Heterosexual Africa?

The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS

Marc Epprecht

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9780821442982
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Diseases & Allergies

Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS builds from Marc Epprecht's previous book, Hungochani (which focuses explicitly on same-sex desire in southern Africa), to explore the historical processes by which a singular, heterosexual identity for Africa was constructed—by anthropologists, ethnopsychologists, colonial officials, African elites, and most recently, health care workers seeking to address the HIV/AIDS pandemic. This is an eloquently written, accessible book, based on a rich and diverse range of sources, that will find enthusiastic audiences in classrooms and in the general public.

Epprecht argues that Africans, just like people all over the world, have always had a range of sexualities and sexual identities. Over the course of the last two centuries, however, African societies south of the Sahara have come to be viewed as singularly heterosexual. Epprecht carefully traces the many routes by which this singularity, this heteronormativity, became a dominant culture. In telling a fascinating story that will surely generate lively debate, Epprecht makes his project speak to a range of literatures—queer theory, the new imperial history, African social history, queer and women's studies, and biomedical literature on the HIV/AIDS pandemic. He does this with a light enough hand that his story is not bogged down by endless references to particular debates.

Heterosexual Africa? aims to understand an enduring stereotype about Africa and Africans. It asks how Africa came to be defined as a "homosexual-free zone" during the colonial era, and how this idea not only survived the transition to independence but flourished under conditions of globalization and early panicky responses to HIV/AIDS.

1

A Puzzling Blindspot, a Troubling Silence, a Strange Consensus

Reflections on the Heterosexual Norm in “African AIDS”

THE RESEARCH QUESTION

HIV/AIDS was identified in Africa south of the Sahara in the mid-1980s.¹ At that time its rapid, atypical progress in populations focused considerable attention on so-called African sexuality. Scientists, theologians, pundits, gender activists, and other researchers were all struggling to explain both the unprecedented rates of HIV infection and the fact that men and women appeared to be equally affected. This suggested a different epidemiology than in the West, where HIV infections occurred mostly in gay and bisexual men. Efforts to solve the mystery were complicated by the relative paucity of African epidemiologists and other researchers in the search for answers. Indeed, the vast majority of those who published their findings in the early years of the epidemic were European or North American. Only about one in twelve of the participants in the very first AIDS in Africa conference in 1985 actually came from Africa (Putzel 2004, 21), while the most widely cited publication to synthesize their findings with the ethnographic record was authored by three Australian demographers (Caldwell, Caldwell, and Quiggin 1989).

Not knowing Africa or African languages all that well, and under intense pressure of time and the looming health calamity, foreign researchers relied heavily on received wisdom and rational logic to fill in the many critical gaps in knowledge about the disease in its African manifestation. Their work in turn contributed to a new problem that in many ways continues to frustrate research, prevention, and education initiatives. The problem resides in the notion that a singular African sexuality exists and that it exacerbates the risks of HIV transmission particularly for women. This hypothetical singular African sexuality includes, above all, the supposed nonexistence of homosexuality or bisexuality, along with Africans’ purported tendencies toward heterosexual promiscuity, gender violence, and lack of the kind of internalized moral restraints that supposedly inhibit the spread of HIV in other cultures. Another common thread is a tendency toward age discrepancy in sexual relationships (mostly older men with young women, girls, or even female infants), and, compared to the West, a relative absence of romantic affection and a predominance of transactional relationships (sex in exchange for money or gifts). Further examples of such “otherizing” or pathologizing of African sexuality in the popular media are legion, and many will be discussed in the chapters to follow. But a sobering example in the peer-reviewed academic press is worth pointing out here. Rushton (1997, esp. 178–83) claims a relationship between Africans’ penis size and sexual behavior that can account for the high rates of HIV/AIDS among women in Africa and in the African diaspora.

African opinion makers often responded defensively to Western claims about an African sexuality. Yet ironically, they often at the same time buttressed one key aspect of it. Hence, on the one hand, African critics pointed to the colonialist (or even older) provenance of received wisdom about African sexuality. They have suggested that the long shelf life of negative stereotypes in contemporary discourses was evidence of whites’ pervasive unthinking racism against Africans. As late as 2004, for example, South African president Thabo Mbeki angrily rejected questions about the high rates of rape and HIV infection in that country by accusing whites of clinging to apartheid-era demonizations of black men.² Yet on the other hand, many African leaders accepted or even amplified the accompanying stereotype that homosexuality was exotic in Africa. In some cases they baldly asserted that male-male sexual transmission was so rare that it should and would not be discussed, even as a theoretical possibility. Both African and foreign scholars proved surprisingly receptive to this unscientific assertion. Important scholarly texts aimed at health care professionals sometimes went so far as to say that there are only three modes of HIV transmission in Africa (that is, heterosexual intercourse, intravenous injection, and mother-to-child transmission; hence, there is no transmission through homosexual intercourse and it is therefore not worth mentioning on the precautionary principle, let alone as a substantive issue).³ This understanding of African sexuality is now typically so much taken for granted that it does not even warrant a footnote to substantiate or qualify it.

