On workshopping and voices of authority
Same-sex practices and relationships are caught between colonial institutions of sexual normalcy and deviance and attempts to reclaim what was lost as a result of those impositions. As Sylvia Tamale poignantly asks, referring to a Ugandan anti-gay politician, “Is it not the mother of all ironies for a Bible-wielding African politician named ‘David’ dressed in a three-piece suit, caressing his iPhone, and speaking a colonial language to condemn anything for its un-Africanness?” (2014: 168).15 While those against same-sex rights in the name of decolonization, for example, cling to false colonial claims about same-sex life and tradition, those in favor can sometimes fall into a similar trap. KwaZulu-Natal (quietly) boasts a long history of same-sex practices, expressed in local terms for same-sexualities and a modern same-sex vernacular. While this reality may not be entirely unique in the country, the cultural and political positioning of KZN is, as African resistance to colonialism and modern-day Black African nationalism are distinctly tied to the Zulu kingdom.
The country’s progressive Constitution, though hailed by many, is sometimes pitted against Black African values by traditionalists because it sanctions same-sex and gender-variant life, that which is not only described as ‘un-African’ but, within that description, as ‘un-Zulu.’ As noted in a local KZN news article, “The constitution is only a government document - the king’s rule is considered supreme.” The king, whose role is to both safeguard and protect Zulu culture, claims that same-sexuality has no place in it (Tolsi 2006). Writing about sexual and gender non-conformity in KZN thus also presents a unique challenge to widely held beliefs about the province’s conservatism in everyday discussions of same-sex life. Sex, gender, and sexuality are also uniquely constructed in relation to Zuluness among transgender and same-sex identified izangoma in the province. This uniqueness is important considering how the diversity of South African experiences is often subsumed by the nation-state umbrella.
Within the province, different speakers voice their claims to knowledge and sounds of dissent. The question of authoritative voices is a matter of both actors and levels. Individuals produce knowledge about themselves and their own subjectivities, as do others. The same occurs at the level of institutional knowledge, whether the actors are LGBTl-focused or other NGOs, media organizations, churches, research organizations, or legal/lobbying bodies. Local, municipal, provincial, national, and international governance structures also contribute as actors within these individual and institutional levels. In narrowing in on KZN, certain loud voices proclaiming versions of truth overlay and obscure others. Though knowledge about sexuality is created, circulated, and contested by many of them, two in particular appear authoritative; though, under the surface, this is mostly only in name.
At the beginning of my field research in 2015, the voices of then President Jacob Zuma and King Goodwill Zwelithini were put on pedestals by their own decree. However, their authority on issues of gender and sexuality was self-proclaimed as often as it was dismissed by LGBT1 activists, creating a queer juxtaposition that kept them in circulation. Though in different ways, both are considered custodians of Zulu culture (Gumede 2007: 406), with Zuma’s ancestral homestead situated in rural KwaZulu-Natal (Nkandla); and, as such, their homophobic statements are iterated through both Zuma’s brand of Black African nationalism and Zulu nationalist sentiments promoted by the king. Because of this, 1 argue that same-sexualities are produced by both figureheads as ‘un-African’ in KwaZulu-Natal as a result of being produced as ‘un-Zulu.’ The ‘un-Zuluness’ of same-sexuality can be iterated even when not cited as such. Likewise, Zuluness can be iterated to bolster the authenticity of same-sex desire, even if it is underlying.
