1 Sexual rights and the anti-apartheid movement
The history of same-sex sexuality in South Africa that I discuss in the Introduction focuses largely on the period up to the 1970s. However, the 1970s and 1980s would see the rapid global rise of an organised sexual rights movement. In this period, sexual rights in South Africa would come into dialogue with the activist and ideological networks of the anti-apartheid movement. But while the anti-apartheid movement was in many ways one of the moral flagbearers of the global human rights project of the 1980s, its initial heteronormative impulses point to gaps in its conceptualisation of rights. The place of sexuality within discourses of the anti-apartheid movement and the eventual inclusion of sexual orientation in the equality clause of the South African Constitution have a contested history. This is a history in which local cultural politics overlap and intersect with transnational agents, ideologies, and aesthetics. Tim Trengrove-Jones (2005) argues that sexual rights in South Africa and the expansive Bill of Rights were inevitable given the prevailing human rights culture and discourses of equality that characterised the anti-apartheid struggle and the transition to democracy. However, this argument overlooks the multiple conflicting transnational imaginaries in which this sexual rights regime was constituted. Far from being inevitable, I would argue, the recognition of gay and lesbian rights as human rights was located within the crosshairs of an uncertain and volatile historical moment. In this chapter, I trace several local and transnational cultural flows and show how they were renegotiated, within the liberation struggle in the 1970s and 1980s, and during the transitional decade of the 1990s, to produce a particularly localised sexual politics.
One of the key historical figures who navigated the competing rights-based discourses, and who played a major role in the historical period described in this chapter, is Simon Tseko Nkoli. Nkoli was a prominent gay rights and anti-apartheid activist, who was charged, along with 21 others, in what famously became known as the Delmas Treason Trial. It was while awaiting trial in prison in the late 1980s that he revealed his sexuality to his fellow prisoners, many of whom were already major political leaders in the internal resistance movement and would go on to become leading figures in the post-apartheid government. Nkoliās decision to come out to his comrades, to risk exclusion from their collective defence, and to persevere in the face of prejudice exposed the fractures in the human rights agenda of the anti-apartheid movement at the same time as it catalysed new political solidarities. Nkoliās insistence on the indivisibility of rights and his own political commitments are widely regarded as being among the most significant factors that would inform the resolve of the African National Congress (ANC) to ensure the retention of sexual orientation as a protected category in the final Constitutionās equality clause (Cameron 2014: 119, 217; Lekota 2005: 153; Kraak 2005: 130).
However, as I have explored elsewhere (Carolin 2015), public sites of memorialisation and official practices of history-making have largely failed to adequately account for the complex intersections of sexual rights and the anti-apartheid movement. These patterns of exclusion are evidenced by the considerable absence of same-sex sexualities in official discourses of the liberation movement and the apartheid regime. The seven-volume final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), for instance, offers only a single sentence on same-sex sexualities during apartheid.1 This heteronormative erasure is similarly evident at the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, where same-sex sexualities during apartheid are reduced to a single exhibit in a corner where the sexual rights movement is largely conflated with the disability and womenās rights movements. In contrast, this chapter maps the ways in which three cultural texts produced in a post-apartheid context reinscribe sexuality into South African historiography and collectively provide a type of gay cultural history that has not been adequately attended to by other modes of memorialisation.2
This chapter analyses the generic and textual strategies through which a novel, drama, and documentary film represent intersecting local and transnational sexual and cultural politics. These creative works are analysed together with key historical discourses to create a richly textured cultural history of sexuality in the liberation movement. Focusing on the anti-apartheid movement in Cape Town in the 1970s, Gerald Kraakās award-winning historical novel Ice in the Lungs (2006) maps the tumultuous relationship between two white men, and the inevitable intersection of homophobia, politics, love, and loss. Robert Colmanās stage drama Your Loving Simon (2013 [2003]) depicts the imprisonment of Simon Nkoli during the late 1980s, and centres on Nkoliās efforts to refashion the relationship between homophobia and racism, as he articulated a simultaneously localised and inclusive model for thinking about human rights. Finally, Beverley Ditsie and Nicky Newmanās documentary film Simon & I (2002) focuses predominantly on Nkoli and the transitional decade of the 1990s, tracking the development of sexual rights activism and the ultimate constitutional recognition of these rights. These texts, which function as complex and layered snapshots of the anti-apartheid struggle, do not imagine a binary relationship between the local and the global, but rather reveal the ways in which global cultural forms have been transformed and become constitutive of the local. The texts reveal the circuits and agents of global human rights discourses and identity politics, and show how they traverse both the heteronormativity of much of the anti-apartheid movement, and essentialist configurations of race, gender, and religion. But they also invite us to think about the relationships between the context, content, and aesthetics of biographical texts and historical fiction, and to interrogate the form of cultural work being produced in a post-apartheid environment.
