Introduction
How exactly do people define “homosexuals” or “homosexuality,” and what does homophobia mean in a context like South Africa where there are such diverse cultures? Research on sexual minorities often assumes that the meanings of these and other terms are self-evident and fixed in time as general knowledge. The claim that homosexuality is “un-African,” for example, has gained notoriety as an articulation of homophobic prejudice throughout the continent.Footnote 1 Yet it is an articulation that is heavy with the assumption that homosexuality and “Africanness” have the same meaning to all speakers, and also that such meanings are translatable across cultural and historical contexts. We know, however, that colonialism and other historical forces mediated notions of sexuality and morality on the African continent and had the result, in Tamale’s terms, of “standardiz[ing] global ideas about African sexualities…” (2011:2). One outcome of this process was the assumption that Africans are “inherently hostile to, or devoid of, gender and sexual minorities” (Gaudio Reference Gaudio2009:8)—a misleading notion that is detrimental to good scholarship and policy formulation on several grounds, including an obscuring of the existence of men who have sex with men in HIV/AIDS interventions and of the specific vulnerabilities of lesbian or trans-identified people to gender-based violence.Footnote 2 The presumed fixedness of African prejudice against nonnormative sexualities may also feed into a progress narrative among activists, researchers, and donors whereby wise Westerners lead benighted Africans to a promised land of liberation, understanding, and tolerance. Such a narrative, termed “homonationalist” when taken to a point of pride or chauvinism about sexual rights in the West, may in fact be contributing to skepticism about the possibility of change in public attitudes among Africans and to cynicism about the likely outcomes of civil and human rights claims.Footnote 3
There is no question that prejudice exists in South Africa—findings over a five-year period (2003‒7) from the South African Social Attitudes Survey (Roberts & Reddy Reference Roberts and Reddy2008) show that more than 80 percent of South Africans aged sixteen and older believed that same-sex relations between consenting adults is always wrong. However, as Epprecht (Reference Epprecht1998) asked in his study of silences around same-sex sexuality in Zimbabwe, can the concept of “homophobia” be applied to people who do not know what homosexuality is or who do not understand it as same-sex sexuality? Moreover, how clear is the reference to “African” attitudes when much of the discourse connecting African opposition to homosexuality makes reference to non-African sources, including the Bible, the Qur’an, and ethnographic accounts of African cultures written by Europeans? Asking what “homosexual” and “African” mean to informants thus became a key question underpinning the research upon which this article is based. For without this kind of insight into how language names what is socially valued and codes social and political processes of value making, how can efforts to shift social value markers succeed? It is difficult to imagine, for example, that anti-homophobia campaigns can be persuasive when they lack awareness of discursive connections between normative sexuality and African identity. Only with such awareness, by contrast, will we be able to develop creative and contextually relevant approaches to making sexual diversity and sexual minority rights more readily accommodated among South Africans than is generally the case at present.
This article engages with these issues and concerns by drawing on research based in two black South African urban townships. The findings raise questions about whether the concept of homophobia is sufficiently nuanced to frame and measure same-sex prejudice contextually. They also confound the stereotype that black South Africans are uniformly hostile to same-sex sexuality, and show a range of potential openings to promote nondiscrimination against same-sex practicing people.
Notes on Method
The lead investigator (Veronica Sigamoney) adopted a case study approach to elicit comprehensive responses from multiple audiences in two black townships in the province of Gauteng, namely Daveyton and KwaThema. The selection of these townships was triggered by discussions with members of Johannesburg-based LGBTI organizations about an apparent increase in rape and murder of black lesbians during the previous years.Footnote 4 KwaThema invariably was featured in these discussions, due to the contradiction between the violence and the township’s long-held reputation as a space of relative tolerance for sexual minorities.Footnote 5 The existence of a ready-made network of activists who could potentially provide researchers with access to informants who might otherwise be hard to reach added to the rationale for selecting KwaThema. The idea of Daveyton as an additional research site was also sparked by discussions with Johannesburg-based LGBTI activists. Although Daveyton is located on KwaThema’s doorstep and the populations are demographically similar, Daveyton was reported to be a space that oppressed its same-sex attracted residents and inhibited LGBTI solidarity and organized activity. The impression that was conveyed was that Daveyton’s same-sex attracted residents frequently “escaped” to KwaThema. This apparent difference, despite geographical, demographic, and other proximities, invited empirical testing.
