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

This book contains an argument that is critical to medical historians and medical practitioners with an interest in HIV/AIDS in Africa. Put simply, Marc Epprecht insists that same-sex practices and homoerotic behaviors have long been practiced in Africa and that defining the continent as heterosexual has not only distorted the histories of its sexualities but has created erroneous assumptions on which the cure and treatment of sexually transmitted illnesses are based. I found myself wishing that Epprecht had published this argument in a short article in a medical journal, because the power of the insight gets a little diluted in this book.

Epprecht’s earlier work on same-sex desire in southern Africa¹ was an archivedriven book, and given the number of court cases in southern Rhodesia that came out of male homoerotic desire, Epprecht made his case with great clarity. He’s no less clear here, but a continent-wide history that seeks to identify similar sexual behaviors over a wider cultural and geographic range rambles at times. Moreover, Epprecht is torn between being a historian and being an advocate, so the historiography is introduced by his own struggles to present the histories and not to appropriate the work of LBGTI activists in Africa. His first chapter has the revealing title “A Puzzling Blindspot, a Troubling Silence, a Strange Consensus,” which tells us we are in for a complexified text. We get the obligatory chapter on the errors of African ethnographers who saw only straight African behaviors; when they saw other sexualities, they pathologized them and, worse still, explained them in structural functionalist terms: Africans’ disgust at homosexual acts was said to be about Africans’ understanding of sexuality being for procreation. There is also a very engaging chapter on the construction of Shaka Zulu’s sexuality by generations of “ethno-psychiatrists,” in which interpretations of the motives of the dead despot increasingly come to hinge on his sexual desire. Epprecht concludes with a chapter noting that if historians and doctors paid more attention to African films and novels, they would not be surprised to find a range of African sexualities practiced and discussed on a daily basis.

All of this, however, is so much scaffolding, for Epprecht’s chapter on how HIV/AIDS became a disease of heterosexuals in Africa is what’s most important about this book, and it makes for the most compelling reading. Epprecht’s own interview material and his close reading of a wide range of AIDS literature from across the continent reveals one terrifying fact: researchers have studied HIV/ AIDS as a heterosexual disease in Africa because they have been told and have read that there is no homosexuality in Africa. Epprecht is, if anything, less heavy handed than I would have liked here: this is a story of lives lost to this assumption and of the research time wasted on studies of African truck drivers, prostitutes, and widows married off to their late husband’s oldest brother. Epprecht ends with bulleted recommendations about how same-sex actions should be thought about, studied, and brought into dialogue with none-too-sophisticated analyses of African sexualities. Don’t get me wrong—all of this is a good thing. But I want to take a shorter point from this book: that the assumption that Africa is a continent of heterosexual sex has been deadly for too many people for too long.