Introduction
Ayo A. Coly
African Studies Review, Volume 56, Number 2, September 2013, pp. 21-30
(Article)
Published by Cambridge University Press
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/519181
Access provided by University of California, San Diego (25 Jan 2017 03:10 GMT)
ASR FORUM: HOMOPHOBIC AFRICA?
Introduction
Ayo A. Coly, Guest Editor
An antigay propaganda bill is currently in the works in Russia. On January
25, 2013, the Russian Lower House of Parliament voted overwhelmingly in
favor of legislation that would make punishable, by a fine of up to US $16,000,
the dissemination of information and organization of public events about
sexual minorities.1 The bill is now awaiting final approval by the Parliament
and president of Russia. I have been interested in the international attention (or lack thereof) to the proposed antigay propaganda bill in Russia
and similar legislation projects in Ukraine. Anyone who has been following
the spectacularization in the Euro-American media and the blogosphere
of antigay vigilantism and legislation in Senegal, Nigeria, Cameroon, and
Uganda knows where I am headed with this comparison. The international
attention paid to the Ukrainian and Russian bills is at best tepid, especially
when compared with Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill for which the bill’s
sponsor, David Bahati, received ample and prime airtime on major U.S. and
British televisions shows, including MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, Voice
of America’s In Focus and Straight Talk Africa, Current TV’s Vanguard, and
ABC’s Nightline. The international frenzy surrounding the Ugandan bill
undergirds an existing difference in the discursive translations of African
African Studies Review, Volume 56, Number 2 (September 2013), pp. 21–30
Ayo A. Coly is an associate professor of comparative literature at Dartmouth College.
She is the author of The Pull of Postcolonial Nationhood: Gender and Migration
in Francophone African Literatures (Lexington Books, 2010). She has guestedited a special issue of Callaloo and has published articles on African literatures
and photography in Research in African Literatures, Third Text, The Canadian
Journal of Comparative Literature, and Nottingham French Studies. She is currently
conducting research for a book manuscript on the politics of homophobia in
Senegal and completing another manuscript entitled “Un/Clothing African
Womanhood: Colonial Statements and African Discourses of the Female Body.”
E-mail: Ayo.A.Coly@dartmouth.edu
© African Studies Association, 2013
doi:10.1017/asr.2013.39
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African Studies Review
and European homophobias. On the one hand lies the hypervisibility of
homophobias in Africa as “African” homophobia. On the other hand is the
tepid international attention to the violated rights of sexual minorities in
Eastern Europe and the perception of homophobias in Eastern European
nations as homophobias tout court.
This ASR Forum, entitled “Homophobic Africa?”—a deliberate echo of
Marc Epprecht’s Heterosexual Africa? (2008)—is concerned with the concept
of African homophobia, as it prevails in non-African but also African
engagements with LGBTI rights on the continent.2 In the columns of The
Guardian Keguro Macharia has critiqued the discourses on homophobias in
Africa, contending that “homophobia in Africa is not [the] single story”
that some analysts are making it out to be. “Homophobia in Africa is a
problem,” he writes, “but not as African homophobia, a special class that
requires special interventions. And certainly not the kinds of special interventions that reconsolidate old, ongoing and boring oppositions between
a progressive west and an atavistic Africa” (2010). According to the French
philosopher Michel Foucault, discourses are “practices that systematically
form the objects of which they speak” (1972:54). This injunction to focus
on the doings and not the sayings of discourses permeates Macharia’s
attention to the constitutive effects of the single story of African homophobia. Discourses prescribe ways of knowing, inscribe their objects of
knowledge, and construct knowledge. Hence the kind of global shaming
campaign that has been directed to Africa in the form of online petitions,
calls for boycotts, or threats of political and economic sanctions has not
been applied to Russia and Ukraine.3 Homophobic Europe cannot exist,
because homophobia has become a conceptual cognate for Africa. There
is homophobia in Europe—but Europe is not homophobic. There is
homophobia in Africa—and Africa is homophobic.
