Heterosexual Africa?: The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS (review)

Sexuality is one of the most socially contentious issues facing Africa today. Carina Ray's "Confronting Homophobia" (New African, Feb. 2010) states that currently thirty-seven African countries have draconian homophobic laws of colonial origin, which have recently been intensified in several countries to ban gay-rights organizations and to impose harsh penalties for those who engage in same-sex sex. A proposition in Uganda would make homosexuality a capital offense for repeat offenders and HIV-positive individuals. In the academic sphere, only in the last decade have postcolonial studies begun to pay serious attention to sexuality as a site of power and of simultaneous struggle.

My responses to Marc Epprecht's Heterosexual Africa occur within these larger cultural and academic contexts. Though his archival research for a previous book, Hungochani: The History of a Dissident Sexuality in Africa (McGill-Queens UP, 2004), showed that homosexuality did not have a single meaning in colonial Rhodesia, Heterosexual Africa? overall appears more reactionary and didactic than helpful in terms of encouraging a better understanding of the complexities of African sexuality. Epprecht cites with seeming thoroughness much of the literature on Africa and sexuality, but he does so with very little critical analysis.

Heterosexual Africa lacks an engaged theorization of desire and is far too ensconced both in the social heteronormativity its author purports to challenge and in the epistemological heteronormativity that has for so long, as Epprecht himself rightly notes, plagued empirical and anthropological research on sexual difference in Africa. While it is true that the affective and erotic bonds sometimes formed between indigenous women in Lesotho (which often continue alongside heterosexual marriage) neither replace nor challenge overtly the high value placed on heterosexual marriage and reproduction in Sesotho culture, I cannot disagree more with Epprecht's uncritical conclusion: that because these relationships occur under such social conditions as economic strain, the high frequency of male absence in heterosexual marriage, and male sexual irresponsibility, these close emotive and sexual bonds strengthen heterosexual marriages since women are protected (or distracted) from having sex with other men. But doesn't this then keep the heteronormative lens at the forefront of inquiry; that is, is Epprecht saying that the female-female relationships are tolerated, or even encouraged, in Sesotho culture because they somehow ensure that women will not have sex with men other than their husbands? The obvious question that Epprecht's formulation leaves unanswered is: Why would they want to?

Reducing the desires of Basotho women to social circumstances and historical effects seems not only intellectually reductive, but also hypocritical; Epprecht seems to pride himself on taking in local knowledge as delivered by indigenous informants, but he doesn't appear to be listening critically to what they are saying. Moreover, Epprecht's dismissal of the credibility of queer theoretical inquiry on Africa, and his privileging of research that is anthropologically and empirically based and conducted in conjunction with local informants, is rather limiting, since (as prominent scholars such as Kwame Anthony Appiah have argued) it merely rehearses a nativist, originary myth of African culture that presumes an essentialized, centered, homogenous African subject of which the historian, like Epprecht, or the ethnographer, supposedly has direct and unfettered access. Epprecht's premise that only work that is produced in Africa and is informant-based bears the mark of African authenticity masks completely the all-too-evident political fact that such fantasies of authenticity are used by some governments in Africa to stigmatize and oppress those who are marked by difference (including lesbians, gay men, and other sexual dissidents) and thereby marginalized.

There are also several factual errors in Heterosexual Africa that need addressing. In chapter 3 Epprecht attempts a critique of psychoanalytic readings of Shaka, the nineteenth-century Zulu leader, who has been mythologized as hypermasculine, heroic, cruel, barbaric, misogynistic, and most recently (though dubiously), as...