Death and mourning in Cameroon

Like many Central African societies (see Vaughan Reference Vaughan2008; Jindra and Noret Reference Jindra and Noret2012), Cameroon is a mourning society where any misfortune or tragic event that negatively affects people's lives generally triggers lamentation (see Gufler Reference Gufler2000; Mebenga Tamba Reference Mebenga Tamba2016; Ndjio Reference Ndjio, Murray and Myers2006). Yet despite the numerous tragic and unhappy situations that cause sorrow, no heart-breaking event arouses more grief and pain than death, especially when it concerns the passing of close friends, trustworthy colleagues, kin, family members, and so on. No other painful occurrence makes people feel as miserable as death.

Death may be a trigger of social disorders within a society; it might exacerbate conflicts within the community and among family members, especially when it prompts witchcraft accusations that the deceased might have been mystically killed by a relative, or when it leads to a struggle for control over the deceased's fortune among siblings and other family members (Goody Reference Goody1962; Ashforth Reference Ashforth2005; Geschiere Reference Geschiere1997). However, death may also reinforce communal spirit and solidarity among family members, or dramatize a sense of belonging among members of a clan or an ethnic group, as Anthony Appiah's seminal In My Father's House indicates (Appiah Reference Appiah1992; see also Geschiere Reference Geschiere2005; Reynolds Whyte Reference Reynolds Whyte2005). This is why people generally mourn on the occasion of the death of a close relative.

Yet over the past three decades mourning has taken a more dramatic turn in this country whose cities have been transformed into ‘necropolises’ (Ndjio Reference Ndjio, Murray and Myers2006), and where insecurity, violence and terror have become the daily experience of the vast majority of city dwellers whose lives are permanently subject to the power of uncertainty, and above all to the tyranny of death. Because of the pervasiveness of death and the polymorphous presence of tragedy, contemporary Cameroonian society has become a grieving society where corpse removals, funerals and burial ceremonies permeate everyday life (see Beuvier Reference Beuvier2014; Gufler Reference Gufler2000; Ndjio Reference Ndjio, Murray and Myers2006). Indeed, in most of the country's urban areas, it is common to see long processions of mourners every weekend, as they block the city's main roads while accompanying, amid wailing chants, the dead body of their relative or family member from the mortuary or the deceased's home to the cemetery (cf. Mebenga Tamba Reference Mebenga Tamba2015; Reference Mebenga Tamba2009).

By a mourning society I mean here not only a society where one ‘cries the death’, to paraphrase Hermann Gufler, who has studied the rituals of death among the Yamba populations of the western Grassfields region of Cameroon (Gufler Reference Gufler2000), but also a society that saturates its public sphere with funeral services dramatizing the power of death and its grip on the lives of its members (Ashforth Reference Ashforth2005; Jindra and Noret Reference Jindra and Noret2012; Dilger and Luig Reference Dilger and Luig2013). In addition, a mourning society is a society in which it is virtually impossible not to be regularly disturbed or annoyed by the lamenting cries of women from the neighbourhood, or the weeping of a neighbouring friend, colleague or fellow passenger in the bus or taxi, saddened by the unexpected demise of a close relative or family member. Moreover, the concept accounts for a community in which people spend much of their time noisily mourning loved ones who have passed away, especially when the deceased was the family's breadwinner (Gufler Reference Gufler2000). People often weep so copiously that they collapse or lose strength and have to be taken to a local healthcare centre for emergency care.

Contemporary Cameroonian society attaches so much importance to mourning that the mortuaries of some public hospitals set aside a special place to enable people to mourn their deceased relatives without disturbing other visitors or patients. Because of the growing social and symbolic importance of mourning in recent years, several groups of professional female mourners are often hired by bereaved families to animate funerals and wakes with their affected and exaggerated lamentations; their prices vary according to the nature of the women's spectacle, and especially the tonality of their crying or screaming (see Beuvier Reference Beuvier2014; De Boeck and Plissart Reference De Boeck and Plissart2004). Weeping for deceased people with whom one has no social or cultural ties is one of the mutations in the African moral economy of mourning noted by Cameroonian anthropologist Luc Mebenga Tamba. These manifestations mark a new phenomenon, distinct from mourning rituals linked to a regime of kinship and ethnicity or friendship bonds, where it is assumed that we mourn only those with whom we share some ties or connections (Mebenga Tamba Reference Mebenga Tamba2015).

