REVIEWS

Out of the closet and into the coffin: born free as a gay man

Moffies: gay life in Southern Africa
By Bart Luirink,
David Philip Publishers,
R 75 Review:

Henk Rossouw, published in The Sunday Independent, June 11 2000. 'I cannot be free as a black man if I am not free as a gay man.' These are the words of Simon Nkoli, activist, orator and optimist, who died of Aids. Moffies, says Dutch journalist and author Bart Luirink, was born "out of admiration for people like Simon" who see the fight for democracy and gay identity as inseparable. Over a period of eight years, arriving in the heady days just after Nelson Mandela's release, Luirink travelled throughout southern Africa in search of the gay movement, amid a "culture of silence" and recorded his encounters with any fag, family member, kgwete, koffiemoffie, Letty, Wendy, Mavis or matonyola who was eager to talk. His story moves from the dance floor of the Skyline club in Hillbrow, "meeting place for activists, students, street kids, sex workers", to cruising in Sea Point, solidarity in Harare despite Robert Mugabe, a "German detective series" called Windhoek, and political apathy in Gaborone.

Except for Luirink's descriptions of Skyline, there is little sense of place, even when he visits the first gay shebeen in kwaThema. This book is about people - gays and lesbians, activists and closets - and it is their lives crowding Moffies that are its strength, rather than its style.

Though Luirink does reveal his lack of sexual self-confidence when he arrives in Africa, he gives little insight into his life as a fellow moffie, and the parts of the book dealing with his own sexuality read like the Lonely Planet guide to cruising, with directions on where to go and no reason for the journey.

Yet Luirink can be poignant. Dawie's father is an ex-corporal in Hoedspruit, complicit all his life in apartheid, yet admits to his angry son that "you and Themba are partners. You belong together." Jozef, a black drag queen, has a lump in his neck, cuts on his forehead, and missing front teeth, evidence of his uncle's punishment for his homosexuality. Yet Jozef says grimly: "I know what I am." Not who, but what, as if he were an animal. While the writing in the first chapters is awkward, Luirink gathers confidence as he spends more time in the country.

Though he admits he is "an outsider", he is always welcomed, allowing him to capture the essence of the experience of being gay in southern Africa.

The "bevy of hugs" that Luirink is greeted with in Skyline after eight years reflects this: he is a confidant rather than a researcher.

Yet he also delights in facts, providing political commentaries on the countries he visited and recalling historical events such as the love affair between Rijkhaart Jacobz and Klaas Blank on Robben Island.

Just as fascinating are the different ways cultures accept and reject homosexuality. Like Nkoli himself, many of Luirink's subjects were forced by their parents, after coming out, to visit sangoma after sangoma, looking for a cure. Then again, as in Shangaan culture, if a man is homosexual then a female ancestor is believed to have descended into him and this is considered a sign that he should become a sangoma. Though Luirink is wary of "anthrohomo-apologists", running through the book is a strong argument countering Mugabe's statements that homosexuality is unAfrican and in conflict with black culture.

In a moment of grim hilarity, Lynde Francis, a lesbian activist in Harare, recalls Mugabe's trembling hands during the delivery of his infamous speech calling gays "perverts" and "worse than pigs", and attributes this excess of emotion to possible rape in prison when Mugabe served 12 years for his political beliefs. Luirink points out the correlation between the "vitriolic verbal volleys" of leaders like Mugabe and Sam Nujoma and the strenthening of the gay movement, with visible expressions of homosexuality.

Yet his continual reference to herd boys having sex at remote cattle posts as evidence of an indigenous African homosexuality is romanticised. The evidence is right there, in the lives of his subjects and the stories they tell.

Throughout Moffies Luirink returns to Nkoli. Nkoli was one of the accused in the Delmas trial, and in prison his comrades reprimanded him for his sexuality, seeing it as a threat to solidarity, and warders threatened to rape him with blunt objects. Despite this, he continued his activism, forming Gays and Lesbians of Witwatersrand (Glow) and working for it with renewed vigour in the last years of his life. When he found out that he was HIV-positive, Nkoli said wryly: "Out of the closet, into the coffin." He died in 1998.

Luirink concludes Moffies with a passionate essay, drawing on the central tenet of Nkoli's life, that the struggle for equal treatment for gays could not be separated from the struggle against apartheid and poverty.

The banner held up at Chris Hani's funeral by Glow was clear: "Their struggle, our struggle."

Greenwich Village Gazette Review

African Homosexualities Stephen O. Murray & Will Roscoe (eds),

Boy-Wives and Female Husbands.
Studies on African Homosexualities.