African homophobia was the inevitable and indispensable framing
narrative in the BBC’s The World’s Worst Place to Be Gay (2011), a documentary on homophobia in Uganda. In the early minutes of the film, a visual
montage of antigay vigilantism and homophobic vitriol in various unspecified
African countries fixes the predetermined notion of homophobia in Uganda
as African homophobia. The documentary also illustrates, unwittingly,
how the concept of African homophobia has its raison d’être in Western
“homonationalism,” a narrative of sexual exceptionalism championed
by LGBTIs from the global North and consonant with the neo-imperial
politics of their nation-states (see Puar 2007). Indeed, the BBC’s story of
homophobia in Uganda steadily refurbishes the old paradigm of advanced
“us” versus backward “them” into a narrative of a European gay-heaven
versus an African gay-deathtrap. As the end credits of the documentary roll,
a programming announcement about BBC’s forthcoming The World’s Worst
Place to Be a Woman, a documentary on the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
puts homophobic Africa in context. Homophobic Africa supports the larger
overarching concept of Africa, a system of signification through which the
West invents itself in relation to what Achille Mbembe—following Valentin
ASR Forum: Homophobic Africa? 23
Mudimbe in The Invention of Africa (1988) and The Idea of Africa (1994) —calls
the “absolute otherness” of the continent (2001:2). Mbembe is worth quoting
at length here because he helps illuminate how the concept of African
homophobia pertains to the idea of Africa: It is in relation to Africa that the
notion of “absolute otherness” has been taken the furthest. It is now widely
acknowledged that Africa as an idea, a concept, has historically served, and
continues to serve, as a polemical argument for the West’s desire to assert
its difference from the rest of the world. In several respects, Africa still constitutes one of the metaphors through which the West represents the origin
of its own norms, develops a self-image, and integrates this image into the
set of signifiers asserting what is supposed to be its identity. And Africa,
because it was and remains that fissure between what the West is, what it
thinks it represents, and what it thinks it signifies, is not simply part of its
imaginary significations: it is one of those significations.
Having said this, I will proceed to argue that homophobic Africa is in
fact a Euro-American-African co-production. David Bahati’s generously
apportioned prime time appearances, as not only the author of the Ugandan
bill but also the face of African homophobia, is a case in point. Bahati himself has been eager to embrace this identity. In his European and North
American appearances he often gives his interviewers the lead by stressing
the “un-Africanness” of homosexuality and casting himself as a defender of
true “Africanness.” By means of this repeated script, well-rehearsed and
performed by both Bahati and his media hosts, David Bahati becomes
Africa and Africa becomes David Bahati. This co-production of African
homophobia was particularly evident in March 2011 in a BBC-hosted
debate titled Is Homosexuality Un-African? The panel was composed of
Bahati, former Botswana President Festus Mogae, two gay rights activists
from South Africa and Rwanda, and an antigay Muslim youth leader from
Nigeria. The framing question of the debate was premised on the existence
of African homophobia. This framework preempted a critical engagement
with the concept of African homophobia, and the panelists’ participation
in such a debate already meant that they endorsed the concept. Throughout
the discussion, the framing question remained unchallenged, reifying the
totalizing notions of “Africanness” and “un-Africanness” and reinforcing
the concept of African homophobia. The panelists and the audience were
left to either challenge African homophobes by proving the “Africanness”
of homosexuality or stand with African homophobes by proving the
“un-Africannness” of homosexuality. But as Veronica Sigamoney and Marc
Epprecht argue in their article in this issue (83‒107), in South African
contexts, for example, the statement “homosexuality is un-African” may
not be an articulation of homophobia; in South Africa, as they explain,
the term homosexuality is not used consistently and may not even refer to
same-sex sexuality. When LGBTI activists in the BBC debate discussed
the “un-Africanness” of homosexuality without challenging the very premises
of the concept, they were inadvertently lending support to the preconceptions they should be challenging.
