Between the white man's burden and the white man's disease: Tracking lesbian and gay human rights in Southern Africa

GLQ

Volumn 5, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 559-584

  Hoad, Neville ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0039684984     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-5-4-559     Document Type: Article

References (64)

1. Thanks to Joseph Massad for pointing this out to me.
2. Just when revolutionaries appear to be engaged in the revolutionary transformation of themselves and their material surroundings, in the creation of something that does not yet exist, they timidly conjure up the spirits of the past to help them; they borrow their names, slogans, and costumes so as to stage the new world-historical scene in a 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 1793-95. See Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," in Surveys from Exile, ed. David Fernbach (New York: Vintage, 1974), 146-47.
3. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987). The essays "Reading the World: Literary Studies in the Eighties" (95-102) and "Explanation and Culture: Marginalia" (103-17) introduce and elaborate on the notion of "worlding" while keeping the practitioner of cultural studies clearly in view.
4. See Toonen v. Australia, communication no. 488-1992, United Nations Document CCPR/C/50/D/488/1992 (1994); Eric Heinze, Sexual Orientation: A Human Right: An Essay on International Human Rights Law (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1995); and Robert Ermanski, "A Right to Privacy for Gay People under International Human Rights Law," Boston College International and Comparative Law Review 15 (1992). The emergence of an organization like the 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 set up caucuses to deal with sexual orientation rights, although this process has been contested.
5. Here I am riffing on Homi K. Bhabha's famous formulation in "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," October, no. 28 (1984): 125-33.
6. For selective instances of this rhetoric, inflected by invocations of Christianity in the Swazi case, see Vusie Ginindza, "Away with All the Lesbians and Gays," Times of Swaziland, 6 March 1997, 6;
7. and Themba Shongwe, "Gays Are Sick, Says the King," Times of Swaziland, 30 March 1997, 1-2. For extensive referencing of the Namibian fracas see Windhoek Advertiser, Windhoek Observer, Namibian, Southern African Chronicle, and New Era, 12 December 1996-13 March 1997. For a useful synopsis of Mugabe's notorious remarks see the 1995 National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality (NCGLE) flyer "Exposing Mugabes Ongoing Anti-gay Campaign of Lies," Gay and Lesbian Archive, Johannesburg. For an excellent discussion that rigorously situates the Zimbabwean case in colonial and postcolonial contexts, with an emphasis on legal aspects,
8. see Oliver Phillips, "Zimbabwean Law and the Production of a White Man's Disease" Social and Legal Studies 6 (1997): 471-91. The invocation of nationalist rhetoric in the Zambian debate following the attempt to register the Lesbians, Gays, Bisexual and Transgender Persons Association (LEGATRA) as an official non-governmental organization can be found on the pages of the Zambian Post, 31 August-17 September 1998.
9. Rachel Holmes traces this rhetoric in "White Rapists Made Coloureds (and Homosexuals): The Winnie Mandela Trial and the Politics of Race and Sexuality," in Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa, ed. Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1994), 284-94.
10. For a lucid account of the Zimbabwe International Book Fair drama see Chris Dunton and Mai Palmberg, Human Rights and Homosexuality in Southern Africa (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1996).
11. Dennis Altman, The Homosexualization of America, the Americanization of the Homosexual (New York: St. Martins, 1982), 6.
12. See, e.g., Bloke Modisane, Blame Me on History (Craighall: Donker, 1986).
13. Marion Riggs's film Tongues Untied (Frameline, 1989) is a moving portrayal of this dual dynamic in the U.S. context.
14. Kobena Mercer touches on this problem in Britain in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994).
15. This assertion, previously present both in gay claims and in homophobic responses in the United States, is refuted in M. V. Lee Badgett, "Towards Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Perspectives in Economics: Why and How They Make a Difference," Feminist Economics 4, no. 2 (1998): 49-54;
16. and Badgett, "Some Readings Related to Lesbian and Gay Economics: An Annotated Bibliography," Feminist Economics 4, no. 2 (1998): 111-16.
17. South African Gay Pages, October 1995, 28. The editorial of this edition of the magazine, which claims to have the biggest circulation of any gay or lesbian publication in South Africa, 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" (2). The irony of this rhetoric abounds when one considers that some sectors of the gay and lesbian community have called for "sexual orientation" to be included in affirmative action programs.
18. See Department of Labour, "Sexual Orientation and the Workplace" (document distributed to participants in a national seminar, Johannesburg, 26 March 1988).
19. For the unemployment statistics (and how they were derived) see Central Statistics Services, October Household Survey, 1994-97 (http://www.css.gov.za).