Despite the fact that people in contemporary Cameroon increasingly respond to the death of their nearest and dearest with weeping, most Cameroonians still discriminate when mourning their next of kin or relatives who have passed away. As will be demonstrated in the next section, the same people who are keen to give themselves up to unending mourning and unrelenting laments when some members of their family pass away often show indifference when other members die.

Homo sacer: the untouchables, the spectres and ungrievable death

In urban popular language in Cameroon, pleureurs (convulsive mourners) refers to people who are unable to contain their grief, bereaved by the death of their loved ones. Yet Cameroonians do not always feel grief when death strikes in their community. This discrimination, which is at the heart of the mourning regime in Cameroon, can be related to pervasive customary cultural practices and imaginations that establish a moral distinction between deaths. Indeed, in this country, as in many other African societies, some types of death are represented as ‘good deaths’ while others are construed as ‘bad deaths’ (van der Geest Reference van der Geest2004; Kalusa and Vaughan Reference Kalusa and Vaughan2013). In her analysis of the social representation of bereavement among the Meru populations of Tanzania, for example, Liv Haram notes that these mountain people generally conceive of death in terms of ‘good death’ and ‘bad death’. She defines a good death as one reserved for ‘people who have lived long and prosperous lives or have been blessed with lots of children and great-grandchildren, and have lived as good, moral people’ (Haram Reference Haram, Dilger and Luig2013: 226–7). People whose deaths are perceived as good deaths will be ‘properly and heavily mourned’ (ibid.: 227). Moreover, these deceased people will be given a ‘proper funeral with many visiting mourners’ (ibid.: 227). There are some types of death that are considered ‘bad’ because they are ‘a waste of time and money’ (ibid.: 223) for the bereaved families or relatives. From an emotional point of view, a good death is generally experienced by many people as unbearable and mournful, while a bad death is often lived as bearable and untroubled. The spread of HIV/AIDS has increased bad deaths in most African communities, where people are tired of attending funerals and burial ceremonies (ibid.: 223).

This article proposes a new interpretation of these tricky concepts of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ deaths. It does so by underlining not the socio-economic profile or social status of the deceased, on which most studies rely for an understanding of death as either good or bad; instead, it focuses on marginality, notably the marginal sexual identity of the deceased person, as a critical concept to analyse the framing of some deaths as bad or bearable.

Since the explosion of a violent political and social homophobia that has rocked most African countries over the past decade (see Geschiere Reference Geschiere2017; Epprecht Reference Epprecht2013; Reference Epprecht2008; Hoad Reference Hoad2007; Kaoma Reference Kaoma2012; Reference Kaoma2009; Bosia and Weiss Reference Bosia and Weiss2013; van Klinken Reference van Klinken2014; Reference van Klinken2011), people who are declared to be or suspected of being ‘homosexual’ have become the new recluses in a number of African communities. Even public medical institutions have been turned into places of medical discrimination, effectively excluding patients whose unconventional sexual identity does not fit the heteronormative values promoted by many postcolonial African governments (cf. Ndjio Reference Ndjio2012). In postcolonial medical discrimination, in a certain sense patients identified as ‘homosexual’ have taken the place formerly occupied by mentally disturbed people, lepers and HIV/AIDS sufferers. If the current medical order has more or less trivialized or ‘normalized’ the presence in health centres of other marginal social categories, this does not yet seem to be the case for patients identified as ‘homosexual’.

