The Cultural Politics of Female Sexuality in South Africa

Henriette Gunkel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135147327
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Sexual identity has emerged into the national discourse of post-apartheid South Africa, bringing the subject of rights and the question of gender relations and cultural authenticity into the focus of the nation state's politics. This book is a fascinating reflection on the effects of these discourses on non-normative modes of sexuality and intimacy and on the country more generally. While in 1996, South Africa became the first country in the world that explicitly incorporated lesbian and gay rights within a Bill of Rights, much of the country has continued to see homosexuality as un-African. Henriette Gunkel examines how colonialism and apartheid have historically shaped constructions of gender and sexuality and how these concepts have not only been re-introduced and shaped by understandings of homosexuality as un-African but also by the post-apartheid constitution and continued discourse within the nation.

1
“Homosexuality is Un-African”

Unfolding the Colonial Legacy within Post-Apartheid Homophobia

Southern Africa has recently witnessed an emerging visibility of discussion around, and proclamation of, sexual identities. Regarding the question of cultural authenticity and that of gender equality, the subject of rights has been brought to the fore in local attempts to define postcolonial nation states. While post-apartheid South Africa was the first country in the world to explicitly incorporate lesbian and gay rights within the Bill of Rights of the post-apartheid constitution, the surrounding countries have chosen to exclude lesbians and gay men from citizenship rights. During the 1995 Book Fair in Harare the Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, for example, gave an infamous speech in which he described lesbians and gay men “as worse than pigs and dogs.” But this was just the start. In 2000 he declared homosexuality “as an abomination, a rottenness of culture” imposed upon Africans by Britain’s ‘gay government.’ Several politicians from different African countries followed Mugabe’s lead. Namibia’s minister of home affairs urged new police recruits in 2000 to “arrest on sight gays and lesbians and eliminate them from the face of Namibia,” while Sam Nujoma, Namibia’s then president, publicly stated that homosexuality was “one of the two top enemies of the national government” (Epprecht 2004, 5). In 2006 Nigerian’s president at that time, Olusegun Obasanjo, declared homosexuality as “un-Biblical, unnatural and definitely un-African” (Horn 2006, 7). The presidents of other countries such as Kenya, Zambia, Uganda, the king of Swaziland and leading church officials also “equated [homosexuals] with external threats” (Epprecht 2004, 4).

The public speeches that, in a populist way, proclaim homosexuality unAfrican are also part of discourses forming within South Africa itself. In fact, the idea that homosexuality is un-African proliferates in public discourse and is an opinion shared by a significant portion of the population.¹ Despite the constitution, organized religious leaders, politicians and nationalist voices in South Africa continuously feed homophobic discourse in the name of tradition and culture (Gevisser 1995; Khunou 2004; Espera 2006). References to Mugabe’s remarks that link an anti-homosexual position to the politics of decolonization are visible within popular culture in post-apartheid South Africa, as illustrated in various media items—one of which I will discuss towards the end of this chapter. Homosexuality is regarded as a white exploitation of black culture and as yet another form of cultural imperialism (Holmes 1995). Often these statements do not deny the existence of homosexuality in African communities per se—for example Khoisan X, quoted in Gevisser (1995), who avers that homosexuality only exists as a spin-off of apartheid’s capitalism²—but rather identify homosexuality, directly or indirectly, as an indicator of Westernization, as being a Western product imported by the West through colonialism. And in fact if we are able see beyond the intentions of these statements, which are straightforwardly homophobic, we could see that the identification of homosexuality, in particular, but also sexuality in general, as Western contains some moments of truth. This does not mean, obviously, that same-sex intimacy hasn’t existed throughout the African continent. As a number of scholars have pointed out, there is a whole range of historical and cultural evidence of male and female same-sex intimacy throughout the continent—as in any other part of the world.³ The different forms of same-sex intimacy, however, were not necessarily labeled as ‘homosexual’ throughout history and cultures. The term ‘homosexuality,’ as we have come to understand it in the West through more than three decades of feminism and gay liberation, does not describe the complexities of same-sex practices throughout history. In fact there has not been continuity in what we understand by the term ‘homosexuality.’ As Foucault (1987) has pointed out, the emergence of the ‘homosexual,’ as a category of identity, only became available through modern regimes of knowledge, constituted at the end of the 19^th century in the West. Foucault argues that in the 19^th century sexuality became the primary target of power. And as we will see in this chapter, this was directly linked to the colonial project, hence to politics of racialization.