New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. There are many myths on subsaharan sexualities. Men are well endowed, women can express their sexuality more freely than elsewhere, and homosexuality does not exist.
The latter one has received political support from several African leaders, most famously from Robert Mugabe according to whom homosexuality is less than bestial, and a western import. Unfortunately, he did not comment upon the arrest and conviction because of sodomy of his predecessor, president Banana. In recent years Mugabe's ideas are belied by the emergence of same-sex cultures and movements around the continent, also in Zimbabwe. And it is not only the whites who are infected with this "vice", but mainly black Africans.
There is no doubt and there has never been any doubt that same-sex practices and desires were present on the African continent. From the earliest reports, mention has been made of transgenders and boy-lovers. But homosexualities were not equally distributed among the different cultures. It could well be that homophobia is more of a western import than homosexuality. To my surprise, I saw recently a documentary where a Zimbabwean declared with pride "we are all homophobic", an expression I have never heard from an occidental gay-basher. Stephen Murray and Will Roscoe have tried to fill the gap by publishing a book of essays on "African homosexualities".
Murray is best known as a compiler who has earlier edited books on homosexuality in Latin-America, the Islam and in "Oceanic" societies (from Madagascar to Japan and into the Pacific). He wrote himself American Gay (Chicago 1996, see my review in Thamyris 4:2). Roscoe's specialization concerns the North-American berdache. Both did not have prior knowledge of Africa, but they probably considered their background as anthropologists of same-sex desires sufficient qualification to start off with this project.
The best essay in the collection Boy-Wives and Female Husbands is by Marc Epprecht on homosexual "crimes" in early colonial Zimbabwe. From the beginning of European law-enforcement, black men have been convicted for same-sex crimes, as well from plantations as from villages which counters once more the idea that only those Africans in direct contact with Europeans showed same-sex practices.
The second best essay is by Rudolf P. Gaudio on "Male lesbians and other queer notions in Hausa" which is a summary of his dissertation on Hausa same-sexual linguistics. Interesting are the older articles on Cameroon, Zanzibar, Angola and other places from (pre)colonial times which are translated into English for this collection. Haberlandt's essay on Zanzibar regrettably does not include the pictures in the original text of a single and double dildo women use. But otherwise this book brings ripe and unripe together. It seems to become the trademark of Murray, an armchair anthropologist whose main field of expertise is America. Well written and important papers are mixed up with a superficial interview with a Kikuyu man living around the corner from Murray in San Francisco.
This young man only discovered same-sex desires after he left Kenya for London at age 23. Murray's final essay comparing forms of same-sex behaviour with other social factors is rather useless because his data are incomplete and unreliable. The editors heavily count on English material, and only use texts in other languages from times long past, which makes the book very unbalanced. An article on gay life "Libéralisme et vécus sexuels à Abidjan" by Marc le Pape and Claudine Vidal published in Cahiers internationaux de sociologie (Vol. 76, Jan-June 1984; special issue on "le sexuel") did not make it to San Francisco. A translation of this article should have contributed much more to the collection than Michael Davidson's three-page memories of "A 1958 visit to a Dakar boy brothel" which is utterly superficial.
The important African theme of marriages among women is discussed by Murray himself and Joseph Carrier, as if there are no more knowledgeable specialists in the field. The editors deplore the absence of material on female homosexuality, but they should have done a better job in finding authors across the gender line. There is a full-length book on the topic in German Frauen heiraten Frauen. Studien zur Gynaegamie in Afrika (Women marry women) by E.Tietmeyer (München, 1985) but this important source was missed by the editors. And shortly after they published their compilation, Evelynn Blackwood and Saskia Wieringa came with Female Desires.
Same-Sex Relations and Transgender Practices across Cultures (New York, 1998) that includes two papers by female authors on female same-sex desires in Lesotho and Zimbabwe. Most articles in the collection of Murray and Roscoe are written by Europeans and Anglo-Americans, and at most three by Africans. As no biographical data are given on the authors, this remains however queerly unclear. No effort has apparenty been done to include more authors of African descent.
Research regarding sexual practices and Aids, which is available, is not picked up. The collection looks very much like a reader hastily compiled for an undergraduate course. Murray and Roscoe have done an important job but they should have done it much better and more thoroughly. Let us hope that this first but disappointing book on the theme will soon be followed by others to counter the ridiculous idea of African politicians that homosexuality is a foreign import on their continent.

Gert Hekma
University of Amsterdam