The recent eruption of sick homosexual bodies in the public arena has marked a significant epochal shift in the moral economy of the stigmatization of ‘homosexual’ subjects, who are increasingly seen as dangerous ‘sexual aliens’ (Ndjio Reference Ndjio, Diyvendak, Geschiere and Tonkens2016). This ‘othering’ of sexual minorities should be seen in the context of the Cameroonian government's anti-homosexual politics and its violent exercise of sovereign power over the lives of persons identifying as homosexual. The dissident sexuality of the latter threatens the alleged homogeneous heterosexual Cameroonian community, while destabilizing the national sexual boundaries the postcolonial state has established between so-called ‘authentic’ and ‘autochthonous’ sexual practices and those construed as ‘alien’ (see Ndjio Reference Ndjio2012; Ladǒ Reference Ladǒ2011; Nyeck and Epprecht Reference Nyeck and Epprecht2013). In addition, a dominant nativist representation of homosexuality as an un-African, Western-imported sexual practice has led to the profiling of ‘homosexual’ subjects who are considered to be uprooted Africans who flout so-called African traditional sexual norms and values (cf. Ndjio Reference Ndjio, Wieringa and Sivori2013). In some instances, same-sex loving people are politically or socially branded as enemies from within or traitors to the nation, and therefore routinely subjected to state violence (see Ndjio Reference Ndjio, Diyvendak, Geschiere and Tonkens2016).

In many respects, in contemporary Cameroonian society homosexual subjects now epitomize a modern type of homo sacer, a marginal figure in Roman law that was popularized by Giorgio Agamben (Reference Agamben and Heller-Roazen1998). In contrast to Agamben's discussion of this concept with respect to sovereign power and a certain form of biopolitics, I conceptualize this notion with reference to individuals who, because of their dissident sexual identity and orientation, have lost the social right to be mourned according to their society's customs. The figure of homo sacer symbolizes those outcasts whose demise is similar to those of the chiens écrasés (run-over dogs) for which nobody is willing to make a death announcement; this concept also refers to people who are buried like mad dogs. These are people whose lives have been made ‘une vie nue’ (a bare life, in the sense of an unworthy and less valuable life) because their very existence is thought to bring dishonour to their family and their community.

In times of what Simon Watney calls the expansion of the ‘politics of intense moral purity’ (Reference Watney, Ferguson, Gever, Minh-Ha and West1990: 100), the archetype of a barren and unattached ‘homosexual’ becomes not only ‘the spectre of a world driven by desire sans ethical commitment’, as Jean Comaroff (Reference Comaroff2007: 223) would put it, but also the iconic figure of someone who can be subjected to a bare death. The homosexual subject is a symbol of the untouchable: their dead body cannot be touched by any family member because it is associated with notions of disgust, danger and pollution.Footnote ³ In many respects, the agony of people identified as ‘homosexual’, whose family and community members leave them unattended in hospitals, where they often experience medical neglect, or who are deprived of their basic human right to be properly buried or offered a decent funeral, recalls João Biehl's description of poor Afro-Brazilians as homines sacri who are confined to ‘zones of abandonment’ because they belong neither to the world of the living nor to that of the dead (Biehl Reference Biehl2001).

In Cameroon, as in a number of sub-Saharan African societies, the bodies of heterosexually identified subjects belong either to the community or to the family (see Reynolds Whyte Reference Reynolds Whyte2005; Geissler and Prince Reference Geissler, Prince, Dilger and Luig2013). Sometimes the state or government can lay claim to the dead bodies of citizens who are identified as homosexuals for purposes of juridical or police investigation. Yet a number of cases recorded during my fieldwork suggest that the bodies of persons identified as ‘homosexuals’ belong to nobody; that is why they can be abandoned in the mortuaries or dumped in communal graves. When the thirty-one-year-old LGBTIQ activist with whom I was working died of AIDS in 2011, his body was abandoned in the mortuary of Yaoundé Central Hospital by his relatives, who had not helped the deceased during the long illness that finally claimed his life. Both his illness and his death dramatized the conflict with his devoutly religious family over his sexual orientation. Indeed, the young LGBTIQ activist considered himself the ‘black sheep of [his] family that no one cares about’. When asked to explain his relationship with his family during an education workshop I was coordinating together with a human rights lawyer from Yaoundé in a local LGBTIQ headquarters in 2010, OlivierFootnote ⁴ made these comments:

