COVER PAGE
Xavier Livermon
Assistant Professor
African and African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas at Austin
ABSTRACT
This article examines the relationship between African customary practices and queerness in post-apartheid South Africa and the role of the law and cultural labor in regulating these practices. I argue that black South African queers reconstitute African “tradition” and customary practices through various forms of cultural and discursive labor that function to contest the un-Africanness of same-sex sexuality and insist on visibility and communal belonging. I reveal how the law in the process of expanding “rights” reconstitutes particular forms of exclusion that black queers contest through their cultural labor. Examining customary practices ranging from circumcision to lobola and traditional African religions, I argue for African “tradition” as a set of living practices constantly in formation. The contestation between queerness and African custom reveals a set of practices that are reconstituted. These set of reconstituted practices form “usable traditions” for black South African queers and their allies. Usable traditions forge an important space for understanding how black sexual autonomy is formed within communal understandings of self and works against exclusionary interpretations of African custom in both societal and legal frameworks.
USABLE TRADITIONS: CREATING SEXUAL AUTONOMY IN POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA
“The practice of same-sex marriage is against most of African beliefs, cultures, customs and traditions, and this in turn goes against the mandate of traditional leaders which is to promote and protect the customs of communities observing a system of customary law. Traditional leaders have vowed to make it their mission for the coming five years to campaign against this wicked, decadent and immoral Western practice.”[i] – National Annual Conference of Traditional Leaders.
“When I was growing up an ungqingili [a gay] would not have stood in front of me. I would knock him out.”[ii] – Jacob Zuma
INTRODUCTION: YIZO YIZO AND PROBLEMATIZING AFRICAN CULTURE AND “TRADITION”
In July of 2004, local South African newspapers led with provocative headlines such as “the kiss SA TV has never seen before.”[iii] The “kiss” was to be featured on the television series Yizo Yizo. Created by SABC Education, the series, thennow in its final season had provoked considerable debate in previous incarnations with depictions that pushed the boundaries of what was considered acceptable television, particularly for a youth audience.[iv] While the series’ intention was to create a national debate about the inequitable education system in the townships and the decreased options this created for young black people, commentators have noted that much of the focus of public debate surrounding the series bypassed this important national discussion. Instead, commentary about the series, including a debate in the South African Parliament, focused on the “morality” of the depictions presented that emphasized graphic violence and explicit sexuality.[v] One wonders, what was so special about this ‘kiss’ that it warranted advanced media publicity, titillating headlines, and public discussion.
Two young black men kiss in a moment of tender passion. They’ve been repressing their feelings for each other, but they cannot hold back anymore. It’s a beautiful moment coming up on TV next week, but there’s a chance this latest ground breaking plot in the award winning Yizo Yizo will cause controversy for the series, which has stirred debate many times before…Thiza, played by Tshepo Ngwane, has experienced something of a change in character on his journey toward discovering his sexuality. And he and the artistic African literature student Thabang, played by Makhoala Ndebele, engage in an on-screen first for South African television – a kiss between two black men.[vi]
In post-apartheid South Africa depictions of queer characters have been quite common as television seeks to play a role in nation-building and construction of a liberal, tolerant, progressive country where people of all backgrounds live together in harmony.[vii] Yet, up until this point, few of these queer characters had been black. And as the quote above suggests, by marking the first ever queer kiss between two black men, even when black gay characters were on screen they were often asexual.[viii] Certainly, Yizo Yizo proved groundbreaking in that it provided the first popular depiction of same-sex intimacy between black men (or women) on popular television. Yizo Yizo provided a public, recognizable representation of same-sex desire that was explicitly erotic and sexual. Yet, perhaps even more important, and the subject of this essay is the way that Yizo Yizo presents discussions of same-sex sexuality in black communities, exposing a complicated relationship between black cultural practices and queerness.
