Desiring Africans: An Introduction

Summary

Do not get tempted into that. You are young people. If you go that direction, we will punish you severely … It is condemned by nature. It is condemned by insects and that is why I have said they are worse than pigs and dogs.

Robert Mugabe, in the mining town of Shurugwi, 2011

In his well-received Desiring Arabs (2007), Joseph A. Massad extends the argument made by his mentor, Edward Said, in Orientalism (1978) that documents how orientalist writing was dehumanising and racist – an analysis of colonial discourse that postcolonial theorists have extended far beyond the Arab world. But Massad also broadens Michel Foucault's history of sexuality to demonstrate how colonial systems helped (mis)shape internalised conceptions of sexuality throughout the postcolonial world. He presents a wide array of Arabic writing from the nineteenth century to show the changes in the understanding of sexual practice that were influenced by European values, and in the process criticises the West for what amounts to a system of bait-and-switch: imposing Victorian standards on what had been stereotyped by them as the licentious Orient, and then in our time amassing their cultural troops to condemn what they now view as a sexually backward postcolony that needs ‘civilising’ yet again. Rayyan Al-Shawaf summarises Massad's approach as follows (and one might reasonably substitute the word ‘African’ for ‘Arab’ in this description, as I will argue in what follows):

Arab cultural traditions have always included a measure of tolerance for same-gender sex practices, without recognizing a separate socio-sexual categorization for those who engage in such practices. Recently, however, there has been an attempt by certain Westerners and Westernised Arabs to universalize arbitrary and exclusivist sexual identities, including heterosexuality and (more problematically) homosexuality. This initiative has caused a backlash in Arab countries against those who identify themselves as homosexual – an identity associated by many Arabs with Western cultural imperialism – but also against people who engage in same-gender sex without considering themselves homosexual. (Al-Shawaf ‘Review of Desiring Arabs’: 103)

Many others who are interested in postcolonial theory as it intersects with gender analysis can appreciate Massad's sensitivities (see, for example, Hawley Postcolonial, Queer and Postcolonial and Queer Theories) without agreeing with his politics, particularly in the arena of LGBTQ futures in Africa.