Research in both Daveyton and KwaThema was conducted at police stations, high schools, and with randomly selected household members eighteen years and older. Data were sourced from multiple audiences using a mix of qualitative and quantitative data-gathering techniques. Questions were aimed at exploring how same-sex sexualities are coded in local terms, including through silences, omissions, and the strategic mixing of languages, or “relexicalization.”Footnote 6
Research at each police station involved in-depth interviews with five to six purposively selected police officers. For the most part, these were investigating officers who had experience working with cases classified as sexual offenses. Officers were interviewed individually and in private. Their names were not recorded and confidentiality was guaranteed. An instrument with open-ended questions was used to guide the interviews. These were conducted in isiZulu, seSotho, English, and, more often than not, a mix of languages including Tsotsietaal, an ever-evolving township slang that draws significantly upon Afrikaans.Footnote 7
To provide a quantitative measure of crimes linked to same-sex sexuality and to gain insight into the language that police officers used to document such crimes, a survey of 10 percent of all police case dockets for a two-year period (January 2008‒January 2010) was undertaken at the Daveyton and KwaThema police stations. Dockets were randomly selected across all crime categories used to file cases. This was necessary since the South African police do not recognize hate crimes as separate from general crimes, including crimes evidently motivated by perceptions of the victim’s sexuality.Footnote 8
Research at four high schools, two in Daveyton and two in Kwathema, was undertaken with learners (students) older than sixteen years. This took the form of facilitated group discussions conducted in school classrooms after school hours. Teachers were not present. Groups were stratified by sex and each comprised eight to ten learners. Facilitators did not record learners’ names and confidentiality was guaranteed. The discussions were followed by a written exercise that allowed learners to express their opinions while remaining anonymous. The topic for discussion was the equality clause in the Bill of Rights in the South African Constitution. The discussions were facilitated by black South African male and female researchers in their mid-to-late twenties and were conducted in the language that learners were most comfortable with. This tended to be isiZulu with a smattering of English and the occasional word or phrase borrowed from Tsotsitaal, seSotho, and seTswana.
Finally, a household survey was conducted to obtain data on residents’ beliefs, attitudes, and practices more generally. Statistical methods were used to calculate representative sample sizes for Daveyton and KwaThema—602 and 500, respectively. Interviews were conducted with a randomly selected household member over the age of eighteen years who at the time of the interview had been residing in the township for twelve months or more.Footnote 9 A questionnaire comprising closed-ended questions was used. Multiple response options were provided for a number of questions. This component of the research provided an opportunity to obtain quantitative measures of variables that had been explored in more depth with police and learners, including meanings of “homosexuality” and social norms regulating what is perceived as authentically African.
Analysis of raw data aimed to gain insight into the meanings of terms that people use for same-sex sexuality, and how such meanings are implicated in constructions of social value, working to produce the authentic or inauthentic subject. Can a relationship be discerned between the terms people use to describe same-sex sexuality and ascribed identity as “real African”? In this regard, terms that signify lack of social value and that work as devices for constructing the inauthentic “other” were considered as indicators of prejudice. Prejudice then, whether on grounds of sexuality, gender, notions of Africanness, and so forth, was therefore conceptualized as a measure of social value.Footnote 10 The research resulted in three reports detailing the respective findings from police, learners, and residents (Sigamoney Reference Sigamoney2011a, Reference Sigamoney2011b, Reference Sigamoney2011c). This article is a distillation of those reports.
Of particular significance to framing the argument at the research stage was the emerging scholarship on the history of nonnormative sexualities in Africa. This has provided historical evidence that same-sex relations have been present in Africa since precolonial times, that within communities and families elements of sexual diversity were acknowledged often with mild stigma but in some cases celebrated, and that it was mainly colonial authorities, missionaries, and travelers who coded same-sex relations as immoral, savage, and shameful, often under the rubric of science (see, e.g., Murray & Roscoe Reference Murray and Roscoe1998; Hoad Reference Hoad2007; Epprecht Reference Epprecht2006, Reference Epprecht2008). Indeed, other studies and memoirs by African LGBTI individuals have argued that cultures of qualified acceptance are manifest in Africa, discursively coded in silence, discretion, not naming, identity blurring, connections between same-sex sexuality and spirit possession, and so on. Implicit in these studies, and indeed explicitly argued by African theologians such as Desmond Tutu (see, e.g., Germond & de Gruchy Reference Germond and Gruchy1997) and traditional healers (Nkabinde Reference Nkabinde2008), is that “real Africanness” requires healing from the trauma of colonial racism and homophobia by a renaissance of precolonial values. They make the point that Africa’s history is not one of flat intolerance toward people who are same-sex attracted; they also question claims of indigenous and fixed African intolerance and lack of acknowledgement.
Our goal was to test these ideas against a wide sample of empirical data. This case study contributes to our understanding of the debates around the subjects of identity, rights, public health, and gender and sexuality in general that the scholarship raises.
Meanings of “Homosexual”
Informants were first asked about local naming practices for people who are attracted to the same sex as themselves. Only afterward were they asked to share their understanding of the meaning of “homosexual.” We are placing the discussion of the latter subject first, however, as it provides the context for understanding the gaps and tensions between local and ostensibly universal or scientific discourses.
The term homosexual is part of the dominant sexuality discourse in present-day South Africa, including in human rights documents, messages campaigning against homophobia, scientific and other academic scholarship, and mass media, including a popular television show (Generations). However, when asked what they would call same-sex attracted people, learners, police, and respondents from the household survey alike only rarely used the word homosexual. Learners in both townships did not use the word at all, only a single police officer used the word (for same-sex attracted men), and less than 5 percent of survey respondents used the word to refer to same-sex attracted men and women. The preferred terms within all groups tended to be gay and lesbian. In the survey, for example, these terms, followed by the vulgar term stabane, sometimes shortened to staban, were the most frequently mentioned.Footnote 11 There was no significant difference between the two townships on this point, notwithstanding the relatively higher visibility of “out” gays and lesbians in KwaThema.