Following Olivier's death, the hospital authorities made several unsuccessful public announcements and threatened to bury the young man's body in a fosse commune (communal grave) if family members did not come to collect it. They changed their minds only after some members of an LGBTIQ association to which the deceased was connected finally agreed to take care of this unwanted body. Being left to be buried by people who are not the deceased's relatives is one of the most socially unacceptable forms of desacralization and dehumanization of the dead in Cameroonian society. Likewise, being buried in a communal grave and away from one's soil or ancestral land is tantamount to equating the dead body with that of a mad dog or the most despised or marginal social figure. And this is what happened to the dead body of the young, unmarried LGBTIQ activist.

Thus, by refusing to retrieve from the hospital mortuary the body of their deceased kin and by relinquishing it to the hospital authorities, who themselves handed it over to members of a local LGBTIQ association, who in turn finally managed to bury it in a small cemetery, the family clearly indicated that this body, which had already been socially alienated during the man's lifetime, was no longer theirs or had ceased to belong to the community.

We don't mourn faggots

During my fieldwork in various neighbourhoods of Yaoundé and Douala, my two research assistants, who were connected to the local LGBTIQ milieu, and I recorded a number of cases that give some hints as to the way in which contemporary Cameroonian society deals with the deaths of people with transgressive sexual identities or of people identified as homosexual and childless in their lifetime. Over the course of June 2011, for example, a well-known Cameroonian LGBTIQ activist died of infections complicated by HIV/AIDS at Yaoundé Central Hospital, where he was hospitalized less than two weeks after his release from Kondengui Central Prison having spent more than a year in custody on suspicion of ‘homosexuality’. No local tabloid alluded to the passing of a man who was a prominent figure in LGBTIQ activism in Cameroon. Nor did his death trigger any form of mobilization of the community at large, as had happened when the populist and anti-homosexual intellectual Charles Ateba Eyene died on 21 February 2014. In the family house where the funeral took place (despite the reluctance of the head of the family, who had initially requested that the funeral be held elsewhere), only a few people attended what some people from the neighbourhood branded a ‘deuil d'un pédé’ (funeral of a faggot). Even the famous veillées funèbres (funeral wakes), which generally attract many people from the neighbourhood, recorded a very poor attendance. Most of the participants were the deceased's fellow homosexuals, who reportedly were admonished by one family member to keep a low profile and not to exhibit themselves in such a gathering where gay people were not welcome.

At his burial, which took place in a small cemetery in Yaoundé, only four of his LGBTIQ colleagues showed up to pay their last respects to a dear friend with whom they were engaged in the gay liberation movement in Cameroon. None of his close relatives considered it necessary to take part in the funeral – not even his mother, despite him being her only male child. She, like other family members, had severed all ties after the deceased's sexual orientation had been disclosed publicly. This explains why there was neither mourning nor weeping for this asocial death.

Despite the fact that Mr Eloundou was a fervent and devout Christian, he was denied the right to be buried as a Christian because the Catholic clergy were categorically opposed to the idea of a homosexual man, who epitomized what Michel Maffesoli (Reference Maffesoli2012: 127) would call ‘la sexualité du diable’ (the devil's sexuality), being laid to rest in their sacred land. Even the priest who was hired by his friends to say a prayer for the deceased's soul turned down the request when he learned that the dead man had been a homosexual and a strong advocate for the decriminalization of homosexuality in Cameroon.