20. For an indication of the enormous housing crisis in South Africa see Mungo Soggott and Tangeni Amphudi, "A Human Flood Drowns Gauteng," Mail and Guardian (Johannesburg), 19 May 1997 (http://www.mg.co.za/mg/news/97may-gautengl.html).
21. This is true in terms of community-defined neighborhoods, like San Francisco's Castro or New York's Chelsea, where gay people form majority populations and the urban geography is marked by a proliferation of commercial venues that specifically cater to them, and in terms of areas set off by city demarcations, like Chicago's North Halsted.
22. Here I have to rely on a particularly problematic form of evidence: personal experience. When I left Johannesburg, my hometown, in August 1991, there were no gay bars in the affluent white northern suburbs. Since then a number of bars and clubs have opened up (and closed down) in the Rosebank area, the largest shopping and business district in the northern suburbs. While many older venues closer to downtown in Braamfontein and Hillbrow remain open, the racial demographics of their clientele has shifted (in some places more dramatically than in others).
23. This is John D'Emilio's thesis in "Capitalism and Gay Identity," in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 467-78.
24. See Matthew Roberts, "Emergence of Gay Identity and Gay Social Movements in Developing Countries: The AIDS Crisis as Catalyst," Alternatives 20 (1995): 243-64.
25. For the formative statement of this argument see Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
26. The classic text that outlines the shifting representational and institutional place of women in Third World nationalism is Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed, 1986).
27. Joseph Massad maps out how the agent of national liberation is figured as masculine as a result of colonialisms ideological legacies and how this figuring affects the differential positions of men and women in anti-and postcolonial national struggles ("Conceiving the Masculine: Gender and Palestinian Nationalism," Middle East Journal 49 [1995]: 468-83).
28. The relation of authentic blackness to homosexuality in the United States has been seen as similarly problematic. I am thinking here of Eldridge Cleavers hostile remarks about James Baldwin in "Notes on a Native Son," in Soul on Ice (New York: Dell, 1968), 97-111.
29. See GALZ, "Statement on Namibia," Harare, 4 February 1997, Gay and Lesbian Archive, Johannesburg.
30. See Sowetan, 11 August 1995, 4.
31. One man has described the cure as applying the blood of a cow, ritually transformed into medicine, onto two cuts made along the sides of the erect penis. The following interview clips are taken from a radio feature about the aftermath of the GALZ controversy that aired on All Things Considered, National Public Radio, 16 August 1995.
32. Ngochani may refer to the Shangaan; if so, it suggests the displaceable otherness of these practices and implies the dislocations caused by transnational labor movements in the mines, where same-sex "mine marriages" became associated with certain ethnic groups, the Shangaan among them. See Marc Epprecht, "Men, Mines, and Sex: A Re-review of Moodie and Harries," Zimbabwean Review, nos. 3-4 (1997): 31-36.
33. For theories of the relation of colonial rule to African tradition more generally see Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
34. For more recent discussions of how these issues affect South African women see Susan Bazilli, ed., Putting Women on the Agenda (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1991).
35. Mahmood Mamdani discusses the ways in which "African tradition" functions as a legacy of both colonialism and apartheid in Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
36. See Erhard Günzel, "Nujoma Blasts Gays," Windhoek Advertiser, 12 December 1996,3.
37. European anthropologists of the colonial era mobilized sexual practices (real and imagined), as they did the largely mythical cannibalism of African peoples, to produce racial differences and social arrangements that they ranked in an explicitly evolutionary hierarchy, of which the Victorian patriarchal family was the pinnacle. In a nineteenth-century cultural imaginary, savages were promiscuous, even though anthropologists such as Lorimer Fison and A. W. Howitt had a difficult time locating such promiscuity in the field (Kamilaroi and Kurnai: Group-Marriage and Relationship, and Marriage by Elopement, facsim. ed. [Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 1991], 25-30).
38. In matters deemed sexual, primitive promiscuity was understood as the first stage of human social organization: "From an initial state of 'promiscuous intercourse,' there had arisen, in sequence, the 'Communal family' (founded on the intermarriage of brothers and sisters); the 'Barbarian family'; . . . the 'Patriarchal family' (founded on the marriage of one man to several wives); and the 'Civilized family'" (George W. Stocking Jr., After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888-1951 [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995], 18-19).
39. See also John Ferguson McLennan, Primitive Marriage: An Inquiry into the Origin of the Form of Capture in Marriage Ceremonies, ed. Peter Rivière (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 20-62. Imperial cultural representations hypersexualize blackness: the lasciviousness of savages is a trope that cuts across genres and disciplines throughout the nineteenth century.