When learners were questioned about what the term homosexual means, variable constructions and a great deal of uncertainty became evident. Indeed, only a minority clearly linked the word to same-sex sexuality, or identified homosexuals as people who have “romantic feelings for people of the same gender.” Others indicated that homosexuals are:
“People whose hormones make them “horny” and who like a lot of sex”;
“People who watch a lot of porn and who download porn on their mobile phones”;
“People who watch porn and smoke dagga” (cannabis);
“Men who have sex with men while in prison but who have sex with women when out of prison.”
In Daveyton, some learners stated flatly that they did not know what the term homosexual meant. They said, for example:
“It is the first time I am hearing this word.”
“Actually I don’t understand these things well; I am not sure.”
“I think a homosexual is a person who is attracted to boys and girls at the same time. It is a person who loves boys and girls at the same time.”
“Maybe I can say it is a girl who likes things and a boy who likes things…. Let’s put it this way, it’s a boy who likes ladies [and] a girl who loves the boys who are tops—these ones who are driving the nice cars.”
“I think a homosexual person is a person who has two private parts.” (An example offered was Caster Semenya, the South African Olympic athlete whose gender was called into question; the terms intersex or hermaphrodite were not mentioned.)
Among police, the word homosexual was also rarely used without prompting—a single officer from KwaThema mentioned it as a naming term. When probed, officers often showed little familiarity or offered widely divergent meanings:
“I don’t know any homosexuals. I only know those who are males involved with males and females that are involved with females.”
“Homosexual, I think has something to do with mixed feelings. You don’t know how you are feeling, which feelings you have, do you have feelings for a man and a female....”
“Homosexual according to my understanding is that you have parts of a man and a female or something like that.”
The household survey corroborated the conclusion that the term homosexual is rarely used or associated with exclusive same-sex sexuality. More than a third of those interviewed responded “don’t know” when asked what they understood by the term. Among those who expressed familiarity with the term, various meanings emerged. In addition to those mentioned already (two organs, etc.), these included: a man who looks like a woman, a woman who looks like a man, a man and woman having sex, someone who doesn’t use his or her sex organs, someone with no reproductive organ, someone who masturbates, hormones, whores and women who have many boyfriends, someone wearing sexually attracting clothes, girls who play with boys and boys who play with girls, someone against God, someone against culture, and “home sex” (unexplained but presumably based on the sound of the word homosexual).
What, then, of the more commonly used terms gay and lesbian? Learners said that gay means men who are “in love” with men, men who “date” other men, and men who want to “marry” men, while lesbians are women who are “in love” with women, “date” other women, and want to “marry” women. Officers who used these terms also tended to associate them with conventional meanings, although one believed that lesbians are same-sex attracted men and another thought that they are same-sex attracted individuals of both sexes. (A small percentage of other respondents in Daveyton and KwaThema also called same-sex attracted men “lesbians.”) Generally, however, survey respondents referred to same-sex attracted men and same-sex attracted women as “gays” and “lesbians,” respectively, with the former term also referring at times to same-sex attracted women, which is also part of worldwide usage.
It is important to emphasize here that although same-sex attracted people were rarely referred to as homosexuals, responses that flatly denied the existence of such people were also uncommon. With reference to the survey, less than 5 percent responded that they “don’t know” any naming terms for same-sex attracted men, rising to around 8 percent for naming terms for women attracted to women. Further, more than 80 percent reported that they are aware of same-sex-attracted people in the township. In the next section, we look at the rich vocabulary by which the majority recognizes and assigns social value to people who are same-sex attracted.
Naming and Social Value-Making
Responding to questions exploring how people who are same-sex attracted are named, learners, police officers, and survey respondents pointed to an array of terms derived from one or more of the South African languages that they speak, or alluding to important, in some cases global, cultural figures. This departs from Leap’s finding that apart from isi’tabane, indigenous terms for same-sex attracted people are not apparent in township sexual discourses and that “if direct reference is unavoidable, loanwords from English are employed” (2006:140). Learners in particular were not concerned with avoiding direct reference. Indeed, they stated explicitly that they use a wide vocabulary to “label” people who are same-sex attracted and indeed that the labels are pejorative, saying that the labels are used to “discriminate them” and are a means of “talking about them in a bad way” and “not treating them like we treat us the normal people.” They noted that people who are called names like stabane “don’t want to be called” such names. They also noted that people who are same-sex attracted sometimes use these naming terms among themselves, saying, however, that when they [learners] use the terms, they are part of “a vulgar language.”
The word stabane, which is by far the most common vulgar term, seems to derive from isiZulu. McLean and Ncgobo’s (1994:168) research indicates that it is understood as a hurtful term literally meaning hermaphrodite or freak of nature, that is, having both male and female genitals. The table below lists other labeling terms that were mentioned by learners with the meanings that they provided. The names make the co-construction of the sexual subject and gendered subject particularly apparent.