Zuma, reviled by some, adored by others, occupies a peculiar symbolism for people in KZN by virtue of his deep ties to the province. Despite Zuma’s departure from office in 2018, those ties remain relevant, and are not shared in 2020 by President Cyril Ramaphosa, who is more supportive of gay and lesbian rights on paper than his predecessor. Tellingly, Zuma was one of the few national leaders in Africa to outwardly condemn homosexuality who referred to an awareness of same-sex existence in the decades prior to the 1990s. While scholars and activists argue that these leaders are in part responsible for the production of the ’myth’ that ‘homosexuality is un-African,’ the consolidation of this rhetoric into that discourse fails to capture nuances of different contexts, motivations, and intended meanings, just as it fails to acknowledge tacit forms of sexual and gender queerness in KZN, including but not limited to those which comprise queer world-making. During a presentation in central Pietermaritzburg on the results of a local study conducted on H1V/A1DS, men who have sex with men, and stigma, a woman in the audience commented that some places are not conducive to a visible expression of the sexual self, so much so that in small KZN towns and rural areas “it is difficult to see the gay person,” in such a way that “a person can be ‘gay’ in town but ‘not gay’ in Nkandla.”16 The use of Zuma’s ancestral
Theorizing unidignified sounds postapartheid 49 home as an example further mires the former president’s homophobia in contestation.
While Zuma and King Zwelithini have stakes in the authority of their own voices when it comes to how sexes, genders, and sexualities should be performed in KZN, other voices rival their volume. Celebrities, churches, schools, newspapers and other print media outlets, local representatives, and individual community members all produce knowledge about gender and sexuality in the province. These ideas circulate in respective spaces of influence, but also on social media sites and platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp, and in social groups through more fluid artifacts than articles, sermons, lessons, images, speeches, and stories, such as the sayings, trends, jokes, memes, and other fleeting things that are the stuff of everyday discussions, musings, and gossip. Non-governmental and community-based organizations are also responsible for circulating knowledge about issues of gender and sexuality, particularly in Durban, Pietermaritzburg, and other towns and areas in the southern coastal, midland, and, to a lesser extent, northern regions of the province.
While community organizing has resulted in progress in the struggle for LGBTI rights and recognition, including the push for hate crimes legislation among NGOs in the province, there are issues surrounding the proliferation of NGO politics. Though NGOs provide physical and figurative space to make marginalized ideas, subjectivities, and, most importantly, people heard, there are problems that stem from their presence, operations, information, and approaches, including those which are lacking. Like LGBTI rights themselves, rights-based organizations are limited when it comes to their potential to alleviate several issues that gender and sexual non-conforming people face. As Nolwazi once said of the psycho-social support initiatives of LGBTI organizations in KZN, “psycho-social support won’t bring me back home.”17 Furthermore, while the institutionalized technologies of queer selfhood such organizations promote are meant to bolster and nurture local ideas, identities, and embodiments, they can have the opposite effect.
During gender and sexuality workshops run by SF in Pietermaritzburg townships and semi-rural areas, the workshop expectations shed light on some of these problems of unpacking same-sex and trans subjectivities through the use of often unfamiliar categories. Some common themes across different workshop expectations were defining ‘gay,’ ‘lesbian,’ and ‘bisexual’ identity, alongside what it means to be ‘transgender’ and ‘intersex,’ the nature of same-sex practices and identities, and the origin! s) of ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ specifically. One participant in a workshop in Imbali township in early 2015 summed up this line of questioning by asking, when did these start? The participant indicated to the facilitator that they were aware of same-sex practices; but by asking about the ‘start’ of identities, a gap was illustrated between the two, and between modes of same-sex existence that occurred outside of and within an English-language LGBTI NGO discourse.
This idea was reiterated as 1 attended more and more workshops, as participants asked questions, mused, and interjected in different discussions. What, people wanted to know, was this acronymized thing, and how might it be similar or different to things they knew of, did, observed, or lived? My own observation thus also revealed disconnects between the aims of the workshops and the thought processes of those people who attended as beneficiaries. By educating people about different sexual identities and practices, workshops provide a valuable space for people who were seeking to understand their gender and/or sexuality and find community. However, sometimes these explanations also confused and perhaps even isolated people further.
In this way, the workshops helped dispel the idea that sexual and gender variance is ‘un-Zulu,’ but also while reifying a binary, categorical morphology of ‘available' modes of same-sex, transgender, and, to an extent, also intersex being. In educating local populations in state-sanctioned LGBT1 legalese, and the various categories and terms referring to same-sex and transgender practices and people, NGO programs and their facilitators curate correct and good ways of being sexually and gender variant while outlining all the wrong ways. These messages constitute an education in what Graeme Reid (2013) refers to as ‘how to be a real gay,’ and they have been succeeded by continuous tensions along racial and cultural lines in LGBT1 organizing.