I am not the first to show academic interest in postcolonial homophobia. Several scholars have already provided an analysis of the populist notion of homosexuality as un-African. The first account goes back to 1996 by Chris Dunton and Mai Palmberg. The apparent increase in violence against black lesbians, as well as the prominence of current popular discourses where these kinds of sentiments are deployed, demonstrates the need to further engage with these statements within the South African context. There is, however, also a clear danger in overemphasizing this discourse—especially when it is articulated from a European or US-American perspective only—as it feeds into the Western project of what Puar calls the “geopolitical mapping of homophobia,” which is the projection of homophobia onto spaces other than the West (2007, 95).⁴ This mapping is initiated by different actors across societies and often leads to campaigns that are damaging to those who are supposed to benefit. In 2007, for example, an open letter signed by African LGBTI Human Rights Defenders was addressed to Peter Tatchell and his London-based organization Outrage!, in which their involvements in Nigerian politics around sexuality were criticized as “exploitative and harmful for local activists” (African LGBTI Human Rights Defenders 2007). As a consequence Tatchell was asked to end his “neo-colonial” activities and “stay out of Africa” (African LGBTI Human Rights Defenders 2007). Tatchell’s outside interference in this case was not considered as globalized solidarity, but rather as a threat to local politics.⁵

The response by leading African LGBTI activists to Tatchell’s ‘neo-colonialism’ and ‘blatant disrespect’ needs to be seen in this international context of sexual politics. And in fact in Europe most representations around gay politics that concern the African continent centre on hate crime, particularly against black queers. This is problematic for the aforementioned reasons. It is also problematic for local politics, as was shown at a recent conference in Johannesburg, where black lesbians shared their (often traumatizing) experiences of being drawn in as an object of public discourse on hate crime; it was decided that, in future, the representation of black lesbian lives needs to take place outside discourses of hate crime.⁶ It is against this background that we need to address the question of how we can engage, within a meaningful scholarship, with the question of why gay rights are as highly contested as they are in the process of constituting decolonized subjectivities in the African context; generally, but also more specifically in South Africa. This scholarship, furthermore, needs to not only be situated, but it also needs to promote a politics that continues to contest dominant heteronormative, but also homonormative assumptions and institutions, instead of upholding and sustaining them; emphasis needs to be placed on not closing down debate, but keeping open the idea of queer politics that (continue to) interact intensely with feminist, counter-hegemonic and antiracist strategies.

The connection between colonialism/cultural imperialism and (homo) sexuality that is suggested in the notion of homosexuality being un-African is not new and it is not made exclusively on the African continent. In different historical periods homosexuality has been considered as un-American, un-Indian, un-Iraqi, etc (Sinfield 1994; Meghari 2004; Varela and Dhawan 2005). During apartheid homosexuality was read as un-Afrikaans by a range of cultural and religious organizations that feared wealthy Jewish and English men corrupting Afrikaner boys (Gevisser 1995, 31). In fact there is a long history of constituting homosexuality as something outside tradition and culture and thus outside the nation. Alan Sinfield (1994), for example, discusses how homosexuality figured in American discourse during the Cold War. Sinfield argues that homosexuality was considered to undermine constructions of masculinity, femininity and family values of the American society; lesbians and gay men threatened the distinct and superior American (therefore similarly Western) morals and values. Sinfield concludes that the recognition of homosexuality as supposedly un-American is not so much directed towards queers, but that homophobic discourse aims to control and discipline the heterosexual majority of the population.

In this chapter I will follow Sinfield’s analysis and make sense of the populist notion of homosexuality as un-African by showing that homophobia is used as a political strategy in South Africa’s postcolonial nation-state. In this chapter, however, I also argue that it is impossible to understand the phenomenon of homophobia in contemporary South Africa without understanding technologies of racism, (post)colonialism and gender regimes in this context. I explore why the statements that constitute a discourse of homosexuality as un-African refer to the history of colonialism and how the reading is informed by a populist understanding of this history. The chapter focuses on how these statements are simultaneously using this history in constituting a decolonized African heterosexual identity. The aim of this chapter is therefore not so much to locate a ‘lesbian’ identity or a ‘homosexual’ identity within the pre-colonial African context, but rather to demonstrate the conditions of emergence for a heterosexual African identity proposed within and by postcolonial homophobia.