Table 1. Naming Terms for People Who Are Same-Sex Attracted (Learner Data)
The term moffie, historically the most commonly used slang term among white and Coloured South Africans for “‘male homosexual’, ‘effeminate male’, and ‘transvestite’” (Gevisser & Cameron Reference Gevisser and Cameron1994:xiii) was mentioned by a few learners but was not explained. It is worth noting that queer, a naming term used globally that can be used both as a pejorative and as a statement of pride, did not show up in learners’ vocabulary at all. The term bisexual was also rarely employed, notwithstanding, as noted in the previous section, that many people’s understanding of the term homosexual was that it referred to a person who had sex with both men and women. More technical terms and acronyms favored by the “gay international,” such as MSM, WSW, LGBTI, and MARP, were entirely unknown.Footnote 12
In KwaThema, police officers indicated that people who are same-sex attracted are primarily called “gays” and “lesbians.” They stated—implausibly—that they had no knowledge of other naming terms. A priori, their interpretations of lesbian, gay, and homosexual indicated seemingly neutral, if not positive, value positions. They noted, for example, that the terms were not derogatory, saying that they didn’t “see anything wrong.” They also noted that gays and lesbians were “not a problem” and that they “had no issue” with them. However, as conversation progressed, there were also indications that these terms and what they stood for were part of an official discourse that conflicted with private discourses. For example, an officer refused to comment on his personal opinion about same-sex attracted men and women and noted that the way he would describe them as a police officer differed from the way he would describe them in his personal capacity as a Christian.
“I have got two views on that. I’ve got a different view as a police officer. I’ve got a different view as a person in my religion.... As a police officer I don’t have any problem at all. My work is to investigate crime, who is involved in crime, who opened the case, who is the victim there....”
Another officer who stated that he has “no problem with them” and sees “nothing wrong” with the terms gay and lesbian said, when probed about his personal view on African men who are same-sex attracted, “In my personal view I totally disagree with those men.” An officer who said that the term lesbian describes a woman’s feelings for another woman noted that feelings cannot be controlled and as such, cannot be judged as right or wrong. She proceeded to say, “I consider myself normal because I don’t have an intimate feeling for [women].” Another officer stated that gay people “are okay because that is the decision they have chosen” but then, later in the conversation, added, “It’s difficult to give the gays a platform [in this community]. It is even difficult to suggest what to do with them.”
Given that the terms lesbian, gay and homosexual appear to signify something that officers do have a problem with in their personal capacity, correct terminology may constitute a performance of duty in which they have been trained and indeed take professional pride. In this space of duty, English terms may also reference their connection to the state and the constitutionally constructed (homo)sexual citizens of the state. Would speaking “township,” as Leap’s (Reference Leap, Leap and Boellstorff2004) research in Cape Town suggests, contest this value and show up tensions between the new and the old? The evidence from Daveyton suggests so. Unlike in KwaThema, officers in Daveyton did not differentiate between the official and the private. They openly noted that the naming terms they used for people who are same-sex attracted (i.e., stabane and inkonkoni) are discriminatory, stating that calling someone by these names indicates that they are abnormal. Some believed that the terms are nonetheless necessary since they allow what exists to be identified and made recognizable. One officer said that although they were “not good names,” there were no other names that were “suitable to use.” Another officer hinted at a tension between stigma and qualified acceptance:
“I think it [inkonkoni] is discriminating but that is how you have to describe them because each and everything that exists here in this world must have a name unfortunately. It’s just like an albino. There is a word in Zulu and at times you feel very much uncomfortable to use that word for referring to such a person. So even now if you say inkawu [albino] you can feel that it is something wrong. But now that is the word that you will understand if I talk to you about it, if I describe an albino.”
The drawing of parallels between inkonkoni and inkawu—notably the connotations of wrongness, shame, and stigma that both are associated with—also carries a subtle and somewhat contradictory meaning that speakers may or may not have been aware of. Both terms reflect traditional knowledge of the stigmatized conditions (inkonkoni, as mentioned, alludes to a naturally occurring phenomenon in a wild animal). The terms thus subtly contradict claims that same-sex sexuality is foreign to Africa or unheard of, including as something that is mildly stigmatized. Not surprisingly, inkonkoni has been interpreted as a marker of validation by some black African gays and lesbians, notably the lesbian sangoma (traditional healer) Nkunzi Nkabinde (Nkabinde Reference Nkabinde2008).
Survey data produced a further list of terms laden with varying degrees of disapproval, as well as corroborating the nonexistence of queer and the rarity of moffie and bisexual as naming terms. Apart from survey data echoing a number of the naming terms that learners and police had mentioned, other names that emerged for same-sex attracted men included:
Abnormal, Adam and Adam, Amanyala (isiZulu word that translates as something disgusting or disgraceful), Boet-sissie, Choma (tsotsietaal for “buddy”—the term is usually used among girls), Confused, Double adaptor, Kakfarts, Lost people, Meleko (seSotho/seTswana for “taboo”), Mholo (isiZulu for “taboo”), Ngqingili (isiZulu for a person without legs—indicates someone not worthy of respect), Possessed, Satan, Senzo/Jason (Senzo and Jason are same-sex attracted characters from the South African soap opera Generations), Sissie, Tomboy, Tommy boy, Trassie (Tsotsietaal for “mattress”), Two-in-one.
Many of the same terms were applied to same-sex attracted women. Other terms specific to women included:
Butch, Caster (a reference to Caster Semenya), Dogs, Dyke, Fekethe (an Africanized form of “faggot”), Ghettolicious, Jarvis (a man’s name), Izinyumba (isiZulu word which translates as “barren”), Loser, MfaziNdoda (man/woman), Ntanga Joe (Tsotsitaal for “buddy”), Sehlola (Sesotho/ Tswana for “taboo”), Sfiso (a man’s name).