To be fair, the phrases African sexuality and heterosexual African AIDS made a lot of sense to many people at the time of the onset of the disease. The phrases not only appeared to account for the high rates of heterosexual transmission (men infecting women and vice versa), they accorded with the consensus of expert opinion dating back a century or more. These expressions accorded as well with what African informants themselves often claimed in strong terms, and with the evident absence of anything remotely approaching a “gay scene” outside select (white-dominated) urban centers in South Africa and Zimbabwe. The fact that the dominant clade, or genetic variation, of HIV-1 was different in Africa from the clade that was infecting gay men in the West added to the accumulating logic of difference. Moreover, the appearance of heterosexual African AIDS was timely and convenient for political struggles in the West, notably the struggle against homophobia. Heterosexual African AIDS allowed gay rights advocates in the West to deflect prevalent blame for HIV/AIDS away from the “homosexual lifestyle,” a huge political achievement.⁴ An essentialized, singular African sexuality also suggested a problem that could be fixed with education, aid dollars, and Western advice drawn from painful experiences fighting AIDS in the early 1980s.

It was a winning combination, or a perfect storm, depending on one’s perspective. This book takes the latter view. Indeed, I maintain that the idea of an African sexuality and, stemming from it, an exclusively heterosexual African AIDS, are both wrong and decidedly harmful to struggles for sexual health and sexual rights in Africa and globally.

Comprehensive scholarly critiques of crude forms of the African sexuality and heterosexual African AIDS arguments in fact followed closely upon their assertion. In particular, the Rushton penis theory and the promiscuity thesis of the Caldwells and Quiggin drew withering criticism and have by now been refuted with a wealth of empirical data.⁵ We know that some Africans do engage in sex with multiple partners and other high-risk behaviors, just as elsewhere in the world. Many do not. Careful studies have shown that sexual initiation for African youth actually tends to come later than in the West and that high rates of multiple partners are associated with the specific circumstances of migrancy rather than with African culture per se (e.g., Dyson 1992 or Crush et al. 2005). High rates of sexual and gender violence that contribute to the risk of infection (where they in fact exist, which is not everywhere) have also been shown to be historically contingent. Far from being essential to Africanness, gender-based violence is often remarkably responsive even to such simple interventions as providing microfinance (Pronyk et al. 2006).

In light of this growing evidence about diverse and historically changing African sexualities, a strong consensus has emerged that HIV/AIDS needs to be understood not as singular in its epidemiology but as distinct, overlapping pandemics in different parts of the continent. This view has entailed a marked move away from morally judgmental language (like promiscuous) and sweeping generalizations (like African sexuality). Rather than looking for single explanatory factors, researchers have now also increasingly concentrated their efforts on unraveling the many factors that seem to overdetermine so much of Africa’s vulnerability to HIV. Much of that research points to nonsexual and even non-African factors, such as malaria and the yawning inequities of the global economic system.⁶

A similar discrepancy between the sweeping claims of “African sexuality” and the empirical evidence has also been established with regard to the claim or assumption of no homosexuality. True, few Africans south of the Sahara even today would identify as homosexual, bisexual, lesbian, gay, queer, or any of the other terms coined in the West to signify a more or less innate individual sexual orientation. We now know, however, that many people who do not so identify nonetheless sometimes, and sometimes even predominantly, have sex with people of the same sex. It was known even in the mid-1980s that such people existed in Africa south of the Sahara and that consequently there were not merely three potential modes of transmission of HIV among black Africans. Admittedly, references to such people were sometimes buried in easily missed footnotes or subordinate clauses following assertions of the predominantly heterosexual nature of transmission. They were nonetheless in the public record. The famously prickly director of one of Africa’s first AIDS Control Programs, for example, responded to a direct question from a journalist about homosexuality in Uganda in 1986. Dr. Samuel Ikwaras Okware reportedly first asserted that it was rare, but then voluntarily conceded that “the situation might be different in the prisons” (Hooper 1990, 250).

