxix
Dlamini-Zuma, Nkosazana, 156n
Domestic partnerships, 60
Douglas, Lord Alfred, 9
Dover, Kenneth, 145n
Downing, Linda, 135n
Drucker, Peter, 148n
Duberman, Martin, 145n
Duiker, K. Sello, The Quiet Violence
of Dreams, 105–6, 159n
Duin, Julia, 143n
Dunne, John, 159n
Dunton, Chris, 41, 139n, 141n,
145n, 148n
Ecuador, 60, 152n
Edgeworth, Maria, 136n
Elder, Glen, 149n
Ellis, Havelock, xvi, 128n
Eng, David, 114, 161n
Epprecht, Marc, 150n
 INDEX
Erinle, 24–25, 35, 45
Ermanski, R., 147n
European Union, 57
Fabian, Johannes, xix, 129n
Fanon, Frantz, 21, 31, 42; Black
Skins, White Masks, 37–39,
141n; The Wretched of the Earth,
37, 140n
Farrar, Frederick William, 141n
Fedler, Dov, 68
Feminism, Africa, xxvi;
public/private split, xxxii–xxxiii
Ferguson, James, 57, 143n
Fiction, xxx–xxxi; and limits of
political vision, xxxi; utility of
close reading, 22
Fink, Amir Sumaka’i, 143n
Forrest, Drew, 156n
Fort Hare, 90, 100, 102
Foucault, Michel, xvi, 59;
incitement to discourse, 66; The
History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 128n,
134n, 145n
Freedom Charter, 80
Freud, Sigmund, xvii, 11, 161n,
162n; and melancholia, xxiii,
xxv, 116, 125, 163n; Oedipus
complex, 38–39, 40–42; “Three
Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality,” 128n
Frontline States, xiii
Gallagher, John, 128n
GALZ (Gays and Lesbians of
Zimbabwe), xi, 58, 64, 76, 83,
144n, 150n
Garuba, Harry, 139n
Garveyism, 45
Gay identity, and capitalism, 74;
and cultural imperialism, 74;
and African tradition, 76
Gayiga, Matthias, 4
Gayle, 72, 148n
Geffen, Nathan, 155n
181
Gevisser, Mark, 146n, 148n, 152n,
154n
Ghali, Boutros, 52
Gibbon, Edward, Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire, 11
Gilman, Sander, 136n, 158n
Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic,
45–47, 141n
Ginindza, V., 147n
Global Fund, 91
Globalization, xvii; and
proliferation of perversity, xix;
and queer theory, xx; and
African homosexuality, xxiii
Goldberg, Jonathan, 6, 133n
Golder, Joe, 34–47
Goniwe, Mbulelo, 156n
Gonzalez, John McKiernan, 154n
Gordimer, Nadine, Six Feet of the
Country, 118
Gordon, Avery, 158n
Graham, Paul, 155n
Gramsci, Antonio, 157n
Greene, Graham, The Heart of the
Matter, xxix
Group Areas Act, 113
Gugelberger, Georg, 128n
Günzel, E., 151n
Gurnah, Abdulrazak, 35, 140n, 141n
Halperin, David, 59, 145n
Han, Shinhee, 114, 161n
Hannington, Bishop, 131n
Harlow, Barbara, 154n
Harries, Patrick, 151n
Harris, Bishop Barbara, 64–65
Hegel, G. W. F., 138n
Heinze, E., 147n
Hendricks, Barbara, 106
Herbert, Robert, 133n
Herdt, Gil, 145n
Heterosexuality, and colonial
history, 29; and masculinity, 39;
and monogamy, 41, 73; and
international gay rights, 62
182 INDEX
Hillbrow, xxii, 113–26
Historiography, 129n, 138n;
Marxism, xv
HIV/AIDS, xiii, xix, xxix 55, 56, 59,
74, 80, 128n; heterosexual
transmission, xiv; as gay disease,
xiv, 127n; and Western
representational hegemony, xxii;
and crisis in South Africa, xxii,
90–112, 155n; and sexual
transmission, xxii, 101–3,
108–11, 124; and biomedical
understandings, xxvii, 102; HIV
and AIDS in Africa: Beyond
Epidemiology, xxvii, xxxiii, 130n;