In the early days of South African democracy, Nomfundo Luphondwana wrote an article on race and lesbian activism in the country, which, though things have changed in the last two decades, is still relevant. In critiquing the White-dominated lesbian organizing of the time, she said:
It is unfortunate that the majority of both gay and lesbian organisations overrely on ‘sexual orientation’ as a basis of building a movement, as this is usually at the expense of the political, social and economic backgrounds of its membership.
(Luphondwana 1996: 72)
Luphondwana continues to argue not only that White lesbian activists lacked empathy for the concerns of Black lesbians and the wider Black population, particularly those living in the townships outside urban activist centers, but also that the way ‘sexual orientation’ was iterated by that activism collided with Black experiences of sexuality in everyday life. For example, in the ways that ‘pride’ was celebrated and in the ways that publicly ‘coming out’ contradicted Black South African norms of respect for elders (1996: 75). Though these critiques are not the universal critiques of Black LGBTI activists, they show the mark left by apartheid in the lack of consideration for Black South African experiences, and the failure of White activists to “confront and constructively deal with a complex and webbed relationship between blacks and whites” (1996: 72). White LGBTI activists have also participated in the blackwashing of homophobia by not only reproducing it as a Black, township problem, but by indefensibly accusing Black LGBT1 activists themselves of homophobia and racism.
The winter 2015 issue of Out Africa Magazine featured an article titled “Gay, Proud & Colour Blind” in which the author, the magazine’s White editor Tommy Patterson (2015b), called out Black lesbian activists for organizing an alternative event to the ‘main’ Cape Town Pride. Patterson also criticized those “militant gay women” in the issue’s Editor’s Note (2015a: 1), and published another scathing article on the same subject in the following issue, written by the White Cape Town Pride 2015 Festival director, Matthew Van As. In said article, Van As identified “people who wish to divide the community by labeling their members as ’black Lesbians’” (2015: 3). The title of Patterson’s original article, “Gay, Proud & Color Blind,” stems from his claims that activist Funeka Soldaat’s “battle cry of BLACK LESBIANS as emblazoned on her t-shirt hardly portrays an image of inclusiveness” and “wouldn’t GAY, PROUD & COLOUR BLIND be more appropriate?”18 Patterson goes so far as to claim to be “sick to the stomach of these racist, homophobic radicals who are trying to scuttle every community event that they don’t control” (2015b: 21). After this clash, Cape Town Pride’s 2016 theme was set as Gay, Proud and Colourblind, which was later changed after a wave of criticism (Igual 2015). The Cape Town Pride debate follows from a series of confrontations around race before, during, and in the wake of pride events in South Africa (see for example Davis 2012).
While NGOs and other community-based LGBTI organizations rival the, for lack of a more nuanced description, homophobic and transphobic rhetoric of officials like Zuma and King Zwelithini, the racist and sexist discourses emerging from LGBTI media sources, and therefore also from the LGBTI communities and groups they are an outlet for, also criticize, exclude, and invisibilize Black LGBTI people, particularly Black lesbians and trans men. The work of LGBTI rights, recognition, and respect in South Africa can sometimes mirror the racism, sexism, classism, and - while not homophobia per se - at times the transphobia of that work’s detractors. Even when NGOs, like SF, explicitly serve the LGBTI community through a broad and comprehensive lens of social justice and Black liberation, issues around their intent, accuracy, empathy, capabilities, and effectiveness still persist.
Despite speaking to me about the presence of SF workshops on gender and sexuality coinciding with a degree of acceptance of LGBTI people in her neighborhood of Edendale, 21-year-old Thandazo also realized the limitations: not everyone in the community would come to workshops; and those who did might only be there for the food, and the 20 rand ($1.20) transportation subsidies. Being unemployed, she herself relied on this as a vital source of income. Thandazo’s skepticism echoed her criticisms of local NGOs and their failure to deliver promises of a better life. While she saw the importance of these dialogues and. at times, the importance of LGBTI visibility, she expressed that she was wary of what happens, and does not happen, when a community is considered ‘workshopped.'