The idea that same-sex sexuality is somehow un-African and alien to African cultural traditions is one that haunts queers of African descent globally. If tradition is represented as that which is authentically and un-problematically African, then same-sex sexuality is its direct opposite—its constitutive outside. Under this formulation, black queers cannot exist as part of African cultural practices represented by tradition. They can only be some manifestation of cultural loss and ultimately alienation from African subjectivity. As a result, Black queers become visible manifestations of cultural taint which exist to be excluded at best, or as the quote from Jacob Zuma indicates, subjected to forms of bodily violence at worst. Therefore, in this essay, I explore the contestation between tradition and queerness in post-apartheid South Africa by examining the ways in which black queers put “tradition” to use. If there is some recognition that the new political dispensation creates possibilities for people to choose, and if this idea of choice is uncomfortable for some, then the question is on what basis are claims to sexual autonomy made? I suggest that for black queers one important site for making claims to sexual autonomy rests in accessing forms of African tradition and redefining what constitutes African culture. In the examples that follow, black queer engagement with African tradition is one way of creating a politics of belonging in their communities that cannot be conferred through the discourse of human rights that presently underpins the Constitution. Furthermore, in reworking and revising tradition, black queers offer a critique of the ways that tradition has been selectively appropriated to reinforce heteropatriarchy. In making this argument, I am not suggesting that black queers completely overturn the heteropatriarchy inherent in many of these traditional practices. [ix] Rather, I argue that black queer engagement with forms of tradition reveals tradition to be a set of practices that are fluid and constantly in process, and therefore able to accommodate difference. While prominent traditional leaders cited in the epigraph argue in favor of preserving a static understanding of African cultural practices to suggest that black queers have no standing within African cultural contexts, black queers “use tradition” to show the flexibility of customary African practices and insist on their rights to exist within explicit African cultural frameworks.[x]
To examine these practices of reworking tradition, I employ an interdisciplinary approach that draws from a combination of discursive and ethnographic approaches. Primarily, I am interested in how black queers employ a number of discursive strategies to combat their exclusion from common sense interpretations of African traditions. I supplement the discursive with observations and conversations gleaned from twenty months of ethnographic experience in South Africa from 2003 to 2005. During this time, a number of prominent media events involving black queer sexuality and its relationship to African cultural traditions created a lively discussion in the black public sphere. In what follows, I document one aspect of this lively discussion and examine how black queers specifically mobilize African customary practices in the service of a more socially equitable polity. This interdisciplinary approach, allows me to account for the co-constitutive nature of African tradition as a set of discursive and material practices that impact the lives of black queer South Africans.
WHY AFRICAN TRADITION?
In the post-apartheid moment, issues of “Africanness” and African culture have become increasingly prominent in a world defined by postmodern neoliberalism. As Jyoti Mistry notes, “Afrikaner hegemony contrasted with the lived experiences of the black majority. The new South African government is at pains to celebrate the diversity of the nation.”[xi] Furthermore, during apartheid, aspects of African culture, particularly as represented by forms of tradition were often seen as divisive tools of colonial oppression.
Political activists, influenced by theories of modernization and African Marxism were often skeptical of appeals to African tradition.[xii] They were aware of the ways in which colonial, and later apartheid authorities misused aspects of African culture to solidify racialized inequality.[xiii] Furthermore, traditional rulers and the separate and distinct cultures they promoted were often viewed as collaborators with apartheid. However, in the post-apartheid moment, there has been more space to actively reevaluate the role of African culture in general and customary practices in particular in the constitution of the post-apartheid state. This desire to reevaluate African custom has also been combined with a discourse of liberal multiculturalism that respects cultural difference. This has been exemplified most publicly through the governmentality articulated through the post-apartheid discourses of “the Rainbow Nation” and the “African Renaissance” and given prominence in the South African Constitution that includes language aimed at “acknowledging and compensating for the imbalances of the past.”[xiv] Ostensibly, African customary law is based on the culture and traditions of African people. The Recognition of Customary Marriages Act (No. 120 of 1998) passed by the South African parliament defines custom using the following language, “customary law means the customs and usages traditionally observed among the indigenous African peoples of South Africa and which form part of the culture of those peoples.”