EXCERPT. Continental drift

From the perspective of the early Christian missionaries and colonial officials in Africa, traditional patriarchal societies there were morally suspect or repugnant. However, to the extent that they maintained control over the rambunctious sexuality of young people and young women in particular, they could be admired and indeed, supported. It was also widely noted and admired by European observers that most African societies appeared not to tolerate exceptions to heterosexual norms. The disruptions caused by colonialism and racial capitalism, however, rapidly broke those traditional mores and controls down. By the late nineteenth century, the sexual health of Africans had consequently emerged as a significant concern to colonial administrations and their corporate and other allies.

The unchecked spread of sexually transmitted infections, above all syphilis, was not just a humanitarian crisis. Syphilis prior to the late 1940s was effectively incurable. It frequently resulted in insanity and a horrible, humiliating death, including for wives infected by their husbands with all that implied for stable family life. There were material and political implications to the disease as well. Even less debilitating infections like gonorrhoea undermined the viability of a cheap African labour force in that the resultant sickness and absenteeism imposed significant costs on industry and infrastructural development. The existence of sexually transmitted diseases on such a scale also exposed to public debate the sordid underpinnings of the so-called civilizing mission. The male migrant labour system, the legal and institutional apparatus erected to minimize women’s and children’s presence in towns, infertility, and the proliferation of female prostitution (to use the language of the time) that often flowed from these policies, brought condemnation of colonialism from critics as wide-ranging as Christian missionaries, African chiefs and the Comintern.

Colonial medical interventions to address the crisis often did put humanitarian concerns at the fore. Funding and personnel, however, were never remotely adequate to the task. Moreover, often operating under extremely primitive laboratory conditions and in the face of unfamiliar tropical diseases, European medical interventions almost inescapably drew upon poor or flatly wrong empirical research. The extent of the syphilis epidemic around the turn of the century notably appears to have been hugely exaggerated due to confusion between the very similar spirochetes of syphilis and yaws, the latter disease being endemic in much of Africa and non-sexually transmitted. Medical interventions around sexual health further suffered from high levels of morally normative language and presumptions. Indeed, the majority of the early heath care providers were missionaries or lay-Christian doctors and nurses. Their understanding of sexuality was profoundly coloured by the vocation that had brought them to Africa in the first place: convert ‘barbarous’ or ‘lascivious’ Africans to a model of ‘civilized’ gender relations and sexuality such as they idealized about their own societies. Disease in this way became a rhetorical crowbar to pry Africans away from customary practices and understandings of puberty transitions, courtship, marriage and even specific sexual acts. To reconstruct Africans’ sexuality in this way was to lay the foundation for the rise of a ‘respectable’ African middle class ( assimilés or assimilados in the French and Portuguese colonies).

In practical terms, what this meant was that medical interventions, purportedly on behalf of Africans’ sexual health, were frequently punitive, deeply humiliating for the recipients and either useless or actually counterproductive to preventing the spread of diseases. The practice that the Shona people of modern Zimbabwe termed chibeura was one of the more notorious examples: compulsory vaginal examinations of women in town, sometimes with male African police constables in attendance, followed by deportation back to the rural areas if they were found to have an infection. In other settings, men who did not report symptoms for treatment faced a prison sentence or were fired and deported to rural homes if discovered. And discovered they would be, since many of the large employers subjected their contract African labourers to mandatory genital and anal examinations as a pre-condition for employment or re-employment after every short-term contract.

The colonial medical establishment through the first half of the twentieth century also de facto supported the view that male–male sexuality among Africans either did not exist or was not a potential health concern. Some doctors may have simply accepted the prevailing wisdom about Africans’ supposedly primitive heterosexual nature and not even considered homosexuality as a possibility. Others may have felt a similarly misplaced confidence in the progress of ‘respectability’ or assimilation. This view acknowledged the existence of certain homosexual-like rites or relationships in traditional culture but felt (as the anthropologists’ African informants assured them) that such practices had become moribund before the march of Christian civilization. Yet at the same time, medical professionals were unquestionably aware of new forms of MSM (men who have sex with men) appearing in non-traditional settings like migrant labour camps and same-sex boarding schools. Doctors were often called as witnesses in criminal cases of indecent assault or sodomy, for example. That medical health officials did not write more about such situational sex probably reflects the fact that it was not perceived as a public health concern. Male-male sex may even, not to be admitted in public, have been regarded as a public health good.

How could European men from societies that otherwise criminalized and scorned homosexuality have construed MSM among Africans as a relatively desirable behaviour? The simple answer is that anally transmitted sexual infections were almost never observed in the dominant forms of MSM practised by African men, and indeed the men themselves claimed that anal sex was not allowed according to the prevailing etiquette. Rather, in a strictly hierarchical relationship, the ‘husband’ would emit between the legs of the ‘wife’. The participants in these relationships for the most part clearly were not turning into ‘real homosexuals’ to disturb social decorum. Male-male thigh sex or masturbation was meanwhile an obviously less risky activity than penetrative sex in male-female prostitution in the context of the times. As a discreet, temporary expedient, it helped to preserve men’s marriages to women and social stability back home in the rural areas, not to mention protecting white women from the assumed scourge that might result from unrequited black male lusts (the so-called ‘Black Peril’). Male-male sexuality associated with long-distance porterage, prisons, mine hostels and other modern institutions was thus somewhat embarrassing to colonial health officials but could be tolerated or even tacitly condoned as the lesser of several evils.

Public health not being at risk and moral education being largely in the hands of the missionaries, colonial states thus made scant movement on this issue beyond guarding against obvious breaches of the peace and public decency. The first noteworthy health intervention that I was able to uncover was not until the late 1930s or early 1940s. In that instance, the South African government lent its support to an International Red Cross initiative to teach African working-class men the health benefits of abstinence, self-repression and/or self-masturbation. The pamphlet they circulated to men on the mines in southern Africa was principally concerned with averting sexually transmitted infections acquired by the men from female prostitutes, again to use the language of the times. However, it also vigorously denounced homosexuality (‘This unnatural act, repulsive to all healthy-minded men, must be strenuously opposed and eradicated’). It underscored this point by anchoring itself in reference both to modern medical science and to the ethnography of (presumed) ancient African cultures. Indeed, without noticing any contradiction with its masturbation advice for grown men, the authors swathed themselves under the mantle of respect for African traditions: ‘Tribal Laws of the Bantu provided drastic penalties for sexual irregularities.’

This is not to make homophobic and racist Europeans the centre of attention. On the contrary, African religious leaders, political activists and intellectuals all played supportive and sometimes leading roles in constructing an ideology of African sexuality that served their social and political agendas in the rapidly changing environment. Knowledge about ‘shameful’ or ‘emasculating’ practices such as sex in prisons or for money was suppressed in this discourse, particularly as the struggle against European colonialism heated up. By the 1960s, drawing upon eclectic sources including European ethnographies, Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary thought, and Christian scriptures, African nationalist ideologues and politicians asserted a distinctive form of homophobia that presented steadfast African heterosexuality in opposition to dangerous, morally corrosive outside influences. As Tanzania’s first president put it in justifying his preference for criminalizing homosexuality as long back as 1973, he was ‘amazed’ by then liberal European attitudes on the issue: ‘I can’t even begin to talk about it.’

Marc Epprecht is head of the department of global development studies at Queen’s University, Canada

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