She wished SF could do more for the local community, including but not limited to helping with employment. I first began regularly encountering Thandazo at an LGBT1 youth empowerment program in Edendale designed to build interpersonal skills, financial literacy, and job-seeking knowledge, such as how to write a resume, interact with potential employers, and create small business plans. Around that time, she had planned to join her sister working at a fast-food chain restaurant in Durban, but that fell through. During the program, she had written her own plan for a gift-wrapping business which would creatively reuse and upcycle paper products like newsprint. One of my first real glimpses of Thandazo, the detailed proposal reflected her creative spirit and stuck with me as she would muse about her desires for a better life on walks through Edendale. After the program ended, she had dreams to open a small salon, but had trouble acquiring start-up funds and key donations of necessary items like mirrors. She also wanted to write a memoir, reflecting on her own life story as she told it to me through different moments as entry points, each telling another side of it, and of her, like a rolling die.
In the wake of the youth program, Thandazo was frustrated by the barriers to technologies that facilitators had ensured her would lead down the path to employment and security: access to a computer, the internet, e-mail, and printing. Having to rely on unreliable sources for these, Thandazo’s frustration mirrored her frustration with NGOs like SF. She wondered, for example, why they could not help clean up the fields we sat in as she told me about her life, fields that used to be nice places for people to hang out. She imagined the word 'Edendale’ being spelled out in big letters on the hillside near the hospital, like in Hollywood. The presence of SF gave her, and others, not only false hope of better lives but also of a better Edendale. Often upset at those empty promises, she saw such organizations as disconnected from and uninterested in reality, noticing that NGO staff who lived in town or nearby Imbali would never spend any free time in Edendale.
Thandazo also took issue with the knowledge promoted by SF during workshops on gender and sexuality. Their black-and-white explanations of homosexuality and bisexuality, and implicit biphobia in discussions of sexual orientation, bothered her. While Thandazo preferred to date women, but also dated local men, these frustrations with workshopped identities at times seemed to fuel the way she performed her sexuality, saying that at the end of the day it is “better for people ... who act just straight.”19 As 1 discuss further in Chapter 3, Thandazo has performed heterosexuality as a form of selfprotection because, as she said, “sometimes you end up getting raped, because like in this area, people don’t see you - men, they see, they know that you dating women, and most of them don't like it.”
On the one hand, she saw her bisexuality as an incidental mode of selfpreservation, articulated for her, rather than by her, by means of the LGBTI-NGO terminology that implied she was not a lesbian if she dated men, and not straight if she dated women.20 On the other hand, she was frustrated when her bisexuality was attacked from within the community. She said:
Bisexual doesn’t kill anyone! [...] gay people don't like it [...] even [Spectrum LGBTI Forum], why do they put it there? [...] What’s LGBT1? [...] B stands for bisexual, so why do they put it there if they don’t like it?
Thandazo's need to hide her same-sex subjectivity in the local community was thus coupled with the biphobia she felt from the LGBTI community. Even Fikile, who worked for SF, relayed her concerns about rampant and institutionalized biphobia.
The lines drawn between acronymized sexual and gender identities - figuratively in the everyday bureaucracy and grassroots work that is LGBTI activism in Pietermaritzburg and its surroundings, and literally on paper flipcharts in township workshop spaces - were both liberating and constraining for staff and beneficiaries of services. Nolwazi for example, who had been with the organization for over a decade and expressed that she felt empowered in her identity as a Black Zulu lesbian woman, at times felt that ‘lesbian’ and ‘woman’ failed to represent her identity as an activist, a person, and a member of her natal family and extended community. These considerations reveal an important concept: that of refusal. As much as markers of identities and everyday practices in English and isiZulu vernacular can sound sexy and dignified, they can sound negative and prohibited, figuratively harsh and also painful to the ear, ill-fitting, and wrong.