Mr Eloundou's death highlighted the social alienation and radical otherness of a young man who was marked by his family as a sexual outcast when he came out in 2006. Indeed, in an unpublished reportFootnote ⁶ documenting some aspects of Mr Eloundou's life, it was revealed that, prior to his death, the young man was sharing a studio with one of his friends after being expelled from the family home by his father, who reportedly threatened to kill his ‘dishonourable’ son if he ever set foot in his home again. Only one of his older sisters, who lived abroad, did not sever ties with him. In that document, Mr Eloundou explained why he was ostracized by his family to the point of being forced to give up his studies because nobody was willing to support him financially. One of the reasons why his father could not forgive him for his homosexuality, he stated, was that he was the only male among his parents’ seven children. His father, a retired army officer, did not want to pass on his inheritance to a homosexual son.

Likewise, during his lifetime, Eric O. Lembembe, a journalist and well-known LGBTIQ activist with whom I had previously collaborated on several research projects in Cameroon, maintained conflictual relations with his close relatives; they did not tolerate the fact that he was openly homosexual and very active in LGBTIQ liberation activism in Cameroon. Like Mr Eloundou, he was compelled to vacate the family home and find a new house elsewhere, because his parents feared that he could ‘contaminate’ his two younger brothers with his homosexuality, as he once explained to me during one of our conversations. Thus, when he was brutally killed in July 2013 in what looked like a homophobic murder, I did not see any of his family members mourning or weeping for the loss of the thirty-three-year-old man who was affectionately called ‘mademoiselle’ or ‘la go’ (young and sexy girl) by his friends. None of his family members showed any hint of sorrow or grief. Despite the fact that Eric Lembembe was a social junior who had not yet fulfilled his social obligations towards his community (to marry and have children), his family found his death not too hard to bear.

During the veillées funèbres that I and some members of two well-known local LGBTIQ human rights associations attended, I was confused by the unfriendly and unemotional ambience of the ceremony, which contrasted with the generally animated and lively atmosphere of such an event. My confusion led me to ask a middle-aged man who was sitting next to me why the vigil for the young man had attracted only a few people and why there was so little show of mourning, unlike what would otherwise be common practice in Cameroonian society. The man gave me this simple and straightforward response that alerted me to the changes in the local imagination and experience of mourning: ‘Chez nous les Beti on ne pleure pas les pédés [We the Beti people don't mourn faggots].’ ‘Le deuil c'est pour les personnes normales et non les gens qui font les choses du diable [Funerals are reserved for normal people and not for people who do devilish things].’ The man did not need to explain further why the bereaved family was unwilling to give a proper and respectful funeral to its deceased member, or why the deuil (funeral) of the homosexual person was de-culturalized and de-Africanized to the point of bearing a resemblance to funerals performed in the Western world. Indeed, what I witnessed that evening in a popular neighbourhood of Yaoundé had nothing to do with the highly culturalized and ethnicized funerals I was accustomed to attending in many areas of Douala and Yaoundé. The culturally and socially alienated funerals of young deceased LGBTIQ activists were similar to those generally reserved for marginal figures of society who have been de-socialized, notably people accused of practising witchcraft or persons who have committed suicide.

In May 2012, Nadine, a twenty-five-year-old lesbian woman, who was my master's degree student and one of my research assistants, died of what was officially recorded as severe cerebral malaria. As an only child, she was the pride of her middle-class parents, who had great expectations for her. Her sudden death was a hard blow for them. But there was something that her parents did not know about their daughter's intimate life: her homosexuality. It was a secret she had always managed to hide from her conservative parents, who would have been devastated if they had learned that their beloved child loved women and had no intention of marrying or having children, as they had hoped. That is why she never turned up in the family home with any woman whose appearance might have aroused suspicion in her parents.