In order to understand the historical implications of conceptions of (hetero)sexuality, as well as the reference points within postcolonial and post-apartheid homophobia—as expressed in the notion of homosexuality as un-African—this chapter first turns to the role of heterosexuality within the race regime of apartheid South Africa. One of the main goals of this chapter is to show the interdependency of conceptions of race and sexuality as expressed in contemporary as well as historical texts. As I go on to argue, the apartheid regime needs to be understood in the following ways: as a continuity of the colonial project, as being based on institutionalized white supremacy and as having underwritten its race regime through heterosexuality. This is to argue, then, that heterosexuality was policed through race—and vice versa. The very need to police sexuality shows the lack of continuity in, and instability of, heterosexuality. And in fact heterosexuality is unstable and needs to be constantly contested and reaffirmed, which is the very reason why homophobia is necessary. This is evident in post-apartheid homophobia which, as I would argue, further highlights that contemporary homophobia is, in effect, reintroducing a colonialist and racist discourse of sexuality into a postcolonial project.

AFRIKANER NATIONALISM AND BIOPOLITICS

South Africa has a 350-year-long history of colonialism that culminated with the beginning of apartheid in 1948 and only ended officially in 1994 with the first democratic elections. The ideology of white supremacy embodied in Afrikaner Nationalism became particularly visible in the apartheid regime that was implemented in order to secure a racialized position of privilege and subordination. This regime was building on laws which were in place since the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, such as the withholding of voting rights for black people, the Land Act of 1913⁷ and the (Natives) Urban Areas Act of 1923.⁸

The Population Registration Act (1950) imposed racial classification on the entire population and based the classification system on supposedly biological grounds. People were classified as either ‘African’ (described as ‘Bantu’ within the apartheid law terminology), ‘Coloured,’ ‘Indian’/‘Asian’ or ‘White.’ While whites, Africans and Indians were regarded as ‘pure races,’ coloureds were seen as ‘mixed’ or ‘impure.’ Building on the Population Registration Act, the Group Areas Act geographically separated the different classified groups. As a result black South Africans were forcibly removed into so-called homelands and townships and were often further sub-classified according to ethnicity. The apartheid system thus, to a certain extent, successfully implemented what Foucault calls “fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls” (2004, 255), i.e. to subdivide the population along racial and ethnic lines in order to control it. Foucault understands this as biopolitics, as the attempt to differentiate bodies and groups of bodies within and of the biomass (the population) in order to define them. Foucault argues that state racism is a crucial element of biopower. State racism replaces the old sovereigns’ right to kill with the power of normalization: “wherever you find a normalizing society, wherever you find a power that is primarily a biopower, racism is the necessary condition for the killing of another person” (Foucault in Finzsch 2005). Racism provides the means for building hierarchies between people by constituting one racialized group as superior, and the others as inferior, and then separating them spatially from one another in order to develop biological units within the biomass. This separation allows the state to more easily apply interfering measures and regulations with the aim of controlling the population (Foucault 2004). In saying this it is not my intention to give an analysis and/ or a theory of racism; not in general and not in the specific South African context. There are a number of scholars who have done so very sufficiently.⁹ My aim, rather, is to highlight the mechanisms of power that mutually constitute race and sexuality, as highlighted in Foucault’s concept of biopower. In this section I am interested in the microphysics of the bioproject within the apartheid regime, in the detailed anatomy of this biopolitical project that constitutes sexuality, race and gender as interdependent categories. This analysis of apartheid biopolitics helps to unfold the similarities of colonial and postcolonial nationalism in relation to sexuality and by doing so establishes an understanding of the instrumental value (and the effects) of opposing homosexuality in anti-colonial struggles as it.

While the aim of the apartheid government was to entrench racial discrimination through law, in the manner discussed previously, it simultaneously introduced laws that regulated the apparatus of race through sexuality by linking sexuality directly to race. Sexuality, within the apartheid project, was the biopolitical interface between the individual body and the population body and for this reason it became the main target of power. Whereas several scholars mention these intersections within the biopolitics of the apartheid regime it has hardly been focused on explicitly. One exception is the PhD-thesis written by Kopano Ratele entitled The Sexualization of Apartheid (2001a). In this work Ratele explores how the apartheid government regulated its race regime through heterosexuality.