[xv] This definition remains vague as to which people constitute “indigenous” African peoples of South Africa. Furthermore, it fails to distinguish between the traditions, culture, law, and religion of said indigenous peoples. As a result, both political and popular representations of African tradition tend to un-problematically substitute terms such as “African custom,” “African tradition,” and “African culture” for one another. The interchageability of these terms has meant that the heteropatriarchal chieftancy has been able to claim a monopoly not only on the creation and designation of customary law, but also on the definition of what constitutes African culture and tradition, all of which are often represented in tautological terms. In this schemata, African tradition and culture become what the chieftancy says it is creating a delimited vision of customary law that often serves to expand their power and reinforce heteropatriarchy. However, for black queers and their allies, the interchangeable nature of these terms also present a space of flexibility and contestation through which they contest restrictive definitions of African culture and tradition and with it provide a space for the reimagination of African customary law. Indeed, black queers argue for the expansion of voices with respect to the delineation of African customary law and hence understandings of African culture and tradition. In its landmark decision (Alexkor Ltd. and Another vs. Ritchersveld Community and Others) the Constitutional Court delineated the difficulty of defining customary law. Nevertheless, the Constitutional Court suggested that whatever its definition, that customary law (and I would argue the African culture and tradition that ostensibly informs custom) is far from static, functioning rather as “a system of law that was know to the community, passed on from generation to generation [with] a system of laws that has its own values and norms. [Continuing] The justices wrote,
In applying indigenous law, it is important to bear in mind that, unlike common law, indigenous law is not written. It is a system of law that was known to the community, passed on from generation to generation. It is a system of law that has its own values and norms. Throughout its history it has evolved and developed to meet the changing needs of the community. And it will continue to evolve within the context of its values and norms consistently with the Constitution.[xvi]
The Constitutional interpretation provides the space for black queers to challenge the self-evident and static nature of African culture and tradition trumpeted by traditional leaders.
Ultimately, what this contestation means is that a productive tension, mitigated by the South African Constitution exists between a culture of individual rights and the right of each individual to practice his or her culture. Mahmood Mamdani suggests that the contemporary post-apartheid moment “highlights the centrality of politics rather than the theoretical inadequacy of a rights discourse in a struggle for reform.”[xvii] Mamdani invites us to rethink the idea that human rights discourse is theoretically inadequate by insisting on the role of political struggle in making rights meaningful to the everyday lives of citizens. However, I would like to add that the kinds of politics that Mamdani suggests are central to reform are sociocultural in nature. Thus, the evaluation of African tradition and custom must also take into account the centrality of performance, cultural labor, and the representational, all of which reveal the significance of cultural politics.
In the post-apartheid moment, African tradition has been freed from its connection with apartheid collaboration and now works to connect and reconnect increasingly urbanized black South African populations to a post-apartheid notion of difference that is acknowledged and celebrated. While an in-depth discussion of the formation of customary law in South Africa is beyond the scope of this essay, it is important to note the role of colonial figures in the creation of customary law, particularly in the manufacturing of customary law and tradition as singularly situated in male chieftancy
. As Mahmood Mamdani argues,
Was not the key change wrought by colonialism in the sphere of ‘customary law’ to privilege a single authority – chiefs – as the source of custom, thereby sanctioning an authoritarian version of custom as law? In a context where there had been multiple sources of custom – not only chiefs, but also clans, women’s groups, age groups – and no single authoritative source in all social domains, was not the effect to silence every contrary version and expand the authority of the chief to every social domain.?[xviii]
However, simply because a practice, in this case customary law and tradition is heavily imbricated in the colonial imagination does not mean that Africans lack agency in relationship to how they engage these practices. To reiterate, custom and tradition have historically been infused with colonial and apartheid politics, but have emerged in the post-apartheid period as important sites of belonging. The blurriness that exists in social usage regarding African tradition has not been adequately resolved through the law. Nevertheless, what matters is how the ideas concerning tradition are deployed and what they make im/possible. Mamdani asks, “even if the communities [and practices] in question were wholly constructed by the colonial state, did not the outcome unleash the agency of particular sections and muffle that of others?”[xix] Contestation over the meanings of customary practices are attached to how these practices are enacted in post-apartheid South Africa where “life as a national citizen and life as an ethnic subject are as likely to run up against one another.”[xx] This tension creates what Jean and John Comaroffthey describe as “increasingly irreconcilable, fractal forms of political being…, embodied in self-defined aggregates of persons, seek[ing] to open up possibilities for themselves, in pursuit of their passions, principles, ideals and interests.”[xxi]