But during her funeral service at the mortuary of Douala General Hospital, an incident occurred that subsequently had a negative impact on the young woman's funeral rituals. During the procession, one young woman, who was cross-dressing, stepped out of the line and came closer to the coffin, which was open to enable family members and friends to pay their last respects to their loved one. At the sight of the inert body of her lover, she started to weep with emotion. In her laments she called the deceased her ‘amour’ (lover) and reminded her of the promise they once made to each other: that they would never be parted. Outraged by what he had just heard from the young mourner, the disgruntled father ordered the cessation of the ceremony. In his anger he declared: ‘I consider that I no longer have a child and I don't want to mourn homosexuals in my house. Go and do this somewhere else and not in my house.’ Before he left the mortuary, the man threatened to use violence against anyone who dared bring the dead body of his daughter to his house. Later, I learned that there were no funeral vigils in the family home: the deceased woman was buried on the same day in the cemetery of the Bois des Singes and not in her native village, as initially planned. No member of the family deemed it necessary to accompany the deceased to her final resting place.

The comments that followed this family drama proved to be crucial because they revealed a new twist in the local imagination of queerness with respect to a philosophy of life. An older woman apparently connected to the bereaved family did not hesitate in accusing the deceased young woman of having ‘killed’ her entire family even before her own physical death. ‘This girl was really wicked, despite her deceptive appearances,’ she said. She then asked: ‘How can you be a homosexual when you know that you're the only child of your parents and that they are expecting you to give them children to expand the family?’ In line with her friend's statements, another woman made these comments: ‘Poor family. I really feel sorry for this family. I'm sure this family lineage will disappear forever when the man and his wife die. Who'll talk about this family again since there are no descendants to keep alive the memory of the family?’ And then she added:

The woman's comments inspired this philosophical reflection on the part of the only man in the group: ‘People must understand that the family is first of all the offspring [descendance], and without descendants there is no family.’

The different cases described above underscore a phenomenon that is still understudied in African anthropology and queer studies: namely, the desacralization and de-ritualization of the deaths of people identified as ‘homosexuals’, and of people with no descendance or progeny in contemporary Cameroonian society. Childless homosexuals whose dead bodies are treated with indifference by the general public, including by their family members, who are dehumanized, buried without dignity, dumped into communal graves like mad dogs, deprived of the right to a funeral, and de-ritualized in such a trivial manner, recall the dramatic fate of the figure Giorgio Agamben called homo sacer. Although the collective mistreatment of the dead bodies of people identified as ‘homosexual’ might not necessarily relate to the kind of biopolitics discussed by the Italian philosopher, it reveals a certain mode of representation of homoeroticism and queer identity by nativist and pro-natalist ideologies that celebrate a procreative sexual life, while dismissing a homoerotic form of life as anti-life. These principles of procreation and reproduction generally inscribe homoerotic forms of life in a register of cannibalistic eroticism.Footnote ⁷ According to these norms, socially disavowed sexual practices such as homoeroticism not only ‘eat’, devour or consume life, as often happens in cannibalistic witchcraft-related practices; they also undermine the fundamental principles of the reproduction and regeneration of life that allow society to withstand tragedy and loss.

In other respects, the cases described above indicate that what I have previously referred to as ‘bare death’ or the ungrievable loss of persons identified as homosexual subjects appears as a logical consequence of their homosexual life, which had been represented as ‘bare life’, to borrow Agamben's term. In her Frames of War, Butler argues that the grievability of death is inseparable from the value we attach to certain lives, and that lives which were already framed as dispensable cannot be mourned or grieved (Butler Reference Butler2009). In other words, there is always a connection between ‘bare life’ and ‘bare death’, as the cases of ‘unreproductive’ homosexual subjects show (see also Butler Reference Butler2004).

This idea of ‘bare life’ or ‘bare death’ is reflected in the comments made by some internet users following the death of a well-known homosexual jetsetter from Yaoundé. On social media, his death provoked only disparaging and homophobic comments, such as: ‘un pédé de moins, c'est toujours une bonne nouvelle pour le pays [one less faggot is always good news for the country]’, ‘la pédérastie en deuil [pederasty in mourning]’, ‘au moins son sale derrière va se reposer en paix en enfer [at least his dirty backside will rest in peace in hell]’, ‘qu'il aille au diable déjà sa vie nous servait à quoi à la société [may he go to hell! What was his life useful for to society]?’ and ‘il est mort comme il a vécu: une vie inutile que personne ne regrettera [he died as he lived: a useless life that no one will regret]’.