and prevention strategies, xxviii;
and multi-scalar and multi-
temporal approaches, xxviii; and
capital, xxix, 159n; and
conscience, xxxii; and mother to
child transmission, 91, 155n;
infection rate, 91, 154n; and
AIDS dissidents, 91, 156n; and
witchcraft, 108–10, 123–24; and
cosmopolitanism, 123; and
Thabo Mbeki, 90–112, 154n
Hoad, Neville, 134n, 137n, 144n,
151n, 160n
Hoare, Philip, 134n, 135n
Hobsbawm, Eric, 140n, 151n
Holiday, Billie, “Strange Fruit,”
102–4, 111
Holloway, Bishop Richard, 65
Holmes, Rachel, 146n, 148n
Homophobia, and African
nationalism, xii, 77; and
globalization, xii–xiii, xx; and
heterosexual coupledom, xxvi;
and displacement and diffusion,
21; and African sexuality, 42;
and alienation, 43–44; and anti-
imperialism, 61, 67; and
Lambeth resolution, 61, 66; as
symptom of globalization, 66;
and the Southern African state,
84, 145n; companionate
marriage, 97
Homosexuality, and Christianity, xi,
xii, 6, 53–59; and African
identity, xiii, 1; and imperialism,
xiii, xvi, xvii, 2, 129n; and
imaginary content, xvi; and
social construction, xvi, 59; and
essentialism, xvii, 59; and
minoritarian and universalizing
views, xvii; and race, xix; and
colonial archives, xx; and
diversity of experiences, xxiv;
and African culture, xxiv, 64;
and anthropological approaches,
xix, xxiv; and climate, xxv, 10;
and gender transitive, xxvi; and
realpolitik, 2; and royalty, 4; and
violence, 6; and martyrdom,
7–8; and evolution, 10; and
diaspora, 21; and coming out of
the closet, 27–28; and
definitions, 59–60; as western
import, 60–61; and cultural
difference, 51; and Islam, 145n;
and economics, 148n
Hudson, Barbara, 141n
Hughes, Langston, 98–100, 111
Human Rights, lesbian and gay,
69–72; and temporality, 70; and
anticolonial nationalism, 75
Human Rights Watch, 60
Hungochani, 77, 88, 150n
Huntington, Samuel P., The Clash of
Civilizations, 18, 138n
Hyde, Harford Montgomery, 135n
Identity, gay, xvi, xviii; and African
(rural and urban), xxiii
Ike, Chukwuemeka, 139n
Imperial British East Africa
Company, 1
Imperialism, economic history, 128n
Indirect Rule, xv
Indonesia, xxxii
 INDEX
Ingrams, William Harold, 133n
International Gay and Lesbian
Human Rights Commission
(IGLHRC), 18, 60–61, 147n
International Lesbian and Gay
Association [ILGA], 60, 70
International lesbian and gay
organizing, xix
International Monetary Fund, 63, 82
Intimacy, sexual, xx; and sexuality,
xxxii; and publicness, xxxii; and
psychoanalysis, xxxiii, 2; and
kinship, xxxiii, corporeal, 2; and
neoliberal rhetorics of
development, 49
Iran, 61
Islam, sexual stereotypes, 11, 41
Israel, 57
Jackson, Jesse, 87, 153n
Jackson, Peter, 129n
Jayawardena, Kumari, 142n, 150n
Jefiyo, Biodun, 37, 141n
Jenkins, Philip, 141n
Jim comes to Jo’burg, 118, 162n
Johnstone, Sir Harry, 5, 132n
Jolayeni, Moses, 143n
Julien, Isaac, xvii, 98, 129n, 159n
Kaggwa, Sir Apolo, 2, 137n
Kamanyire, Bishop Eustace, 54
Kampala, xii
Kaplan, Robert D., 18, 138n
Karlstrom, Mikael, 137n
Katz, Jonathan Ned, 128n, 145n
Kendall, xxvi
Kenya, xii, 15; and Anglican
Church, 55, 58, 61
Kilgour, Maggie, 143n
King, Katie, 145n
Kirrigwajjo, Anatole, 4
