Chantal Zabus, Out in Africa: Same-Sex Desire in Sub-Saharan Literatures & Cultures

Summary

Chantal Zabus begins her interesting study by noting that she hopes to do for Sub-Saharan Africa what Jarrod Hayes, in Queer Nations (2000), did for the Maghreb: that is, to demonstrate that ‘the African Continent has always been more queer than generally acknowledged’ (1). Her study attempts this task in six broadly historical chapters.

In the first, ‘Anthropological Wormholes: From Pederasts to Female Husbands’, Zabus provides ‘cautionary tales around the instabilities and at times the inappropriateness of terminology around Sub-Saharan African same-sex relations’ (16). Although expressions and phrases describing same-sex activities appear in at least 50 Sub-Saharan African languages, these are not procrustean in their designations; and although imported words like ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, ‘homosexual’, and ‘queer’, are employed, they ‘come with a hurtling conglomerate of indigenous and other designations and their corollary practices’ (16). Zabus further notes that ‘the imported words are not always understood or are construed differently’ (16), so that non-Africans must tread cautiously when encountering terms that they might consider comfortingly accessible. Naming a thing does not make it so, and Zabus exposes ‘discourse-as-event’ while showing that ‘relationships such as those between female husbands and their partners and between boy-wives and their boss-boys in various Sub-Saharan African societies reach back to ancestral nexuses prior to the European colonization of Africa’ (50) – before, as Marc Epprecht argues, ‘Europeans introduced homophobia, not homosexuality, to Africa’ (20).

The second chapter, ‘The Text that Dare not Speak its Name: Forging Male Colonial Intimacies’, tries with some success to imply an implicit shifting (emerging) of agency in colonised subjects through same-sex relations with the European, unequal though it basically remained. She notes that ‘in the second half of the nineteenth century, a true cult developed [in European writing] around brotherly companionship and the overall buddiness of mateship’ (53). She briefly notes Roger Casement's Black Diaries (not fully available till 1997), but focuses principally on Julien Viaud (aka Pierre Loti) and his notion of ‘situational homosexuality’ (61), and Henry Morton Stanley's My Kalulu, Prince, King and Slave: A Story of Central Africa (1873), suggesting Stanley's bisexuality. Along the way, Zabus demonstrates ‘the gradual shift [in European writing] from a discourse about the ‘act’ of sodomy to ‘the homosexual’, from a rhetoric of ‘vice’ to the identity politics of same-sex behaviour’ (65).