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African Studies Review
Frantz Fanon’s argument that colonialism determines the form and
content of anticolonial resistance (1965:47) is applicable to the predicament of LGBTI activism in Africa. African LGBTI activists cannot but
engage with the assertion that homosexuality is “un-African.” Similarly, in
order to gain access to “pink money (the financial power of LGBTI communities in the global North) and international LGBTI advocacy networks,
LGTBI activism in Africa finds itself needing to use—and hence obliquely
promote—the concept of African homophobia to boost their visibility to
potential Western donors (see Hoad 1999:572‒73). This dependence on
outside resources also dictates the use of Western gender and sexual identity terminology in African LGBTI activism. Sexual minorities in Africa have
the burden of making themselves intelligible and legible to Western donors
and audiences, and Western NGOs, in fact, often fund gender and sexual
identity workshops to familiarize African sexual minorities with Western
terminology (see Lorway 2008:86). But as Martin Manalansan points out,
this privileging of Western terminologies itself codes homophobia into the
discussion of non-Western same-sex practices (2003:209). A case in point is
Evelyn Blackwood’s homonationalist statement that African sexual minorities are better served by the terms gay and lesbian because African indigenous terms for same-sex acts “cannot be recouped in a positive manner at
this point in time” (2004:106). I am specifically concerned here with the
way Western sexual and gender categories are offered to (and accepted by)
sexual minorities in Africa as lifelines. Ultimately, the need for proficiency
in Western identity categories, acronyms, and strategies bolsters the dominance of Western sexual and gender categories and thus gives further credence to the concept of African homophobia. Henriette Gunkel’s article in
this issue (67‒81) addresses such concerns. By examining the effects of
anti-homophobia and anti-homophobic discourses in online petitions
against homophobias in Africa, Gunkel pinpoints the geopolitical mapping
of homophobia.
The irony in the concurrent Western patronage of LGBTI activism in
Africa and the Western patronage of antigay vigilantism, via the work of
U.S. evangelist pastors, can hardly be missed here. The function of Africa as
a battleground for the conflicts between different Western parties certainly
complicates the concept of African homophobia; so do the British colonial
origins of antisodomy laws currently on the books in Anglophone Africa.
In his article in this issue (109‒28), Babacar M’Baye produces a detailed
analysis of homophobia in Senegal, tracing some of the roots of that homophobia back to the colonial era when French colonial discourse asserted
that homosexuality did not exist in Africa. Yet any attempt to unravel the
narrative of African homophobia by pointing to external influences must
also take into account the reality of homophobia in contemporary Africa
and the agency of African actors in the development of these homophobias.
For instance, the colonial legacies argument is severely limited by the fact
that homosexuality is criminalized in Francophone as well as Anglophone
African nations. And in Anglophone African nations the existing antisodomy
ASR Forum: Homophobic Africa? 25
laws were dormant until the last two decades. Probably the more productive
question to ask of homophobias in Africa is—why now? In other words, why
is antigay legislation and “re”-legislation taking place on the continent
now? Why are American antigay Christian groups gaining traction in Africa
now?
As Sylvia Tamale shows (31‒45), homophobia is a political resource
for African leaders. Embattled leaders throughout the continent use the
figure of the homosexual as a scapegoat and opportune diversion from the
issues of high unemployment, rampant poverty, and bad governance.