Homosexual, homo sacer and vitalis moralis

One fine morning, I was listening to a popular talk show on a local radio station in Douala when one of the guests, Dr Abdelaziz, who was introduced as an anthropologist, philosopher and traditional doctor, made these statements:

And he continued: ‘To live without producing offspring is to decide to be like a tree that cannot bear fruit, and in our societies we are not affected when such a tree falls down.’

Dr Abdelaziz was expressing in plain language an opinion that now permeates contemporary Cameroonian society: namely, the idea that homosexuality is an unproductive and infertile sexuality, which, unlike heterosexual eroticism, does not permit the perpetuation of human life and the human species. Indeed, in the wake of the sexual biopolitics of the Cameroon government, with its eminently confrontational and violent responses to homosexual subjects, new sexual ideologies emerged around 2006 to which little attention has yet been given: these can be described as procreationist ideologies.Footnote ⁸ Beyond their epistemological and methodological divergences, these nativist discourses all endorse a certain ‘ethics of life’ to which homosexuality, often perceived as an immoderata carnis petulantia (an immoderate carnal obsession), would be opposed. According to these philosophies that have entangled homosexual eroticism within registers of infertility and childlessness, homosexuality undermines Africa's reproductive and procreative power, its demographic vitality, and the development of its human capital. It is alleged that African subjects engaging in same-sex acts voluntarily or involuntarily renounce the historical mission that champions of natalism might have assigned to all African men and women: to contribute to the maintenance of the continent's population growth, and to what one Cameroonian analyst calls the ‘preservation of the human being and its species over time’ (Ayissi Reference Ayissi2009: 162).

Moreover, these pro-natalist ideologies present same-sex sexuality as a new Malthusian device deployed by the Western world to curb the growth of the African population. In many African countries, and especially in Cameroon, the subject identified as ‘homosexual’ now embodies the detestable figure of a traitor to the nation, an agent or a surrogate of Western imperialist forces plotting against African countries whose demographic growth would be worrisome to Western powers.

This vitalis moralis resonates in a text published in 2009 by the Cameroonian philosopher Lucien Ayissi under the title ‘La logique hédonistique de l'homosexualité au regard de l’éthique de vie’ (‘The hedonistic logic of homosexuality with regard to the ethics of life’). The author's main argument can be summed up as follows: in its new imperialist project, the West has imported and imposed on Africa a hedonistic pederasty, with the absolute purpose of sexual and carnal enjoyment. This is what Ayissi refers to as ‘hedonophilia’ – a form of sexuality that is guided primarily and essentially by a pathological passion for the pleasures of the flesh and enjoyment (jouissance). According to Ayissi, this libertine homosexual hedonism differs fundamentally from the spiritual homophilia that prevailed in ancient Greece and that had an essentially psychagogic function – that is, pedagogical and educational. Whereas the ancient form of pederasty celebrated by ancient philosophers such as Socrates and Plato primarily aimed at developing wisdom and virtue in the eromenos (the young male who was often the disciple or the learner) by the erastes (the adult male and also the master or initiator), the homosexual eroticism that currently thrives in Africa is exclusively motivated by aphrodisia or carnal pleasures. As the author points out:

Lucien Ayissi adopts an adversarial and vindictive stance in relation to homosexual eroticism, which he accuses of cultivating vile and beastly sexual behaviours in Africans. The Cameroonian philosopher also denounces current homosexual practices, which, according to him, are characterized by their ‘predilection for evanescent and ambiguous pleasures’ (Ayissi Reference Ayissi2009: 163): ‘In terms of the ethics of life, homosexuality is discredited because it gives sexual pleasure the excessive visibility it does not deserve. It greatly devalues the body by reducing it to the mundane function of aphrodisiac manufacture’ (ibid.). According to Ayissi, the outrageous sublimation of aphrodisia that he observes in homosexual relations is equivalent to what he finds in postmodern societies of the Western world.

