Out in Africa: Queer Desire in Some Anthropological and Literary Texts

Abstract

We need to criss-cross queer theory with postcoloniality, in order to examine the phenomenon of those who are ‘out in Africa’. To date there have been only embryonic attempts to consider the literary representation of same-sex desire in a pan-African context.2 What is more, we lack a comparative approach to queer studies of African literatures, for research remains split between anglophone and francophone, let alone lusophone, studies, patterned on the colonial carving up of the African continent. Research has also privileged the colonial over the postcolonial period and male over female intimacies.3 It has therefore become crucial to identify those literary texts that present, in a subterranean way, homosexuality-as-an-identity rather than an occasional or ritualized practice, as was the case in the early ethnographic imagination. I have therefore attempted to place my analysis in the historical context of the dominant anthropological discourse and to sketch out an evolutionary pattern in representing male and female samesex desire in the novel while confining my scope to sub-Saharan Africa, even if Islamic homosexualities in the Maghreb and the Mashreq need to be addressed as well.4 Homosexuality is still thought to be not only ‘un-African’ but also a highly suspicious import from the deviant West. As a case in point, in the wake of the trial for sodomy of the first president of Zimbabwe, Canaan Banana, his successor Robert Mugabe spoke of homosexuals in his 2002 electioneering speech as ‘mad person[s]’ who will be sent to jail: ‘we don’t want to import it [homosexuality] to our country [Zimbabwe], we have our own culture, our own people’.5 Whereas Dennis Altman contended