Tamale argued in an earlier publication that the homophobia of the postcolonial African patriarchal state serves to perpetuate the institution of
patriarchy and the subjugation of women (2007:18). Patrick Ireland’s
article (47‒66) discusses the phenomenon of state homophobia in Africa
and explains the ways in which it is more complex and unpredictable than
most scholars have assumed. Indeed, state-sponsored homophobia has
been on the rise on the continent since the mid-1990s, coinciding with the
so-called wind of democracy and the collapse of African economies under
the World Bank and International Monetary Fund structural adjustment
policies. But state-sponsored homophobia in Africa has also responded to
the “no discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation” clause in the
postapartheid South African Constitution (1996) as well as South Africa’s
legalization of gay marriage in 2006 (see Epprecht 2008; Hoad 2007). In
the aftermath of these developments, African state leaders’ vigorous assertions of the “un-Africanness” of homosexuality were declarations about
the “un-Africanness” of South Africa. Furthermore, these declarations were
denigrations of South Africa’s aspirations for a moral leadership role on the
continent. Neville Hoad has teased out a strong connection between South
African President Thabo Mbeki’s HIV/AIDS denialism and this perceived
“un-Africanness” of South Africa (2007:xiii). Similar insecurities about South
Africa’s gay exceptionalism resurfaced in 2006 when ANC Deputy President
Jacob Zuma criticized same-sex unions at a public event, adding that when
he was growing up no gay person would have dared approach him (see IOL
News 2006). Mbeki and Zuma apparently felt the need to defensively assert,
by way of homophobic statements, their and the Africanness of South Africa.
Meanwhile, Uganda is emerging as a model for some African state leaders
who plan to copy the Ugandan bill (Ekine 2013:79). These copycat African
leaders from Nigeria, The Gambia, and Liberia are motivated by the opportunity to cast themselves as guardians of an embattled Africanness, in
the hope of again winning the confidence of their constituencies.
So-called “gay internationalism”—the imposition of universalized Western
sexual frameworks and agendas on the world (see Massad 2002)—and the
threats of donor sanctions against homophobic African states have also
more than ever facilitated the workings of state homophobia in Africa.
State homophobia is now able to present itself as a savior of the population
and guardian of the moral integrity of the nation. In the wake of the British
government’s threat to implement donor sanctions against homophobic
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African Studies Review
African states, a statement from a collective of one hundred African social
justice organizations warned that such sanctions would exacerbate hostilities against sexual minorities, support the notion that homosexuality is a
Western-sponsored idea, and, most importantly, garner popular support for
state-sponsored homophobia and homophobic African leaders (African
Social Justice Activists 2011). The potential political capital of state homophobia is perhaps best illustrated by the predicament of President Macky
Sall of Senegal, whose alleged laxity toward sexual minorities has become a
political resource for his political foes. The subject is a recurrent theme in
social media and online forums and in daily conversations in Senegal, and
Senegalese newspapers regularly announce an impending decriminalization of homosexuality. The visit of President Obama to Senegal in June
2013 intensified speculations that a decriminalization of homosexuality was
in the works.4 The members of “Y’en a marre,” a movement of young social
activists who helped Sall defeat former President Abdoulaye Wade, have
positioned themselves as defenders of morality and crusaders against the
global gay agenda of Western neo-imperialism, threatening to oust President
Sall from power if he capitulates to international pressure and decriminalizes homosexuality. Homophobias on the continent have thus allowed for
new forms of political leadership by way of moral leadership. Christian
conservatives in Uganda (see Demange 2012) and fundamentalist Islamic
groups in Senegal (see Bopp 2008) are using homophobia similarly to position themselves on the political scene. Patrick Awondo has argued in the
pages of ASR that this politicization of homophobia on the continent dictates a more nuanced approach to homophobias in Africa and, most importantly, debunks the narrative of an inherently homophobic Africa (2012).