The resolute silence that followed this admission can also be put in context with another contemporary account by an African journalist. Mark Mathabane’s memoir of growing up in the black township of Alexandria, near Johannesburg, in the 1960s is ultimately a celebration of black middle-class dignity, triumph over racism, and the affirmation of African heterosexual and other signifiers of normalcy. But it also includes a description of the young Mathabane’s visit to a male-only mine hostel where he witnessed high-risk male-male sexual encounters. Not only does this account vividly juxtapose with the by then already solid scientific consensus about the nonexistence of male-male anal intercourse among Africans. That the book was published by a major press in the United States, was widely reviewed, and was easily available to interested researchers makes the lingering invisibility of the issues it raises all the more remarkable. As Mathabane put it,

Before I fully realised what was happening, the boys, now completely naked, had begun lining up along the three bunks. They then bent over and touched their toes, their black anuses high up in the air. One of the naked men brought out a large bottle of Vaseline and began smearing, lavishly, the boys’ anuses, and then his long, swollen penis. My eyes darted to the other men; they too had begun smearing their penises with Vaseline. . . . I looked at the men, and one of them said to me, as he continued rubbing his long, veined penis with Vaseline: “This is a game we and the boys play all the time.” He grinned; I tensed [ . . . ]

“Don’t be afraid, boy,” said one of the men softly, dreamily. “It’s only a game we play, and nobody gets hurt.” (1986, 72)

The gap between such accounts and the silences in mainstream HIV/AIDS discourse is dramatic, and it is tempting to suspect that homophobia lies behind the determined refusal to admit the existence of homosexualities in Africa. Without denying that possibility, however, almost nothing in the published scholarly material indicates homophobia as a direct cause, at least in the sense of an active aversion or opposition to conducting research on same-sex sexuality. On the contrary, the first cohort of HIV/AIDS researchers clearly adhered to a professional code of ethics and the antidiscrimination (including antihomophobia) praxis of the World Health Organization. Moreover, the homophobic rhetoric that certain African leaders became notorious for did not start until well after the scientific orthodoxy was firmly established—more than ten years after in the highly publicized case of Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe. Unlike in the United States, therefore, HIV/AIDS researchers in Africa did not encounter significant overt, political homophobia or a swell of popular reaction against “the homosexual lifestyle” when they conducted their initial research. Such a lifestyle scarcely existed in Africa, and where it did, was visible primarily as an elite, white, exotic phenomenon of no interest to the vast majority of Africans potentially at risk for HIV.

Something other than homophobia, in other words, was going on to engender this particularly stubborn element of the African sexuality stereotype. That element has not been given the attention it merits, although, I will argue, the notion of no homosexuality is at least as wrongheaded and harmful as the stereotype of African promiscuity. How the idea came into being, and came to be so strongly believed across such a wide spectrum of identities and politics, will be the focus of this book. Specifically, I aim to trace how “the invisible presence of homosexuality” (Phillips 2004) was concocted, conjured, confirmed, and contested over time through various professional and scientific discourses in and about Africa south of the Sahara. I aim to explore exactly how the stereotype of an exclusively heterosexual African sexuality was established and maintained over the years in the face of suspiciously weak or directly contradictory evidence.

The presumption throughout is that an understanding of how a falsely constrained notion of African sexuality was constructed in intellectual terms can help us deconstruct it. From there, we may be better able to reformulate some of the most basic—and evidently ineffective—tenets of HIV/AIDS and other health and human rights interventions in Africa today. The history of an idea thus might have applications for a reconfiguration or invigoration of activist struggle, language, and politics, including the politics of alliance among civil society groups and across insider-outsider or academic-activist divides. In short, understanding the history of flimsiness in the base on which a significant body of contemporary HIV/AIDS research and activism stands might improve our ability to make stronger interventions in the future.

SAME-SEX SEXUALITY IN AFRICA: ISSUES, CONCEPTS, OBJECTIVES

Let us begin with two basic facts. First, African men sometimes have sex with other men or boys, today as in the past. They do so in a variety of ways, including anally, between the thighs, and by mouth or hand. They do it for money, for love, or when drunk. They identify as gay, straight, he, she, or some other persona · They do it by rape, out of curiosity, out of shyness or fear of women, and for many other reasons. They do it in their bedrooms, in hotels, prisons, dormitories, nightclubs, cars, in the bushes, and elsewhere. Sometimes they feel ashamed or embarrassed by such behavior, and sometimes they feel just fine. As one married Mosotho informant told me, “I mostly like to fuck, anal or between the thighs. This is called ‘in the passage’ here. Interestingly, sometimes I like to be fucked by these manly men I have talked about before.” As to why he and other often-married men like to do this: “Why? Because it is fascinating” (Epprecht 2002, 384, 382).

