Gay is unAfrican (?)

It becomes increasingly difficult for me to shrug off the accusation that my gayness is not African. In fact it is not. I am a product of all the American and British media I consume. This is because all of us learn how to be from other people, and because there have been no people to learn gayness from other than those I found on the internet and on T.V. and in gay magazines. This is where I found the assumptions through which I make sense of my sexual political world.

I know it is not smart right now for a gay African man to be calling himself unAfrican (here is my legitimacy on a silver platter Bob/Kibaki/Museveni/Zuma). The point I want to try and make is that in battling the order of heteronormativity, a new order has been created and that order has diffused (incompletely) from the "west" across the world. There is a normative way of being homosexual, and there is a rubric of sexual identity that purports to describe everyone everywhere. You are either straight, L, G, B, T or I. Each of those letters comes with an identity. You have to chose one.

When Graeme Reid**, an anthropologist, studied "homosexual men and lesbians" in Ermelo, Mpumalanga in 2006, he found that being gay there was "almost synonymous with being effeminate or, in local parlance, a 'lady', or sis-Buti." He found that the separation of gender identity and sexual identity implied by the rubric did not play out in Ermelo. Instead, gay participants in the study saw themselves as members of a "third gender category, separate from men and women". One of the participants said: "In my family it is my mother and we [children] are six . I would say that at home there were three boys and two girls. Then there is me, who is gay." This is just one example in one context where the rubric fails.

So what?

This idea that our discourse around sexuality does not accurately reflect the lives of people who are sexually attracted to people of the same sex has two implications. One is obvious but important - we risk excluding and alienating people when we advocate for sexual freedom and when we study sexuality. The other is a strategic implication. Well, a question really. By using a language of sexuality which is divorced from the culture of a place, from the experiences of people that live there, do we not perpetuate the myth that same-sex attraction is a foreign thing? There is no word to describe my identity in seSotho that I am comfortable using. I resort to english words and I use a language of queerness which has been received from scholarship and activism and pop culture in the west. I wonder if it would not be easier to dismiss the claim that gay is unAfrican if gay was something that we expressed in our languages and was true to the lives of all kinds of South Africans.

In a time when (hetero)sexual identity is a rallying point in a war against cultural imperialism, shouldn’t we be more deliberate in crafting a discourse which is true to our lives, and which is seen to be authentically African, South African, Sotho?


**The study was quoted in a conference paper:
Homosexual and bisexual labels: The need for clear conceptualisations, operationalisations and appropriate methodological designs
by Sandfort T., and Dodge, B.
in From Social Silence to Social Science.... it has a long subtitle and many editors.