Ayissi's insistence on the need to maintain human reproduction and to preserve life in human sexual relations suggests that a certain African nativist philosophy primarily dismisses homosexual eroticism because of the ‘disregard of homosexuality for life in favour of carnal pleasures and its eventual systematization [which] can deal a fatal blow to the human species’, as he points out (Ayissi Reference Ayissi2009: 167). He rejects homosexual eroticism because it encourages what he calls the ‘subordination of life in search of a moralized and absolutized carnal pleasure’ (ibid.).

Ayissi's comments also suggest that homosexuality is vilified by a certain nativist discourse because it amounts to an ‘upheaval of the law of the living [loi du vivant]’, as Georges Balandier would put it (Reference Balandier1984). Moreover, homosexual hedonism is dismissed as a dangerous sexual practice and orientation because it allegedly replaces this loi du vivant with that of unproductiveness and infertility. Adepts of homosexual eroticism allegedly have the propensity to give preference to sexual pleasure over procreation, or to favour aphrodisia over vita. In Cameroon, where new nativist discourses have made demography, and especially what Lee Edelman calls ‘procreative futurism’ (Edelman Reference Edelman2004), a powerful weapon against the so-called Western imperialist project, sexual practices that do not produce children are generally perceived badly. This is the case with same-sex sexuality, which tends to be associated with death, decline and chaos.

Ayissi's text offers a hedono-thanatologicalFootnote ⁹ understanding of homosexual desire. It represents homosexuality as a form of eroticism that is guided by two contradictory primordial ‘impulses’. The first is jouissance, which is driven by the frantic and limitless search for carnal pleasure. Homosexual hedonism allegedly transforms the African homosexual subject into a desirable body that is said to place (homo)sexual consumerism in the pantheon of his or her priorities. This discourse represents the homosexual individual not only as a lecherous subject with unbridled and unrestrained sexuality, but also as a ‘pleasure machine’ (machine à plaisir) driven only by sexual appetites. The second impulse is the desire for death that allegedly characterizes the current libertine homoeroticism. The urge towards death often finds expression in the unnecessary spending and sterile debauchery of sexual energy that is considered the main characteristic of homosexual relationality.

This problematization of same-sex desires by the new nativist and procreationist discourses partly explains why, in contemporary Central African societies dominated by a cult and even a fetishization of natalityFootnote ¹⁰ and procreation, any individual or group of people engaged in unreproductive sexuality are seen as a threat to society or the community at large. Moreover, the recriminatory idea of same-sex desires expressed in these discourses explains why some homosexual people in present-day Cameroon have become what was referred to earlier as homines sacri. Reflecting on Ayissi's interpretation of homosexual hedonism, it is tempting to characterize the current African homo sacer as a non-conforming African subject who is socially ostracized, culturally alienated, and politically and legally persecuted because of his or her refusal to inscribe his or her sexuality in a moral economy of procreation and reproduction.

Lee Edelman's argument that queer people in the Western world are often profiled as subjects with a ‘relentlessly narcissistic, antisocial, and future-negating drive’, because they are supposedly not ready to surrender their sexual freedom to the conservative ideology of ‘procreative and reproductive futurism’ (Edelman Reference Edelman2004), also applies to many people from Central Africa identifying as homosexual. The cases alluded to here show that these subjects were denied proper funerals when they passed away, because, during their lifetime, they had rejected what Edelman would call the ‘rhetoric of future’ (ibid.): they challenged the dominant social, cultural and political order that makes the phallus and the vagina of Africans powerful instruments for the achievement of an African demographic future. Moreover, childless and non-procreative homosexual subjects were viewed as sexually non-conforming subjects compromising the celebrated new African generation. In short, with these young same-sex loving men and women, African demography was seen to have no future. That is why their deaths were framed as irrelevant or met with responses such as ‘good riddance’.