Gay, African, Middle-Class & Fabulous: Writing Queerness in New Writing from Nigeria & South Africa

Summary

In my earlier research (Adenekan 2012), I constructed a historical footprint of the agenda of same-sex desire in African literature and how this may be changing in the age of the internet. I argued that some members of the older generation of contemporary African writers used fictional homosexual characters as part of a larger project of decolonising the African body, but despite this agenda, their writing, such as that of Wole Soyinka's The Interpreters, also gave us a good insight into the figure of the homosexual. For some of the emerging voices, these earlier nationalistic projects contributed to the marginalisation of the figure of the African homosexual. In addition, their position seems to indicate that this figure is central to our understanding of the history of spectrality surrounding all marginalised bodies. In this article, I will be examining how some of the online fictional narratives are suggesting that the queer African body is also surrounded by the agenda of global capital.

It is obvious that, for a growing number of young Africans, straight or gay – as well as for many across the continent – the internet is ensuring that knowledge once privileged and situated within the confines of higher education has never been more free, more plentiful nor more available. For the sexually marginalised, digital technologies make romantic and sexual connections possible. They also reduce isolation from human contacts and even enable offline social interaction. Eve Sedgwick (‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’) surmises that capitalism relies on stimulating or creating consumer interest and participation and, through some of these emerging narratives in the online writing space, we are seeing how the internet, as a product of capitalism, has become a tool for generating contemporary queer identity, particularly in Nigeria and Kenya. Most importantly, much of the queer writing focuses mainly on the everyday middle-class African experience. Keguro Macharia, in an examination of queer Kenyan writing, recognises the shift in literary representation, ‘from the allegorical mode’ of the Ngugi and Soyinka generation, to a pre-occupation that is ‘now focused on quotidian details, without taking on the burden of representing revolutionary peasants, the urban working class, or betrayed freedom fighters’ (‘Blogging Queer Kenya’: 3).