Towards a Dubious Liberation: Masculinity, Sexuality and Power in South African Lowveld Schools, 1953-1999

Abstract

This article investigates how masculine sexuality featured as a political issue during the liberation struggle in Impalahoek, a village on the South African lowveld. The starting point of my analysis is the repressive regime in primary and high schools during the period of Bantu Education, from 1953 to 1986. I show that whilst teachers strictly prohibited and harshly punished all forms of sexuality between students, male teachers freely engaged in sexual liaisons with schoolgirls. The revolt by Comrades in the schools between 1986 and 1992 was inspired in part by students' discontent about sexuality. Comrades demanded an end to corporal punishment, expelled teachers who engaged in sex with schoolgirls and celebrated their own sexual virility in a local campaign to 'build soldiers'. Since 1994, the management of sexuality by the African National Congress (ANC)-led government has not inaugurated sexual liberation. Rather, sex education and new medical discourses about sexuality in the era of AIDS have generated new forms of surveillance and contestation. Such historical experiences inform the links between democratisation and changing notions of sexuality in South Africa.