Since its founding in 1957, the African Studies Association in the USA has navigated an internal contest between Africans and Africanists. Africans are primarily Black scholars, while Africanists are white scholars who typically claim objectivity and neutrality in the production of knowledge about African peoples. This contest is evident in calls to decolonize African studies, including the 2015 #RhodesMustFall campaign in South Africa. The white American takeover of African studies marginalized historical pan-African connections and intellectual production. Today, this legacy remains a source of tension in the professional association and the publication and distribution of scholarly works about Africans. A consequence of the whiteness of African studies has been white scholars’ refusal to confront the implications of this racialized (and gendered) landscape. What this refusal brings about is a continued objectification of African experiences as represented by white scholars.
I open this review of Edwards and Epprecht’s Working Class Homosexuality in South African History with the above reflections on African studies, whiteness and knowledge production to map out what I believe are the ongoing epistemological contests evident in the book, which have to do with whiteness and the use of colonial archives.
The authors’ key argument is that archival narratives and oral histories that articulate the subjective experiences of indigenous South Africans around same-sex sexualities can challenge exclusionary nationalist discourses and push back against Black hetero-masculinist nationalism. In other words, by proving that there were historical Africans who practised same-sex sexualities, we can challenge existing arguments that being gay is un-African. The book’s timeframe is generative. The two sections juxtapose archival transcripts of colonial-era South Africa and oral histories from 1995 in the newly independent nation. This arrangement demonstrates the persistence of colonial technologies that seek to codify African sexualities, and also shows how some South African men organized together to build communities during apartheid and in the new nation. The oral histories of the Izingqingili zaseMkhumbane, conducted by the first author in 1995, show a rich landscape of community building, ritual and loss. That we have these narratives today is a gift for a new generation of queer Africans, who are creating communities and are actively engaged in contemporary political struggles.
For readers interested in African cultural histories, the transcripts provide generative insights into how colonial epistemologies shape and calcify identities. It is fascinating to read the similarities between the 1907 transcripts and the 1995 oral histories. In 1907, British colonial officials asked Black South Africans questions about their sexual practices and which ethnic groups were doing what to whom. In this colonial context, the investigation into Black sexualities was about rooting out ‘unnatural vice’, which mine managers worried would hamper productivity. In 1995, in less formal contexts, Edwards asked similar kinds of questions about gender, ethnicity and sexual practice. The more recent interviews were conducted as part of an effort at cultural preservation at a time of rapid change around South Africa’s independence from white minority rule.
The centrality of whiteness in the production of both documents is worth consideration. Despite the stated differing motivations, an exoticism and objectification permeate, reminding us of how a Western gaze reproduces African sexualities as in need of colonial classification. This outcome is not unique to Working Class Homosexuality in South African History, but instead is a consequence of the unexamined whiteness of the mainstream of African studies.
There is also the issue of the archive. In her foreword to the book, sociologist zethu Matebeni reminds us of the limits of the archive, which, when it comes to African genders and sexualities, is ‘majorly constituted of disease, criminality, and death’ (p. xiii). As such, the question arises: is this archive, engaged as it is in colonial mechanisms of control, a productive method for challenging exclusionary nationalist discourses or notions of African humanity? I am not convinced that it is. Recognizing these limits means exploring different approaches to studying African sexualities.
Contemporary African scholars of queer African life, including Godfried Asante, Unoma Azuah, Serena Dankwa, Keguro Macharia, Neo Musangi, S. N. Nyeck, Kwame Otu, myself, and many others, have offered such approaches. These scholars produce works that refuse colonial epistemologies, offer critical interventions into the archive, and engage in an intellectual reflexivity that white Africanists could learn from. Readers of Working Class Homosexuality in South African History would do well to balance the insights gleaned from this text with queer African scholarship that provides grounded explanations for the persistence of homophobia on the African continent and its relationship to colonialism, nationalism, indigenous African practices and modernity.