āGay rights are human rightsā: Transnational circulations and local histories
Human rights functioned as a major discursive and ideological tool in both the anti-apartheid and sexual rights movements. Despite their ubiquity in popular discourse, however, the concept and substance of human rights are neither natural nor neutral, and invariably move within existing circuits of global power. In his provocative criticism of the hegemonic and homogenising tendencies of human rights discourses in the West, Makau Mutua (2002) emphasises that human rights are a constructed set of discourses that often erase cultural specificities in local contexts. Similarly pointing to the ideological baggage of human rights as constructed political discourses, Joseph Slaughter (2012: 45) writes that āin practice, human rights are not the natural rights of human beings as presocial creatures but the positive rights of citizens as incorporated creatures of the stateā. However, recognising the constructedness of human rights discourses does not negate their humanitarian and democratic worth, nor does it undermine the extraordinary social and political developments that have taken place under their name. Rather, recognising the ways in which these global discourses and power structures are produced and sustained foregrounds the contingencies of their mobility and the ideological reach of their claims. The intellectual frameworks for the Western human rights agenda are indebted to the foundational French and American constitutional declarations of political rights in the eighteenth century, as well as the broader discourses of the Enlightenment. However, it was only in the 1940s, in the aftermath of the Second World War, that this agenda would claim a truly global reach. The early promise of an inclusive and egalitarian global political system through the United Nations (UN) and its institutionalisation of an international human rights charter marked the zenith for liberal internationalists. Indeed, the UN mobilised new ideological circuits that would provide innovative intellectual and political tools for both domestic and transnational advocacy. However, the idealism of this moment was marred by the spectre of colonialism that, ironically, was being enforced by many of the same nations that were authoring supposedly universal rights to equality, freedom, and self-determination (Mutua 2002: 16).3
Despite the adoption of the UNās Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, the election in South Africa of the National Party, and its legislative formalisation of apartheid in the same year, foreshadowed the extraordinary brutality, discrimination, and biopolitical controls enacted by and within states during the second half of the twentieth century. But this period also bore witness to an expansive human rights agenda that circulated through several different forums, including the policy priorities of different governments, the advocacy and care work of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), media and communication networks, and increasingly vocal populations. Much of this human rights advocacy was transnational and built on the generic and inclusive language of individual human rights imagined in the UDHR and other international conventions. However, human rights as a conceptual form became inhabited by the discursive specificities of different citizen-subjects, their sites of harm or vulnerability, and their broader political strategies. Appadurai (2013: 63) observes that since the formation of the UN, āthe discourse of human rights [has spread] into the center of the vocabulary of politicsā and that āvirtually every known society has generated individuals and groups who have a new consciousness of their political status within the framework of human rightsā.
In his study of globalisation, Appadurai (66) emphasises the transnational circulation of cultural forms (be they physical, textual, ideological, conceptual, or aesthetic), which he distinguishes from the āspecific voices, contents, messages, and materialsā that occupy those forms.4 The local sexual rights agenda in South Africa was tied to the global circulation of particular forms of political apparatus and ideological language. Chong Kee Tan (2001: 126), for instance, credits the transnational circulation of form for providing non-Western sexual rights groups with āa forum (public hearing), a model (civil groups negotiating with the state), and a language (human rights) to articulate their demandsā. Though these political forms are inhabited in different ways in different localities, they provide powerful models for the rollout of an expansive human rights agenda. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the global cultural flow of gay and lesbian politics into South Africa would develop, transform, and inhabit these political forms in distinct ways. It was during this time that demands for sexual rights and racial equality were increasingly co-circulating among the anti-apartheid political elite in the country, and among those in exile.
Modern human rights have had uneven mobility over the second half of the twentieth century, with some citizen-subjects invoking a universalist language of rights more successfully than others. Although the UN was first petitioned to recognise and protect sexual rights as human rights as early as 1951 (Paternotte & Seckinelgin 2015: 215), it would be several decades before sexuality was incorporated into the institutional rights discourses of the global body.5 As I argue in relation to both the gay and lesbian and anti-apartheid movements, while differently inhabited human rights discourses can often complement one another, at other times they block each otherās traction and mobility, contesting for priority and legitimacy. Though there were some important strategic overlaps between the anti-apartheid and sexual rights movements that would assert the indivisibility of rights ā that is, the universality of form despite variations in content ā their histories are characterised by some stark exclusions and oppositions. While the UN and many of its member states were advancing the development and spread of distinctly political rights and democratic forms of government, NGOs were mobilising identity politics across borders to expand sexual rights advocacy globally. However, the travel of these discourses was often uneven, and the discourses were negotiated differently in different political contexts.
Paradoxically, as I discussed in the Introduction, the rise of more militant sexual politics across Europe and the United States following the famous Stonewall riots in 1969 coincided with the dismantling of the sexual rights movement in South Africa. Following the relative successes of the Law Reform Movement that same year, gay and lesbian political organising near disappeared for more than a decade. In 1982, however, the Gay Association of South Africa (GASA) was formed. Though based far more on social support than political activism, this predominantly white organisation increasingly located itself within existing transnational gay and lesbian cultural and aesthetic forms.
In response to GASAās constitutive whiteness and its apolitical silence on apartheid (Gunkel 2010: 63), Simon Nkoli formed the Saturday Group as one of its structures to provide mainly black gay men and lesbian women with a safe space in which to engage on issues of politics and sexuality. However, Nkoliās arrest later in 1985 on charges of treason marked the beginning of the end, not only of the Saturday Group and Nkoliās relationship with GASA but of the organisation itself. After Nkoliās arrest, GASA distanced itself from him and framed his anti-apartheid activism in terms of murder, treason, and illegality ā crimes for which the evidence was tenuous (Heaton-Nicholls 2005).
Having been granted formal membership of the influential International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) in 1984, GASA now f...