Making the African and unAfrican: The Notion of Nbuka
This section explores the norms that regulate the value of the sexual subject in relation to “real” men and women, to brothers, sisters, and other family, and to “real” African identity—and vice versa.
Who or what is an African? Common to learners, police officers, and survey respondents was the marking of Africans in terms of spatial boundaries. For the most part, they described Africans as people who live in Africa. A few police officers also made reference to color when talking about Africans, and although learners did not use the word black, this was implicit in the distinction between whites/the West and Africans that some of them made. Learners, however, did not conceptualize this as a racial distinction, believing race-based discrimination to be discrimination based on language and ethnicity among blacks. The association between color and ideas of Africanness was more explicit in survey data.Footnote 13 In Daveyton and KwaThema, respectively, survey respondents believed that Africans are: everyone who lives in Africa (27.6% and 33.5%), all people who live in Africa and behave according to their culture (20.6% and 18.3%), black people who live in Africa and behave according to their culture (20.4% and 19.5%), black people who live in Africa (17.1% and 13.4%), black people everywhere (10.7% and 10.9%), and someone who is born in Africa (1% and 0.7%).
Although the data draws attention to geography and color, it also shows that achieving social value as “African” goes beyond these attributes. Indications are that such value also hinges on whether one is perceived to conform to cultural prescriptions (and proscriptions) of Africanness. This process of becoming African through public shows of conformity to social value markers was emphasized by police officers and learners. Police officers stated, for example, that “as an African, it means there are certain cultures and customs that one has to follow or adhere to make him African” and “to be African is not nbuka,… meaning somebody that deviates from what he is; from what is expected of him by doing something else.” In this view, being/becoming African means being seen to be a conformer, including a conformer to the heteronorm and its accompanying productions of the familial. As a learner noted, “When they refer to an African man they refer to all of us irrespective of your ethnic group. In Africa, it means that a man is the head of the household. When they say ‘African man’ it means that you have a family and your own home.” In a similar vein, learners stated that same-sex attracted people who live in Africa are “Africans by name and not Africans by what they do.” This is because, as one informant put it: “Lesbians are not African women because for us Africans, a woman is a woman by having children. If she is a lesbian, it means she can’t bear children. It means she can’t get married.”
Transgression of the heteronorm, and by extension of a rule of Africanness, was associated with whites and the West: “This gay thing came with white people,” was a typical comment. Others described Africans who are same-sex attracted as “copy cats” and “fax machines” because they “copy things from whites.”
“We show them [gays and lesbians] the ways of African men and women and we tell them their behavior is un-African. If they don’t agree then we buy a sjambok and beat them up because according to my information this behavior came with the Western culture.”
“This thing is American style….”
Data from the household survey also lent quantitative support here. In their responses to the question “What does a man have to do to be thought of as an African?” around 60 percent of respondents in both townships highlighted an association between socially valued manhood and proving one’s virility by having children with women. This reference to the heteronorm was even stronger (over 80%) in responses to the question “What does a woman have to do to be thought of as an African?” Further, roughly three out of four disagreed with the statements “A man who is attracted to another man is a real man” and “A woman who is attracted to another woman is a real woman.”
To explore markers that are used to determine what qualifies as a socially valued kin grouping, survey respondents were asked to define a family. The primary construction of family was a heteronormative one (i.e., the heterosexual couple and their biological offspring), and much of the hostility to same-sex relationships hinged on their presumed inability to conform to that model.
“[People of the same sex] shouldn’t be allowed [to get married]. How will they make children, who is the husband and who is the wife between the two of them?”
“What will my grandchildren say about their mommy bringing a woman home? Mommy brings a stepfather but the stepfather is also a woman?”
“When they say ‘African man,’ it means you must have your own family. What I think about gays is that they are unable to make children. When he is asked to make a child he runs away. He will be saying he doesn’t want to make a child as he falls under the girls. You have to show at home that you are a man.”
Reproduction technology that allows same-sex attracted women to become mothers without having heterosexual sex was viewed as problematic. To the extent that it enhances their value as woman and mothers, the technology was seen to threaten resources enabling “real” women and mothers (and, by extension, “real” men and fathers) to show off norm conformity and express value. As one learner put it:
“It means they will be getting rid of the usual system of a boy dating a girl. They will encourage people who gave them the rights to fall in love to come up with the technology of making formulas for the lesbians to be able to get pregnant and have children. No, it won’t be right because we will be destroying our community.”
Media, particularly television, were also viewed with anxiety for its portrayal of same-sex sexuality as acceptable, thereby threatening the social value of those who behave according to social norms. One learner stated, “This thing is confusing younger children because television is making it a fashion. We see people of same sex kissing and calling one another ‘baby.’ So the young people think it is normal to date another girl if you are a girl or to date a boy if you are a boy. These people have to go and stay in their island.”Footnote 14 Another said, “There is a rumor that we mimic things we see on the media, especially on TV.… We adopted this thing from the media.”
Finally, one glaring feature of this discussion of Africanness and authentic gender was the extent to which learners and police officers regularly invoked Christian creation theology to prove the truth of the heteronorm. God had created Adam and Eve, they said, and not the “changed genders” of “Adam and Steve and Eve and Eve.” Yet in most of South Africa, the Christian creation narrative is barely a century old in the public consciousness. To a number of learners, it was nonetheless claimed as tradition, exemplifying a narrative that authenticates who is African and who is alien.
