A wealth of scholarship, works of fiction, memoirs, documentary film, art, photography, and other media have emerged over the last couple of decades that examine, imagine, or simply testify to the lives of Africans whose sexuality and gender identity do not conform to heteropatriarchal norms. The two books under review here make significant contributions to the scholarship. Brenna Munro describes hers as a ‘cultural history of South African struggles for democracy’, while Ashley Currier's is an ethnography of gay rights activism that gives Namibia and South Africa roughly equal attention.
Munro offers an almost encyclopaedic overview of various forms of writing and visual media from South Africa since the 1960s that include some representation of same-sex sexuality, often through a minor character or as a trope that speaks to larger political or social themes of the day. Her stated goal is to understand, first, how South Africa came to adopt its famously gay-friendly constitution. Can clues to this seemingly quite radical break from a historically homophobic culture be discerned in anti-apartheid literature? Second, what do the frustrations and disappointments of freedom post-1994 tell us about the gay rights progress narrative that is so entrenched in the Western imagination? Is the notion of progress towards individual sexual rights and dignity applicable in South Africa, let alone elsewhere on the continent? Might the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and other queer characters in post-apartheid literature (television, etc.) help us to understand the potential and the limitations of sexual rights in the contemporary neoliberal condition?
Her first two chapters focus on sex in prison, and offset each other quite neatly. The first, beginning with Moses Dlamini's Hellhole, analyzes hostile depictions of same-sex relations in prison mostly written by straight-identified men. In this genre, authors of all the apartheid-era racial groups profess their deep revulsion at such relations. Homosexuality tends to be seen as a squirm-inducing manifestation of racial capitalism. The second chapter looks at the writing of gay-identified men who found themselves in prison for their political activism. Simon Nkoli, most famously, but also Zackie Achmat among others, provide a very different perspective. They suggest that awareness of loving and/or erotic same-sex relationships among Africans in prison may have had a maturing influence on the nationalist struggle.
Chapter Three takes the analysis to the military, where a series of novels and memoirs from the 1980s reveal fitfully repressed homoerotic desire among white conscripts. Chapter Four looks closely at the work of Richard Rive set in District Six of Cape Town to ponder new types of relationships emerging in urban spaces. Chapter Five also has a single author focus, revisiting Bessie Head's A Question of Power to wonder about racialized sexuality and identity when viewed from exile.
The final two substantive chapters take us into the post-1994 era. J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer introduce lesbian characters in two novels that speak to the ambiguities, tensions, and white people's fears of life in the new South Africa. This is followed by consideration of the work of Sello Duiker, the first black African novelist to portray central homosexual and bisexual characters in an affirming light, and Zanele Muholi, an international prize-winning photographer whose ‘visual activism’ primarily seeks to document the lives of black lesbians and to protest the violence they experience at the hands of patriarchal culture. The conclusion suggests that progress is indeed being made toward the ‘dream of love to come’ – a reference to a speech given by Albie Sachs on the cusp of democratic reforms in the late 1980s. Freedom from discrimination, violence, and the oppressive need for secrecy or denial in intimate relationships is emerging although not in quite the pattern known from the West. Scholars of this history, Munro argues, need to be attentive to the role of South Africa's extreme economic inequalities as well as cultural diversity when they assess changing sexualities in the country.
All told, The Dream of Love to Come provides an exceedingly rich and detailed survey, with a clear and largely compelling argument tying the different chapters together. To my eye, however, it does not quite succeed in its stated goal of reconstructing a ‘cultural history’. Key early authors have been left out of the discussion – Henri Junod, Wulf Sachs, A. S. Mopeli-Paulus, and Mary Renault, for example. At the other end of the time frame, Nkunzi Nkabinde is given only the slightest nod despite the importance of her memoir to understanding the relationship between lesbian and traditional healer identities. Also somewhat surprising given the author's own identification as a queer scholar is her minimal discussion of methodology, a topic that typically elicits much self-reflection if not angst in queer theory. The default impression that this leaves is of an almost entirely text-based exegesis, which creates problems in a place like southern Africa. In many cases, Munro scrambles to fill the gaps that texts invariably leave with her own or borrowed speculation that at times stretches credibility.
Out in Africa offers a sharp contrast, not least of all by devoting an entire chapter to methodology, choice of terminology, and the politics of North Americans doing queer ethnographic research in Africa. Currier applies a sharp, almost fly-on-the-wall eye to several of the principal sexual rights associations in South Africa and Namibia during a formative period of organization (mid-1990s up to the near-present). The focus is on how the different associations used public visibility as a strategy to win rights and resist oppression, or opted instead for more discreet forms of organization and political engagement. How did those choices translate into effective (or not) responses at specific moments in their various struggles in the context of economic malaise, rapid cultural change, and burgeoning rates of HIV?
The introductory chapter sets the book up with a solid overview of the theorization of key analytic concepts deriving from the history of activism and sexuality rights transnationally, and of the existing historiography of the same in southern Africa. The chapters that follow provide a comparison of the divergent strategies adopted by two lesbian-oriented associations (the Forum for the Empowerment of Women, and Sister Namibia); a comparison of cases of ‘missed opportunities’ when LBGTI groups chose not to engage in public debate over legal reforms; and a comparison of strategies to counter the widespread accusation that African LGBTI groups promote a Western cultural imperialist agenda or are in it for purely opportunistic reasons – ‘gay for pay’ in popular jargon.
The concluding chapter draws several lessons from the evidence, notably, that strategic decisions about when and how to become publicly visible were extremely important (and sometimes quite divisive or painful) to the various organizations under study. Success or failure in specific campaigns was contingent on many factors, often rooted in local histories of racial conflict and rarely predictable from the Western paradigm of gay liberation.
Currier was a direct witness to some of the key discussions within the nascent movement, and interviewed many of the main decision-makers during important moments of controversy: the Jacob Zuma rape trial; the same-sex marriage debate in South Africa; outreach initiatives to East Africa; presentations to the African Commission on Peoples' and Human Rights; the establishment of the Behind The Mask website; and more. A richly detailed narrative emerges that sheds light upon the complex issues bedeviling LGBTI organizing in Africa today. In addition to the obvious political and religious homophobia LGBTI must deal with, less visible problems that Currier documents include tensions between southern Africans and those from elsewhere on the continent; the need for vigilance against fraud, embezzlement, or managerial incompetence; and the insidious effects of inherited notions of race, gender, and class that equally dog other (straight) civil society initiatives in southern Africa.
As for Western ‘queer imperialism’, Currier's evidence is mixed. The big international actors like Hivos do not come across as promoting or policing an assertively ‘un-African’ gay identity. On the contrary, they often seem cautious in consultation with African activists. The main exceptions have been their role in insisting upon financial discipline and professionalization, and pressing for the creation of broad pan-African networks. These ‘colonizing’ requirements resulted in some localized tensions but it is hard to see that they are going to be harmful to the interests of African LGBTI in the long run.
Out in Africa is the first study of its kind from Africa, and as such an important addition to the historiography of sexualities and of social movements in southern Africa. It should be of great interest for its perceptive observations about coalition-building and identity formation under the pressure-cooker conditions that prevail in the region and indeed more broadly in the Global South. Given the paucity of African evidence in so much so-called global queer studies, these two books should enrich graduate courses on global sexualities and gender.
