‘Out’ in Africa!

Chantal Zabus

By presenting the homosexual militant group ultimately at odds with the feminist factions, Doumbi-Fakoly’s fiction may be said to espouse the ideals of one Western school of queer thought, that argues that queer theory ‘still seems … to denote primarily the study of male homosexuality’ and that the field of queer-inflected lesbian and gay studies is “feminism-free.”  Yet, it is difficult to sustain a representation of queer as not feminist, since prominent queer theorists such as Judith Butler, Teresa de Lauretis, Jonathan Dollimore, David Halperin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Valerie Traub and Jeffrey Weeks are undoubtedly feminist. Annamarie Jagose goes as far as claiming that “queer theory was developed out of feminist knowledges.” Doumbi-Fakoly’s text cannot envisage a reconciliation between feminism and queerness. Also, if queerness is “a suspension of (sexual) identity,” as David Halperin holds, in the Senegalese and larger African context, that queer ‘lightness of being’ is buttressed by creation myths. This annexation of myths reveals a certain level of insecurity (possibly ignorance) in dealing with same-sex desire. Indeed, in his atavistic hankering after Egyptian myths, Doumbi-Fakoly fails to account for relational nexuses that are extant in West African societies.

For instance, in Hausa (Northern Nigerian) society, such relationships involve the ‘yan kifi or ‘male lesbians,’ who take up the receptive role, or the ‘yan daudu’, who have relations between themselves rather than with their ‘active’ ‘husbands’ (miji). These sexual variants in Northern Nigeria and the Northern Islamized West African regions do not exclude marriage with a woman under Muslim law. Challenges to the Hausa, and more largely West African, concept of masculinity, thus come from these men who talk or act ‘like women’ (kamar mata), and their shamanic (Bori) practices which challenge the Islamic (and Christian, for that matter) endorsement of the appropriateness of male dominance.

With the possible exception of Maddy’s novel, which envisages sexual liberation for its main protagonist, Chaîne joins a brace of 1970s West African novels, which document, as in early anthropological and colonial discourse, unequal relations between partners (differences in age, social status, and pecuniary means).  We had to wait till the 1990s to see a growing number of African literary texts such as Doumbi-Fakoly’s La révolte des galsénésiennes project what Plutarch used to call charis, which Foucault famously shifted from marital loveto “l’amour des garcons”; and which could be translated as “obligingness” or “gracious reciprocity.” In recent legal discourse it is imbued with the Human Rights vocabulary, “consent.” With the increasing creation of consensual charistos characters,writers are now definitely on the path to being “out in Africa.”