From the beginning the apartheid regime focused on sexuality as a regulatory factor of the race regime. This focus is highlighted by a series of acts the apartheid government introduced over the first ten years: in 1949 it introduced the Prohibition of Mixed Marriage Act, No.55; in 1950 the Immorality Act; and in 1957 the Sexual Offences Act. Ratele discusses the sexualization of apartheid and argues that the apartheid government’s interest was in “intimacy and subjectivity and the private life of race,” thus in the micro-politics that regulated the individual body (2001a, 29). Ratele, however, fails to explicitly point to heteronormativity—and its effects on non-normative sexualities—as the very precondition of apartheid’s biopolitical project. This chapter argues that the apartheid regime explicitly produced heterosexual normality of the appropriately racialized body by employing the theory of degeneration through sexuality as a regulatory strategy of race in order to secure the purity of the white race.¹⁰ According to Richard Dyer (1997a), the concept of race is always linked to heterosexuality. Heterosexuality is seen as securing the reproduction of racialized bodies—as race itself is always about bodies. In South Africa, as in many parts of the world, white supremacy was/is based on the concept of ‘racial purity.’ The securing of the purity of the ‘white race’ is directly linked to reproduction, and thus to heterosexuality, and, as I will show, the heterosexual institution: the family.

As the Prohibition of Mixed Marriage Act of 1949 reveals, Afrikaner nationalists linked the purity of the white race, from the very early stages of the apartheid regime, to sexuality and reproduction. This law prohibited interracial marriages even before the apartheid system officially defined bodies, or in fact interraciality, through the Population Registration Act of 1950. The main objective of the law was to prevent marriages between ‘Europeans’ and ‘non-Europeans.’ The apartheid government was concerned with the white race only; it was not interested in the other racially constructed communities. Interracial heterosexuality is thus perceived as threatening the power of whiteness because, as Dyer argues, “it breaks the legitimation of whiteness with reference to the white body” (1997a, 25). The call in 1968 by the apartheid government to the white women/mothers within society “to breed faster than their black counterparts” (Retief 1995, 102), in a time in which moral panics were constructed around nonnormative sexualities, must be seen in this context. In the following chapter I contextualize this call historically and demonstrate how it was closely linked to a tightening of the Immorality Act.

Apartheid’s conception of race as a category that is necessarily contested and reproduced through heterosexuality clearly unfolds the gendered aspect of race. As Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias (1989) argue, women are sanctified as markers of the motherland, of boundaries and as reproducers of race. Building on this work Yuval-Davis introduces, in Gender and Nation (1997), a framework for discussing and analyzing the different ways in which discourses of gender and nation intersect. By systematically examining the contribution of gender relations within several major dimensions of nationalists projects Yuval-Davis shows how the concepts of gender and nation are constituted through and in relation to each other.¹¹ In Imperial Leather (1995), Anne McClintock describes how this intersection of gender and nationalism is materialized within the Broederbond¹² ideology—symbolized in the Tweede (Second) Trek. In 1938, exactly one hundred years after the Great Trek, which signifies the move away from the “British laws and the effrontery of slave emancipation” (McClintock 1995, 370), the Afrikaner nationalists celebrated the centenary—not least as a reminder of what Afrikanerdom actually symbolizes—by moving with nine replicas of the Voortrekker wagons from Cape Town to Pretoria. This led to a national(ist) “spectacle of invented tradition and fetish ritual” (McClintock 1995, 371) that lasted for four months. Most interestingly, McClintock highlights the gendered implications of this nationalism, embodied in this historical and cultural event of the Trek:

Each wagon became the microcosm of colonial society at large: the whip-wielding white patriarch prancing on horseback, black servants toiling alongside, white mother and children sequestered in the wagon—the women’s starched white bonnets si...

Table of contents

• Routledge Research in Gender and Society
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 “Homosexuality is Un-African”
• 2 Is Pink Really White in South Africa?
• 3 Homosociality and the Technologies of Homophobia
• 4 “I didn’t think of it as lesbian”
• 5 Aftermath
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index