"Bisexuality" and the Politics of Normal in African Ethnography

Abstract

Anthropologists have played a central role in documenting the diversity of human sexuality as it is understood and expressed in different cultures around the world. Scholars in many other disciplines, including my own of history, are often heavily dependent upon their research. However, as Lyons and Lyons (2004) among others have persuasively demonstrated, anthropologists at times conscripted select evidence and even fabricated facts about the people they studied in order to advance ideals and preferences around sexuality in their own societies. By conjuring idealized or exoticized Others, they helped to create an understanding of normal and by way of contrast. This has resulted in a body of purportedly empirical or scientific data that in retrospect we can see as deeply flawed, morally normative, and sometimes actually complicit in the construction and maintenance of racist colonialist structures. Indeed, to one African critic, the ethnography of African cultures generated by European and American scholars from the 1920s to the 1950s was so useless in empirical terms that it is only useful today to the extent that it sheds light on how those colonial structures could function (Owusu 1978).1Owusu was much too harsh in such a sweeping judgment. In at least one specific area, however, the critique is warranted to a significant degree. This is the commonplace assumption or assertion as an unqualified that Africans south of the Sahara either did not practice samesex sexuality in their traditional societies, or that they only did so so rarely that it was inconsequential. From the vast generalizations of late 18th- and 19th-century travellers, to colonial-era codifications of custom, to modern studies of sexually transmitted diseases, sexuality, prisons and masculinities, social science research has tended to portray Africans as virtually unique in the world in this respect. Same-sex issues meanwhile remain largely invisible in much of the resources available to HIV/AIDS educators in Africa, including what are otherwise frank discussions about sexual health and sexual cultures. The non-existence or irrelevance of homosexual transmission among black Africans is apparently such a given that it typically does not even warrant a footnote or a web-link in this material.2And yet, since Dynes (1983) and Aina (1991) first flagged hidden homosexuality and bisexuality in Africa as potentially important research questions, a growing body of research, activism, and art have comprehensively demonstrated the falseness of the fact of Africans' exclusive heterosexuality. Moodie (1994), Harries (1994), Gevisser and Cameron (1994), Murray and Roscoe (1998), Kendall (1999), Lockhart (2002), Njinje and Alberton (2002), Epprecht (2004), GALZ (2002), Epprecht and Goddard (In press) and Morgan and Wieringa (2005), for example, thoroughly document the presence of diverse expressions of same-sex sexuality in Africa-in traditional societies, in colonial institutions and in present-day settings. A growing, pan-African network of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) associations also attests to diverse, indigenous, same-sex and cultures and practices in Africa.3 A range of images written or produced by Africans in fiction, theatre and film further destabilizes the stereotype of the pure African heterosexual.4These sources on the whole do not propose a timeless, archetypal African gay or lesbian in opposition to that older stereotype. Rather, the women and men who have same-sex sexual relations most often also continue to marry, to have children, and to engage in heterosexual relationships. Whether this should properly be termed bisexual is a matter of debate. However, whether men who sometimes have sex with men but do not identify as homo- or (MSM), and whether women who sometimes have sex with women but do not identify as lesbian or (WSW) exist in Africa in greater numbers that commonly assumed or asserted cannot in good scholarship be disputed. …