Same-sex sexualities have thus entered African public discourse in a
way that jars with the cultures of “silence” (Arnfred 2004:73) and “discretion” (Epprecht 1998) about sexual matters that characterize many African
societies. The adoption of Western categories of identity, forms of collective
mobilization, and languages of sexual rights has positioned sexual minorities in violation of the cultural codes of their communities (Epprecht
2005:253‒45). Homophobias in Africa thus need also to be considered as
responses to these perceived cultural infractions. In an article in Politique
Africaine (2012), Christophe Broqua revisits the episode of Robert Mugabe’s
homophobic vitriol in 1995 when the Gays and Lesbians Association of
Zimbabwe (GALZ) set up a stall at the country’s annual international book
fair. GALZ had been around since 1989 and the Zimbabwean government
had never paid any attention to the organization. Broqua insists that statesponsored homophobia in Zimbabwe in the aftermath of the book fair
episode was prompted not by the matter of same-sex sexualities, but rather
by GALZ’s attempt to force sexual matters into public discourse. A similar
reframing would help explain the unprecedented homophobic hysteria
that has taken over Senegal. When a tabloid journal published photographs
of a local gay wedding ceremony in February 2008, a witch hunt ensued
and periodic outings and public beatings of alleged gays became daily
ASR Forum: Homophobic Africa? 27
spectacles. On the one hand, I agree with Codou Bopp (2008) that homophobia in Senegal is related to the country’s economic depression and
political turmoil. I also agree that the unprecedented homophobic hysteria
in Senegal needs to be seen in the context of intensified gender violence,
the backlash against educated women and women’s rights organizations,
and the aggressive rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the country. On the
other hand, an important consideration that Bopp misses is that same-sex
marriage and its public performance were catalysts for this unprecedented
form of homophobia in Senegal. The adoption of Western LGBTI’s “politics
of visibility in the public sphere” (Gopinath 2002:152) is probably at issue
here. Bopp also challenges the Senegalese construction of homosexuality
as a novelty, writing that homosexuality has always existed and been
accepted in Senegal (Bopp 2008:5). Granted, but homosexual marriage, as
depicted in the tabloid, is indeed a novelty for the Senegalese population.
The pictured gay wedding ceremony—complete with a full spread in a
glossy tabloid, an exchange of wedding rings, and the ritual of wedding
cake feeding—reframes local Senegalese same-sex intimacies in a way that
renders them illegible and unintelligible to Senegalese society.
In a 2011 interview with Voice of America, Paula Donovan, a co-director
of AIDS-Free World, warned that homophobia was “spreading like a contagion from country to country in Africa” (DeCapua 2011). The brutal murder of the Ugandan gay activist David Kato in February 2011, the Ugandan
antihomosexual bill, the unprecedented persecution of gays in Senegal in
the last three years, the violent homophobic rhetoric spewed by Presidents
Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Jammeh in the Gambia, and the overall rise
of antigay vigilantism throughout the African continent have indeed cast
homophobia as Africa’s new “epidemic.” Perhaps as noteworthy as the
intensification of homophobia across the continent is the level of discursive
engagement with the phenomenon. Many discussions of homophobia on
the continent barely stop short of conflating “Africanness” and homophobia;
missionary discourses and savior imperatives are quick to surface in some
analyses. Conversely, the field of African studies has yet to vigorously and
comprehensively address homophobia in Africa, although some scholars
have been paving the way. This ASR Forum, therefore, was conceived as a
response to Keguro Macharia’s injunction to tell the multiple and complex
stories of homophobia in Africa. It brings together scholars from various
disciplines (literature, history, law, political science) to examine the roots,
catalysts, and various uses of homophobia in Africa. All of the authors share
the common goal of reading critically the current wave of homophobia that
is sweeping the continent.
One final note: As we were putting the finishing touches on this issue,
Nigerian lawmakers, on May 30, passed a bill that bans gay marriage and
outlaws any groups actively supporting gay rights. The lawmakers also
endorsed a ten-year prison sentence for any “public show” of affection
by a same-sex couple.
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African Studies Review
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Notes
1. 388 members voted in favor, one member voted against, and one member chose
to abstain.
2. In African contexts, LGBTI (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex), rather
than LGBT, is the preferred acronym (see Ekine 2013:90 n.1).
3. The European Union and the United Nations have issued statements condemning
the bill. But this critique is not nearly as harsh as the chastising statements about
Nigeria and Uganda.
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4. See Seck (2012); Diop (2012); Ledakarois.net (2013); Ndiaye (2013); Rewmi. com
(2013); Leral.net (2013); Senego (2013); Seneweb.com (2013); Xalisman.com
(2013); Dakaractu.com (2013); Senegal8.com (2013); ChildFund International
(2013); XibarTamba. com (2013).
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