Kiwanuka, Andrew, 13–14
Kraak, Gerald, 146n
Krafft-Ebing, Richard, 134n
Krog, Antjie, 157n
183
Kuala Lumpur, 54, 62–63
Kuklick, Henrika, 133n
Kwashi, Bishop Benjamin, 60
Labouchere Amendment, 43, 133n
Lambeth Conference of Anglican
Bishops, xvii, xx–xxi, xxxiii,
48–67, 71, 142n
Lane, Christopher, 131n
Laplanche, Jean, 160n
Lawrence v. Texas, 153n
Le Carré, John, xxix–xxxiii, 130n
Lesbians, and in Lesotho, xxvi; and
in Kenya, xii; and African
lesbianism, 61
Lesbians, Gays, Bisexual, and
Transgendered Persons
Association (LEGATRA), 83–84,
148n, 152n
Lesotho, xxvi
Leviticus, 54
Lindfors, Bernth, 154n, 157n
Lodge, David, 23
Lord, Audre, xxiv, xxv
Lott, Eric, 135n
Loughlin, Sean, 127n
Lubbock, John, 143n
Lugor, Bishop Michael, 54
Machona, G., 151n
Mackay, Alexander, 1, 7–10
Madikizela-Mandela, Winnie, 72,
148n
Makwerekwere, 81, 88, 108–9,
122, 124
Malan, Rian, 155n
Mamdani, Mahmood, xiv, 129n,
151n
Mandela, Nelson, 90, 100
Margolick, David, 159n
Martinique, 38–39
Marx, Karl, 69, 147n
Massad, Joseph, 127n, 144n, 145n,
146n, 150n, 154n
Matory, J. Lorand, 140n
184
Matthews, Z. K., xxii, 90, 92, 156n
Mbali, Mandisa, 104, 159n
Mbeki, Thabo, xiii, xiv, xxii, 90,
92–104, 109, 111, 112, 129n,
154n, 157n
Mbembe, Achille, xv, xvi, 128n, 158n
McKenzie, Peter, 141n
McLennan, John, 143n
McLynn, Frank, 136n
Mda, Lizeka, 152n
Mda, Zakes, Ways of Dying, 119
Medicines Act (1997), 91
Meeropol, Abel, 102–4, 111
Meldrum, Andrew, 127n
Mercer, Kobena, xvii, 128n, 148n
Miller, Christopher, 128n
Mine marriages, xv, 77–79
Mkhize, Zweli, 156n
Modisane, Bloke, Blame Me on
History, 118, 148n, 162n
Montesquieu, 93–94, 103
Moodie, T. Dunbar, 77, 78, 151n
Moorehead, Alan, 135n
Morgan, Lewis, 143n
Mpe, Phaswane, Welcome to Our
Hillbrow, xxii, xxv, xxxiii, 82,
106–36, 160n, 161n, 162n, 163n
Mphahlele, Ezekiel, Down Second
Avenue, 118, 162n
Mpondo, 79
Mudimbe, V. Y., 128n
Mugabe, Robert, xi, xvii, xx, 15, 68,
72, 77, 83, 100, 127n, 147n
Mukasa, Ham, 16–17, 138n
Mukasa, Joseph, 14–15
Multiculturalism, 87
Muñoz, Jose Esteban, 114, 125–26,
161n, 163n
Murray, Steven O., xxiii–xxvi, 62,
129n, 131n, 145n
Museveni, Yoseri, xii, xiv
Mutebi, Bishop Wilson, 54, 65
Mutesa, 1, 16; and execution of
Muslims, 13
Mwanga, xi, xx, 1–20, 131n, 137n,
138n
INDEX
Namibia, xii, 15, 58, 59, 61, 71, 84,
147n, 150n
Namungogo, 1
Naruseb, Alpheus, 15, 80
National Coalition for Gay and
Lesbian Equality (NCGLE), 86,
147n, 151n, 152n
National Mine Workers Union, 78
Nationalism, 57; and Christianity,
58; and lesbian and gay human
rights, 70–71, 144n; and sport,
117–18; and gender, 144n
Nativism, 3
Ndatshe, Vivienne, 78, 151n
Negritude, 45, 52
Neoliberalism, 48, 142n, 144n,
145n, 146n; tolerance of
homosexuality, 58, definition, 63
Newton, Huey, 153n
Ngculu, James, 155n
Ngwane, Zolani, 159n
Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the
Genealogy of Morals, 48, 141n
Nigeria, xx, 60, Biafrian war, 22, 41,
21–46; and Anglican Church,
55, 122
Nijhoff, Martinus, 147n
Nixon, Rob, 151n
Nnobi, xxiv
Noguera, G., 153n
Nordau, Max, 135n
Nujoma, Sam, xii, 77, 80, 84
Nzerebende, Bishop Jackson, 55
Nzima, Sam, 117
Nzimbi, Archbishop Benjamin, 55