40. On the sexualizing of blackness in imperial culture see Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto, 1984). A discursive link runs from Victorian anthropology through psychoanalysis to current configurations of AIDS as a predominantly homosexual and African disease, joining the homosexual and the savage, who are required to represent unbridled lust and are held to embody states of arrested development or degeneration. In this context, anti-imperialist attacks on homosexuality can be seen as refusals to carry the imputation of primitiveness, and to counterproject the racist charge of retardation or degeneration onto its Western source, by scapegoating the West's own sexual deviants.
41. T. Dunbar Moodie, with Vivienne Ndatshe, Going for Gold: Men, Mines, and Migration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
42. See also Patrick Harries, Work, Culture, and Identity: Migrant Laborers in Mozambique and South Africa, c. 1860-1910 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1994).
43. Zackie Achmat astutely points out that Moodie elides the affectionate content of the miners' relationships ("Apostles of Civilised Vice: Immoral and Unnatural Vice in South African Prisons and Compounds, 1980-1990," Social Dynamics 19 [1993]: 92-110). It should be pointed out, however, that he also accords little space to the miners' feelings about their heterosexual relations. What strikes me most about Moodie's analysis of their shifting sexualities is his willingness to insert sexuality into a complex web of social relations and to imply that forms of heterosexualily, far from being naturally given, are historically contingent.
44. For the text of the Freedom Charter see Raymond Suttner and Jeremy Cronin, Thirty Years of the Freedom Charter, with contributions by Mosiuoa "Terror" Lekota et al. (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1986), 262-66.
45. NCGLE Newsletter, October 1995.
46. Namibian, 24 January 1997, 3.
47. I have yet to find any textual evidence for this slang and must rely on hearsay and conversational experience.
48. Dennis Altman touches on this problem, in regional rather than national terms, in his discussion of the place of Australian gay activists in Asia ("Global Gaze/Global Gays," GLQ 3 [1997]: 417-36).
49. Cited in Goodson Machona, "Zulu Defends Homosexual," Zambian Post, 15 July 1998 (http://www.ilga.org/informatiom/africa/zambia_the_birth_of_a_movement.html).
50. Zambian Post, 15 July, 3 September, 31 August 1998 (see Web site reference in n. 36).
51. Mail and Guardian, 4 September 1998;
52. Zambian Post, 18 September 1998 (see Web site reference in n. 36).
53. This number is given by LEGATRA's project manager in the Zambian Post, 31 August 1998 (see Web site reference in n. 36).
54. New Era, 10 February 1997, 10.
55. In its constitution of 1998 Ecuador included explicit prohibitions on discrimination against sexual minorities (article 23, section 3).
56. See Mark Gevisser, "A Different Fight for Freedom: A History of South African Lesbian and Gay Organisation, 1950s to 1990s," in Gevisser and Cameron, Defiant Desire, 14-88.
57. In the arena of employment benefit rights, the Pretoria High Court ruled against the police medical aide Polmed for refusing to allow a lesbian police officer to register her partner as a dependent (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 placing it in the care of its grandparents (http://mg.co.za/mg/za/archive/98apr/21-news.html). In the same month 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).
58. In 1986 Jesse Jackson founded the National Rainbow Coalition as a social justice organization devoted to empowerment, education, and mobilization. See Keep Hope Alive: Jesse Jackson's 1988 Presidential Campaign: A Collection of Major Speeches, Issue Papers, Photographs, and Campaign Analysis, ed. Frank Clemente, with Frank Watkins (Washington, D.C.: Keep Hope Alive PAC; Boston: South End, 1989).
59. For a representative piece of rhetoric on South Africa as the "rainbow nation" see Lizeka Mda, "Has the Rainbow Nation Faded Forever?" (http://www.mg.co.za/mg/news/97dec2 /29dec-lizeka.html).
60. Given that close to half the states have sodomy statutes on the books, the fantasy that the United States is the national home of lesbian and gay human rights is, at best, ironic.
61. The following quotation from Barry D. Adam typifies 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 [to defend them] against the violence of the state and others" (The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement, rev. ed. [New York: Twayne, 1995], 128).
62. In Zambia, on the other hand, an explicit attempt has been 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 World Council of Churches meeting in Harare in December 1998, where they would attend "forums and exhibitions of minority rights" (Zambian Post, 15 July 1998 [see Web site reference in n. 36]).
63. 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 seventies. Huey Newton's statement in the Black Panthers newsletter is a crucial document that argues 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, ed. Len Richmond and Gary Noguera [San Francisco: Ramparts, 1973], 142).
64. See also John D'Emilio, Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University (New York: Routledge, 1992), 240-46.