“I am saying the countries from outside, like the European countries, they look up to the African continent as people who are preserving their culture. They say we live up to the Bible. They say since we are Africans we are normal human beings.… It is a disgrace because there is nothing like this and it will make other countries laugh at us because they believe that ubuntu started in Africa. So if there is such a behavior of homosexuality among small boys there is no ubuntu.…”
On Violence
South Africa is widely regarded as one of the most crime-ridden and violent countries in the world. Rates of sexual violence are especially high, above all male rape of women and girls, but there are also significant levels of male rape of other males (Jewkes et al. 2006). Given this background, and the widely reported phenomenon of the so-called corrective rape of lesbians, we sought to explore people’s attitudes toward violence against same-sex attracted people.
To begin with, some learners believed that same-sex sexuality was a criminal offense, punishable by formal and informal justice systems. They felt that death, imprisonment, severe beatings, or isolation from the community was appropriate. The more severe the punishment, the more of a deterrent it was thought to be. There is some indication that the national discourse of African countries such as Botswana, as well as mythologized figures from the African past, have influenced these beliefs.
“These people have to be punished like people in the country I come from called Botswana where there is no crime. Because if you steal they cut your fingers, if you rape they kill you, and if you kill you follow the person you have killed.”
“The government [of Botswana] makes a point that if people fall a certain way they have to be punished in a certain way. Maybe they have to be killed or sent to prison.”
“Their rights which say a man can sleep with another man have to be scrapped. Back then these rights wouldn’t have worked because if Shaka [founder of the Zulu kingdom in the early nineth century] was still alive he would say they should be killed.”
Most informants, however, understood that the Constitution protects gays and lesbians, and that same-sex marriage is now legal. Their reaction was a feeling of anxiety that fueled a sense that vigilantism was justified:
“You can see they are overpowering us. They have their points and they are winning.”
“There are now bars for lesbians and gays. What about us straight people?…They are given rights. They are going to use them and they are going to demand some more, just like straight people. In the future we won’t have straight people and we won’t have children. They will overcome you.”
“My child will see the gays’ styles and he will want to join them. The child will want to be gay because gays have rights these days.”
To guard against this threat of being “overcome,” some learners stated that rights for people who are same-sex attracted “should be scrapped,” and that those responsible for legalizing same-sex marriage “should be attacked.” Findings on the rape of lesbians underscored that sense of a need to defend against a siege. Indeed, having to achieve authenticity gives a pervasive sense of the fragility of the subject’s social value, as the comments below suggest.
“Lesbians are making women too few because now they are no longer falling under where they are supposed to fall. They are shortening the number.... They don’t belong to the gender they are supposed to fall in.”
“They are raped so they know they are not boys.”
“Eudy left the tavern alone and these boys caught her, raped and killed her. They were showing her that she is not a boy and she will never be a boy.”
“They [men] say that these ones [lesbians] are spoiling the whole thing of ‘we are the men; we have to do the manly things.’ They threaten them.”
“This woman has two children and all of a sudden she is a lesbian. How can we answer this thing because there has to be real men in the community? If she turns herself to a man, who is a real man between us? We have to show we are men.”
How rape operates to distinguish the real from the pseudo is something to consider here. Niehaus’s (Reference Niehaus, Reid and Walker2005) ethnographic work on rape in the South African Lowveld makes the point that what men are expected to do in terms of masculine ideals does not always match what they are able to do given the constraints of lived experience. In Daveyton and KwaThema, where unemployment is the prevailing condition and female-headed households are common, hegemonic masculinity is indeed fragile. In our data, there was a distinct indication that rape of lesbians is intended to send the message that they are not real men, and they should not attempt to be men because real men will assert and defend their authenticity.
Rape attracts the headlines, but it would be inappropriate to end on this point. There are in fact more common forms of resistance to the perceived threats to subjecthood, or the value of the self as a man, woman, kin member, African, and so on. Contesting or simply ignoring constitutional and legal constructions of the sexual subject offers perhaps the most obvious assertion that same-sex sexualities are “not right.” For example, a few police officers saw the national discourse as a betrayal of long-held beliefs and customs because it made people who are same-sex attracted publicly visible. They countered this betrayal by electing to ignore anything that might bring them into collusion with the indiscretion.
“When I see information on that in newspapers and in books I simply pass it.”
“When I come across these things I ignore it because I am not interested in it.”
“I never concentrate on those names and I don’t put them in my head. I am not interested. I just see a person who is changing from what God created him to be. This person has belittled God’s judgment.”
Room to Negotiate Authentic African: Indications of Contested Norms
The data presented thus far largely support the view that same-sex relations are, as learners termed it, umholo (forbidden). Perceived as a threat to highly valued heteronormative and African subjectivities, same-sex attracted people are labeled by a wide array of derogatory terms. Indeed, informants pointed to the imperative to sustain the boundaries separating the norm conformer (the real African) from the norm transgressor (the unAfrican), and in many cases rationalized the use of violence to do so.
