Home Full text issues While alluding to the shift from homosexuality-as-a-practice in anthropological discourse on Africa to homosexuality-as-an-identity in African fiction, this paper argues for a necessary yet culture-specific criss-crossing of African postcolonial texts with queer theory.
Examples are provided, mainly from Nigeria and South Africa. However, some African texts have emerged, tentatively at first in the late s, and, more assertively of late, that speak of and around same-sex desire and are thus at odds with an apparent context of sexual segregation, heteronormativity and emphasis on reproduction, that often denies its own variant sexualities.
Criticism around such interactions is far from dire but still couched in very tentative terms. Cecil Rhodes, conqueror of Rhodesia, who kept company with a series of young assistants and T. David Livingstone and helped carve out an empire for Leopold the King of Belgium. Africans, for instance, have always thought of Europeans as the deviant ones who seek to infiltrate wholesome African societies.
Our knowledge of such practices, however, is still mediated through Euro-American cultural anthropology and ethnography. But same-sex attraction is not always where one would expect it to be. Conversely, if there is sodomy at all, it also exists within heterosexuality. Many a time, it is the monopoly of the young bridegroom, who resorts to anal sex with his bride-to-be so as not to damage the suture of her infibulated vulva and therefore her virginity before the wedding.
He presents the exciser Fatou, wrestling with her conscience. In her dreams, she is invariably beleaguered by thousands of greedy leeches that come to suck up her blood. These are in fact the hundreds of clitorises that Fatou has nicked off, first with the cutting edge of a sacrificial knife, then with the new blades provided by compassionate foreign health organizations. In a conciliatory way, however, they reckon that homosexuals could possibly hold high positions in the internal affairs of the country but not abroad so as to preserve the reputation of the country as straight.