Oliver, Roland, 3, 132n
Olivier, Gerrit, 148n
Omar, Dullah, 86
Oxford Center for Mission
Studies, 63
Palmberg, Mai, 145n, 148n
Pan-Africanism, 43, 45, 100–101,
128n; and James Baldwin, 141n
Parker, Richard, 131n
 INDEX
Parks, Suzan-Lori, 95, 158n
Paton, Alan, Cry, the Beloved
Country, 118, 162n
Patton, Cindy, 143n; Inventing
AIDS, 129n
Per capita foreign debt, 63
Petersen, Hector, 117
Phillips, Arthur, 138n
Phillips, Oliver, 127n, 137n, 146n,
148n
Polygamy, xv, 32; and customary
law, 17, 50–51, 56
Pontalis, J. B., 160n
Pope Benedict XV, 2, 20
Posel, Deborah, 159n
Positio Super Martyrio et
Signis, 132n
Postcoloniality, xv, 86–87, 144n
Povinelli, Elizabeth, 96, 130n, 158n
Power, Samantha, 154n, 156n, 161n
Presley, Elvis, 139n
Press, Jacob, 143n
Proletarianization, xv
Prostitution, 106, 120
Public Health, xxxiii, 92, 110
Puri, Jyoti, 135n
Quarequa, 6
Queen Victoria, 3, 9
Queer theory, 21, 109
Race, xvi; and lasciviousness of
blackness, xxii, 56; and
diaspora, 34–37; and
masculinity, 39–41; racism and
Christianity, 56; sexual ideology
of racism, 92–111; historical
temporality of racism, 93; and
sexual forms of normative
whiteness, 97–112; and diasporic
cultural production, 44–48,
99–106; and nineteenth-century
science, 93–101; and Pan-
Africanism, 128n; racial
formation in the U.S., 143n
Ranger, Terrence, 140n, 151n
185
Rasnick, David, 156n
Reid, Graeme, 148n, 154n
Rich, Adrienne, 145n
Richmond, L., 153n
Rider Haggard, H., 20
Riggs, Marlon, 148n
Roberts, Matthew, 131n, 150n
Robeson, Paul, 139n
Robinson, Bishop V. Gene, 55
Robinson, Ronald, 128n
Rodney, Walter, “How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa,” 130n
Romania, 57
Roscoe, Will, 129n, 145n
Rosenberg, Ethel and Julius, 103
Roskam, Bishop Catherine, 65
Rowe, John, 137n
Rucyahana, Bishop John, 55
Ruskin, John, 132n
Rwanda: and Anglican Church, 55;
genocide, 55
Sachs, Albie, 88
Said, Edward, 157n, 162n; and
cosmopolitanism, xxiii, xxv; and
the intellectual, 92, 111; Freud
and the Non-European, 116;
Orientalism, 136n
Samuel, Reverend Vinay, 63, 65
Sanders, Mark, 157n
Santorum, Rick, xiii, 127n
Schrire, Carmel, 157n
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, xvii, 42,
128n
Seely, Lord, 128n
sexual orientation, xxi, 60; and
global capitalism, 62; and
lesbians, 145n; and international
law, 147n; and the workplace,
149n
Sexuality, definitions, 15–16; and
evolution, 20; and sexual acts,
62; fundamental attribute of
being human, 66
Shangaan, 79
Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean, 158n
186
Shin, Andrew, 141n
Shongwe, T., 147n
Shosholoza, 117
Sinfield, Alan, 9, 135n
Sizzlers, 106
Skidmore, David, 142n
Slavery, 45
Smith, Todd A., 136n
Sodatic, 10
Sodomy: and Arab instruction, 4–5;
recoding, 6, 19; shifting
meanings, 7, 14; and scandal,
10; and homosexuality, 65
Sodomy laws–Zimbabwe, xii
Soggat, M., 149n
Solheim, James, 142n, 146n
Somerville, Siobhan, 8, 129n, 134n
“Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless
Child,” 45–46, 106
Sotho, 79
South Africa, constitution, xii, xxi,
60, 144n; apartheid, xii; lesbians
and gay men, 58;
exceptionalism, 59; nationalism