Nonetheless, the data also indicate that the boundary lines are not as fixed as one might suppose and that discursive traditions—old and new—allow for qualified acceptance of the transgressor. For example, survey data revealed a fairly even split between respondents who agreed (or partially agreed) and those who disagreed with the statement “It would be difficult for me to accept a member of my family who was openly attracted to someone of the same sex.” A split of similar proportions was also evident between respondents who agreed and disagreed with the statement “I could not accept my child if he/ she was attracted to someone of the same sex.” In a similar vein, despite the commonplace invocation of Christian beliefs to justify opposition to homosexuality, the household survey showed that more than two-thirds of respondents agreed with the statement “Churches and other places of worship should accept people who are attracted to members of the same sex.” A mix of intolerance and tolerance also came through in attitudes toward the place of sexual minorities in the public sphere. For example, more than 85 percent of survey respondents in both Daveyton and Kwathema agreed or partially agreed with the statement “People who are attracted to members of the same sex and who live in this township are part of the community just like anyone else who lives here.”Footnote 15
As noted above in the police officer’s comparison of inkonkoni and inkawu, naming terms and practices that are understood to be vulgar or hurtful may at the same time also convey subtle indicators of “acceptance for what they are.” For example, boy learners spoke about a young man at their school whom they identified as gay, admitting that they whistle at him when he passes. They do this, they say, because they are treating him like a girl and because that is what they normally do to girls. They noted that stabanes couldn’t be referred to in the same way as heterosexual boys, namely as, “my brother,” because “they contain themselves like girls,” and to use the term “my brother” would mean not accepting them for what they are.
If survey findings are anything to go by, there is also room to shift beliefs on the acceptability of rape and other forms of violence. For example, the advocating of violence by some learners and a few police officers needs to be compared to the tolerance exhibited by the roughly 90 percent of the study population in both townships who disagreed with the statement “People who are assaulted or raped because they are attracted to members of the same sex get what they deserve.” Slightly more than 95 percent also disagreed with the statement “It is acceptable to beat or rape a man who makes it known that he is attracted to other men.” And a little more than 90 percent disagreed that name calling and jeering is acceptable. Reporting crimes against people who are same-sex attracted is likely to be supported; more than 85 percent agreed with the statement “When people who are attracted to members of the same sex are threatened, assaulted or raped, they should report it to the police.”
Petros et al. (Reference Petros2006) make the point that people who are same-sex attracted in South Africa are stigmatized as transmitters of HIV/AIDS. Our findings, however, suggest that this claim should be qualified. For example, learners, though stating that people who are same-sex attracted are a disease in and of themselves and that isolation on their own island or planet was the only way to manage the threat of collective degeneration, made no explicit reference to HIV/AIDS. During formal interviews and casual conversation, police officers also made no association between same-sex sexuality and HIV/AIDS. Survey data echoed this to some extent. In Daveyton and KwaThema, around 71 percent of respondents disagreed with the statement “People who are attracted to members of the same sex are responsible for spreading HIV/AIDS.” The point is that associations between HIV/AIDS stigma and people who are same-sex attracted were not as obvious from the data as some of the literature on this subject indicates or assumes. Our data show that it is not a foregone conclusion that same-sex sexualities are or will be stigmatized as transmitters and that there may be room to contest such stigma where it exists.
In general, harsh opinions against homosexuality could be assuaged by the exercise of discretion on the part of same-sex attracted individuals and their maintaining the appearance of heteronormativity. For example, around 30 percent of the study population in both KwaThema and Daveyton agreed or partially agreed that having a husband or boyfriend, having children, and keeping same-sex relationships secret make a same-sex attracted woman an “African” woman. A similar proportion could accept same-sex attracted men as “African” provided they keep their desires out of sight and in the public view act virile and have girlfriends or a wife. Rationalizations that allow for the enactment of same-sex desire without requiring that desire to be named as an identity also seemed to qualify as tacit acceptance. One police officer said he would not classify a male acquaintance who had propositioned him for sex as gay because that man had shown himself to be “a very responsible father and head of his family.” Another officer spoke about an ex-girlfriend who, at the time of the research, was in a same-sex relationship. He did not, however, think of her as a lesbian because the ex-girlfriend told him that she was “playing the woman’s part” while her partner played the “husband’s part,” including by sending the children to school and helping the family financially.Footnote 16
The equality clause in the South African Constitution provides another resource by which same-sex prejudice is discursively contested. It is commonly said that this part of the Constitution is elitist, out of touch with majority opinion, and irrelevant to poor black LGBTI individuals who don’t have the resources to fight for their rights though the courts. Indeed, neither learners nor police officers were familiar with the term “sexual orientation,” which is listed as one of the grounds for discrimination in the equality clause. Some of our informants who hazarded a guess at what it means said that sexual orientation refers to anatomical features (e.g., “whether a person had breasts or not” or “women with big curves”) or, vaguely, to “traditional things related to sex that people in KwaZulu-Natal do,” and “sexual things in general.”
Our data indicate, however, that the Constitution is having an educational impact. A senior police officer, for example, talked about it as an instrument of change. He stated that he was raised to believe that people who are same-sex attracted should remain unseen, but because “the Constitution allowed it to be recognized,” he is “getting used, but not 100 percent” to knowing about “such people.” Another police officer, talking about how exposure to the Constitution has affected some of his colleagues, said “We have old and new police. The old ones will say this person is crazy—are you a man or a woman? But for the new constitutional ones, the response will be more versatile and more wide.”
The impact of the Constitution and the new rights that have flowed from it was also evident in the views of some learners. They stated:
“I don’t think a sjambok [whip] will help because if you beat up a person it won’t help. The feelings will stay as they are. A prisoner is sent to goal today but tomorrow he comes back and starts doing what he’s been doing.… I think we have to accept them because the constitution allows it. As some of them are married already there is nothing we can do.”
“People have to get used to seeing gays and accepting them because we know that the government has given them rights to marry.”
“We are doing a wrong thing to think that we will beat up a person because he is gay. The Constitution says stabanes have rights, so we are violating their rights, we are discriminating against them.”
Are these views among young people outliers? The household survey suggests not. A majority (70.1% in Daveyton and 65.3% in KwaThema) agreed with the statement “The South African Constitution states that people who are attracted to members of the same sex have the same rights as anyone else.” Recalling that Daveyton has the reputation for being more intolerant of LGBTI than KwaThema, this is a noteworthy sign of openness to change.
There were also indications that the Constitution’s power as a discursive tool for challenging prejudice is likely to increase with greater evidence of how it works in practice. For example, some learners distinguished between rights in rhetoric and law, and rights in practice. They argued that the theoretical protections afforded by the Constitution were the consequence of lobbying by rights groups rather than an indication of the state’s practical commitment to equal rights. They said that they did not see the president doing anything to show that he took these rights seriously. Learners stated that if the president took these rights as more than simply token, the categories “gay” and “lesbian” would be included on application forms and other administrative documents that require personal details.
“It shows that the president is not for this thing because if he was the application forms will have gay and lesbian boxes.”
“This group is excluded from many things…. As she has said, the president is not taking it seriously because they are not included in the application forms.”
The inference was that this absence from official documentation signifies an authorizing of exclusion, at least on the part of the president.
The South African government has in fact begun to take a more visible stand in favor of sexual minority rights, including by co-sponsoring the successful resolution to have the United Nations Human Rights Council explicitly include sexual orientation within the definition of universal human rights. The affirmation of leadership to correct the tokenism logic might also come from outside of South Africa. Recall that several learners used the example of Botswana in particular to rationalize their view that violence against same-sex attracted people was the appropriate response. The fact that the former president of Botswana has now come out in favor of sexual minority rights, and that decriminalization of the sodomy law has been argued before the country’s High Court, could well have an influence on undermining the close relationship so many of our informants made between African identity and heteronormativity.
Conclusion
This study confounds a number of the assumptions underlying the notion that homophobia is self-evident in the statement “homosexuality is un-African,” or that black South Africans are uniformly and incorrigibly homophobic. First, the word homosexual is not generally understood in the townships under study as a synonym for same-sex sexualities and indeed is commonly misunderstood in key ways. This finding alone challenges conclusions of homophobia based on responses to questions posed about “homosexuals.” The language used by rights and public health advocates is also almost entirely absent from common parlance. This points to a need for critical reflection on how taken-for-granted assumptions within ostensibly universal, scientific, or descriptive concepts can obscure insight into insider codes of value making. The importance of the politics of language and translation as methodological considerations, particularly for researchers attempting to measure same-sex and other prejudice, is therefore a crucial point emerging from this study.
Second, while the study has provided evidence of same-sex prejudice, it has also shown that this prejudice is not only, and in some cases not primarily, about transgressions of sexuality. It is also about contests over appropriate ways to make the same-sex subject evident and accepted as an African subject. Moreover, the apparently harsh and dogmatic hostility to homosexuality that people often expressed is also often belied by an element of qualified acceptance, provided that same-sex attracted people use discretion in their public behavior and acknowledge cultural norms of gender, kin, and African identity. This prompts consideration of whether national constructions of the (homo)sexual citizen, including in appeals against homophobia, may be perceived as a dismissal of familiar constructions. Does the rejection of old codes of qualified acceptance alienate audiences from messages of change? Does assigning these codes the blanket label of “traditional homophobia” prevent us from seeing them as potential resources for change, and does it send the message that local discursive authority is marginal and not respected in change processes? How this intensifies resistance to rights-based claims for sexual minorities, including through the growth of discriminatory language that erodes traditional forms of qualified acceptance, is one of the central questions emerging from this article.
Arguing that local codes should not be completely dismissed does not imply that the valorizing of voice and overt visibility should not be vigorously endorsed. This includes rights-based discourses, particularly given evidence that such discourses are reducing intolerance and indeed have become a matter of some professional pride among the police. The point, however, is that plural codes of conformity and transgression, and acceptance and intolerance, do exist. We conclude by asking whether developing new ways of talking that emphasize inclusive language and do not feed into binaries of “African” and “unAfrican” would promote increased tolerance.
Acknowledgments
The research on which this article is based was funded by The Atlantic Philanthropies. Funding for this work was awarded to Social Surveys. Veronica Sigamoney, in her capacity as senior researcher and subsequently as research consultant to Social Surveys, designed and led the research. The authors thank The Atlantic Philanthropies and Social Surveys for permission to draw on the data. The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own. We thank the anonymous reviewers and Ella Kusnetz for their astute queries and comments.
