‘Out’ in Africa!

Chantal Zabus

Homosexuality, male or female, is equated with total self-deprecation and degeneracy in Bokoum’s Chaîne. It precedes ‘normative’ conjugal love, which is unambiguously located in heterosexuality. Homosexuality precedes heterosexuality the way essence precedes existence a la Sartre.

The symbology which underwrites and energises Kanaan’s transformation are intertextual to those in South African K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001). Both novels make references to the god, Osiris, who was dismembered in order to be reborn. However in Boukoum’s work, since Kanaan is black, there is a further significance between this Osiris myth and Sartre’s essay Orphée noir where the black man’s existential condition and his upsurge into the world in Negritudinist self-assertion within black modernity, is described as “the black dying at the hands of white culture in order to be reborn into the black spirit.” Bokoum also deploys African myths about the creation of the Universe out of a fleshly severance, which Kanaan refers to as “a humongous reaming” (76), echoed in his own abused flesh; his excesses are a kind of primal libidinal initiation rite. Another similarity in narrative strategy within both novels is that Duiker’s Angelo is, likewise, the traumatized victim of a gang-rape and is haunted by a previous gang-rape and murder of his mother by his father and his cohorts. After experiencing unsatisfactory sex with women, he embraces homosexuality as a transcendental, superior form of mystic brotherhood, which entails the exclusion of women. Ancient mythology is also deployed in Duiker’s work. Angelo identifies with the Egyptian God Horus, the avenging, falcon-headed son of the royal incest between Isis and Osiris. The erotic allusions also insinuate a seminal Hellenic speculation about love amongst boys and, more immediately, to the amitiés particulières depicted in colonial narratives.

When the African protagonist ‘becomes’ a homosexual abroad, the premise is that homosexuality is the prerogative of English and French missionaries, teachers, and artists who ‘initiated’ him to it at home. For instance, in Nigerian novelist Kole Omotoso’s The Edifice (1971), as in Maddy’s novel, it is intimated that the ingénu is sexually initiated by a European priest. In other words, ‘vice’ was imported to Africa by ‘depraved’ Europeans or invasive Arab emirs, who penetrated the passive Sub-Saharan lands and bodies and introduced “new abominations,” as depicted in Ghanaian Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons (1979).

Doumbi-Fakoly’s La révolte des Galsénésiennes (1994) resorts to mythology to justify and prop up homosexuality. In an interview with Adele King some years ago, Doumbi-Fakoly reported that the novel was based on the Egyptian myth of the Mout‑Itef or primordial Mother-Father, Mout, meaning, of course, mother, and Itef, father. In the novel, a male homosexual group calling itself ‘Différence,’ is in league with a vanguard group for the ‘Rassemblement des femmes de la République du Galséné’, RAFERGA (this is an anagram of Senegal). Différence collides with ‘Conscience féminine,’ a conservative women’s group promoting the continuation of clitoridectomy and infibulation and opposing ‘vaginist or sexual revolution and homosexuality.’ Tellingly, Différence argues for its postmodern sexual cause through deploying the creation myths of a child’s original androgyny, immortalized by Marcel Griaule’s conversations with the Dogon sage, Ogotemmêli in the 1950s. They explain that there are “are women in men’s bodies and men in women’s bodies” (41). The group considers homosexuality as being rooted in one or more previous incarnations and it is the “the logical consequence of the emergence of that first, primordial nature” (52). The Wolof terminology for a male homosexual – Gor-jigeen (literally: ‘man-woman’, the ‘man’ coming first) – seems, ironically, to entrench the fixity of sexual identities at the expense of queerness.

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