Second, African women also sometimes have sex with other women or girls, today as in the past. They did not, and still for the most part do not, identify this as lesbian behavior or even as sex. That reluctance points to an interesting question or two about definitions. To quote from one important study from Lesotho, “I learned of fairly common instances of tribadism or rubbing, fondling, and cunnilingus between Basotho women, with or without digital penetration” (Kendall 1998, 233). Deep kissing, mutual manipulation of labia majora, dildo play, and female-female marriage were also all noted both by Kendall and in earlier anthropological studies. Such relationships clearly did not detract from the traditionally high value placed on heterosexual marriage and reproduction. On the contrary, in the context of severe economic strain, and high levels of male absence and male sexual irresponsibility, the lesbianlike relationships that Kendall’s informants describe probably strengthened traditional heterosexual marriage forms by allowing women to avoid entanglements with men outside marriage.

The Sesotho culture is unique, and Lesotho is a small country that experienced relatively extreme demographic and social stress under colonial rule and racial capitalism. It absolutely cannot be taken as representative of the whole of Africa or even southern Africa. The Basotho people nevertheless share much in common with other African peoples, including their views on this issue. Indeed, while forms of heterosexual marriage with a gendered hierarchy of power are widely held up as ideals in Lesotho, as throughout Africa south of the Sahara, same-sex sexuality is also alluded to fairly widely. It is substantively documented in scores of scholarly books, articles, and dissertations in a wide range of academic disciplines, in unpublished archival documents such as court records and commissions of enquiry, in art, literature, and film, and in oral history from all over the continent. These will be discussed in depth in the chapters to come. For now, let me just mention Henri Alexandre Junod (1962 [1916]), Evans-Pritchard (1971), Gay (1985), Moodie (1988), Dunton (1989), Harries (1990, 1994), Jeay (1991), Krouse (1993), Achmat (1993), Gevisser and Cameron (1994), GALZ (1995), Bleys (1995), and Murray and Roscoe (1998) as groundbreaking or “canonical” studies in laying the theoretical and empirical foundations for what is sometimes termed queer scholarship in Africa. My own earlier work has drawn attention to a rich history of struggle over, and changing meanings of, sexuality and sexual identities in southern Africa (Epprecht 2004; see also GALZ 2008). Morgan and Wieringa (2005) offset the prevailing concern with male sexuality in many of the above studies with close anthropological studies of lesbianlike relationships in southern and eastern Africa, while Niang et al. (2002, 2003), Gueboguo (2006a, 2006c) and Eboussi Boulaga (2007) have begun to challenge received wisdom in francophone Africa. Current events, reports on legal status and government policies, international links, and other up-to-date information and debates concerning gay rights from all over the African continent can be easily accessed through the Web site Behind the Mask (www.mask.org.za). Same-sex issues in the struggles for human rights and HIV/AIDS awareness around the continent are closely documented, with strong policy recommendations, in Johnson (2007). A growing number of studies from around the continent have meanwhile begun to trickle in that establish credible baseline statistics on and testimony from women who have sex with women who experience heterosexual assaults (Reid and Dirsuweit 2001; Potgeiter 2005; Swarr forthcoming), and of men engaging in high-risk same-sex sexual activity. Jewkes et al. (2006) is a particularly powerful intervention in that respect, on account of the size and quality of the survey it was based on. It demonstrates that male-male sexuality is more widespread in a rural setting (nearly 3.6 percent of informants admitted to it) and has a higher correlation with HIV infection than ever before imagined. Niang et al. (2002) is also significant in that its survey of 250 Senegalese men revealed high levels of violence in male-male relationships. No less than 13 percent of those informants had experienced rape by ostensibly heterosexual police.

The language by which same-sex relationships are described in many of these sources is often Eurocentric—the word homosexuality, notably, suggests a clarity arising from a specific history of scientific enquiry, social relations, and political struggle that did not historically exist in Africa and still does not very accurately describe the majo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1 A Puzzling Blindspot, a Troubling Silence, a Strange Consensus: Reflections on the Heterosexual Norm in “African AIDS”
• Chapter 2 The Ethnography of African Straightness
• Chapter 3: Ethnopsychiatry and the Making of Gay Shaka
• Chapter 4 Slim Disease and the Science of Silence
• Chapter 5 Alternatives and Ambiguities: African Voices in Literature and Film
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index