and ethnic differences, 79; and
human rights discourse, 79; and
political traditions, 81; and
settler colony, 82; and the
equality clause, 86; and the
postcolonial moment, 87, 144n;
rainbow nation, 87; literary
tradition, 118
South African Gay Pages, 73, 149n
Sovereignty, xxxiii; imperial
forms, 96
Soyinka, Wole, xx; and The
Interpreters, xx, 21–47, 59, 76,
139n, 140n; narrative summary,
23–25; and Golder Joe, xx, 21–47,
106; Season of Anomy, 41
Spear, T., 136n
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, xviii,
22, 129n, 130n, 139n, 147n
Spruill, Jennifer, 148n, 152n
Stanley, Henry Morgan, 1, 11–12
INDEX
Stead, W. T., 10
Stepan, Nancy, 158n
Stigma, xiv
Stock, Edward, 132n, 134n, 136n,
142n
Stock, Sarah, 132n
Stoler, Ann Laura, 50, 141n; Race
and the Education of Desire,
xxxii, Carnal Knowledge and
Imperial Power: Race and the
Intimate in Colonial Rule, 129n
Stychin, Carl, 143n
Subalternity, xxxi
Sudan, 54
Suttner, Raymond, 151n
SWAPO (South West Africa People’s
Organization), 76, 84, 137n
Swaziland, 15, 58, 71
Symonds, John Addington, xxv; A
Problem in Modern Ethics, xxv,
130n
Tait, Lawrence, 160n, 163n
Taiwan, 57
Tanzania, 91
Thoonen, J. P., 4, 13, 132n, 136n,
137n
Tradition, xii; and anticolonial
struggles, xviii; and sexuality, 3,
106–8; and Christianity, 16–17,
19; and male touch, 31; and
modernity, 32–34, 58; and
migrant labor, 119
Transnationalism and HIV/
AIDS, xv
Treatment Action Campaign
(TAC), 80, 101, 111, 129n,
154n, 160n, 161n
Treichler, Paula, 128n
Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (TRC), 93, 117, 157n
Tshabalala-Msimang, Manto, 91
Tshabangu, B., 151n
Tutu, Desmond, 87
Tylor, Edward Burnett, 143n
 INDEX
Ubuntu, 122
Uganda, xii, xiv, 54, 156n; and
Anglican Church, 55, 58, 91,
127n; and medievalism, 133n
Underdevelopment theory, xxiv
United Democratic Front, 78
United Nations, 52; Universal
Declaration of Human Rights,
80; and Fourth World
Conference on Women at
Beijing, 145n
U.S. Episcopal Church, 55, 63
U.S. Congress, xi
Uys, Pieter-Dirk, 117
Verryn, Paul, 72
Vicinus, Martha, 145n
Vidal, Gore, 145n
Virodene, 90, 155n
Vogler, Candace, 154n, 158n
Voltaire, 93, 103
Walker, Liz, 154n
Warner, John Harley, 156n
Warner, Marina, 158n
Watney, Simon, 59, 144n, 157n,
160n
Weeks, Jeffrey, 134n, 135n
187
White, Luise, 158n
White Fathers, 1, 131n, 133n; and
Pere Lourdel, 1, 3; and
celibacy, 11
Wilde, Oscar, 7, 9
Williams, Linda, 159n
Williams, Raymond, 142n
Williams, Rowan, Archbishop of
Canterbury, 56
Wilson, Reverend J., 10–11
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 96,
103, 158n
Wojnarowicz, David, 157n
Wolfenden report, 42–43
World Bank, 63, 82, 142n
World Health Organization
(WHO), 91
Yoruba, religion, 26, 28, 35
Zambia, 15, 57, 58, 61, 71, 83, 153n
Zambian Independent Monitoring
Team (ZIMT), 83
Zanzibar, 18
Zaverdinos, Nico, 127n
Zimbabwe, xi, 15, 58, 61, 68, 71,
75–77, 137n, 147n, 148n
Zulu, Alfred, 83
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Neville Hoad was born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa. He
is assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin.