Marc Epprecht

Sexual Orientation, Controversy, and Science

Summary Ongoing political controversies around the world exemplify a long-standing and widespread preoccupation with the acceptability of homosexuality. Nonheterosexual people have seen dramatic surges both in their rights and in positive public opinion in many Western countries. In contrast, in much of Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, Oceania, and parts of Asia, homosexual behavior remains illegal and severely punishable, with some countries retaining the death penalty for it. Political controversies about sexual orientation have often overlapped with scientific controversies. That is, participants on both sides of the sociopolitical debates have tended to believe that scientific findings—and scientific truths—about sexual orientation matter a great deal in making political decisions. The most contentious scientific issues have concerned the causes of sexual orientation—that is, why are some people heterosexual, others bisexual, and others homosexual? The actual relevance of these issues to social, political, and ethical decisions is often poorly justified, however.

Black skin, 'cowboy' masculinity: A genealogy of homophobia in the African nationalist movement in Zimbabwe to 1983

This paper examines the intellectual and social origins of racialist homophobia in contemporary Zimbabwean political discourse, exemplified by President Robert Mugabes anti‐homosexual speeches since the mid‐1990s. It challenges the notions that such homophobia is either essential to African patriarchy or simple political opportunism. Tracing overt expressions of intolerance towards male‐male sexuality back to the colonial period, it focuses on ways in which notions of appropriate, respectable, exclusive heterosexuality within the ‘cowboy’ culture of White Southern Rhodesia trickled into, or were interpreted in, the African nationalist movement. It concludes that understanding this history could improve efforts to address concerns around sexual health in Zimbabwe and elsewhere in the region, particularly silences around same‐sex sexuality in HIV/AIDS education and prevention.

Teaching about homosexualities to Nigerian university students: a report from the field

Nigeria’s diverse cultures, religions and political parties appear to be unified by a strong taboo against homosexuality and gay rights. This has affected academic research, HIV/AIDS programmes, and sexuality education, all which commonly show evidence of heterosexism, self-censorship and even explicit condemnations of homosexuality. Yet a dissident discourse in Nigeria, as well as research from elsewhere in the region, suggests that this appearance of unity may belie greater openness to the issues than assumed. Indeed, research shows that (1) many African societies are traditionally more accommodating toward non-normative sexualities than contemporary nationalist or cultural claims would allow, and (2) secretive ‘bisexuality’ is more common in practice (and tacitly acknowledged) than previously understood. Is it possible then that the presumption of homophobia and the fear of backlash that has clearly contributed to heterosexism and self-censorship in scholarship around homosexualities in Nigeria are exaggerated? Is it possible that Nigerians may be more open to consideration of scientific evidence and international best practices around sexual diversity, rights, and health than is commonly assumed in the literature? A trial intervention at a small state university in a predominantly rural area of Nigeria tested these questions by introducing wide-ranging, frank and non-judgemental (science-based) discussions of same-sex sexuality in several classes. Analysis of the students’ feedback finds that stigmatising attitudes toward homosexuality were indeed present among the students. However, there was also a high degree of curiosity, awareness of the existence of secretive homosexualities in Nigeria, desire for education, and confidence that traditional cultures and Nigerian democracy could accommodate individual freedom and sexual rights. The conclusion is that well-prepared researchers and educators could be less anxious and self-censoring around the topic of homosexuality than prevails at present. Careful attention would need to be paid to local sensibilities, but sexuality and HIV education programmes could probably be brought closer into line with world guidelines on best practices and comprehensive approaches to human sexuality education and sexual health.

The Marquis de Sade's Zimbabwe Adventure: A Contribution to the Critique of ‘African AIDS’

This article examines a passage in a largely neglected 18th-century novel by the Marquis de Sade. The passage involves a culturally Africanized character who logically refutes homophobic Christian arguments against tolerance of sexual diversity. In that way it precociously anticipated heated debates that bedevil human rights and HIV/AIDS interventions to the present. Sade, by representing African sexualities as more complex than asserted or implied in the heterosexual African AIDS literature, makes a positive contribution to contemporary debates about sexuality and race in Africa today, with implications for anti-essentialist scholarship and AIDS activism globally.

An Uncertain Age: The Politics of Manhood in Kenya

Israel, Laqech, and a newer type, ET13) quickly suffered from wheat rust and only occupied Ada’s uplands like Chafe Donsa, rather than the lower and flat vertisol areas that predominated in Ada and in areas along the Rift Valley zones. Wheat, however, was the crop of choice for projects in the Arsi area. In other, if not most, of the areas in the Rift Valley lakes maize also assumed a prominent role on abortive state farms where lighter soils were the norm, especially new varieties like A511 adapted to the drier, shorter seasons as farmers worked with extension agents to adopt hybrid seed distributed by government seed programs. So, while Bekele offers an impressive template for the Rift Valley lake region, he underplays the varieties of ethnicity, local conditions of cultivation, and national markets. For example, varieties of capsicum in Ethiopia, such as at Maraqo ridge, do not include “jalapenos” but instead other specific types of hot red and green capsicum peppers (C. frutescens and C. annuum) used as the base ingredient for Ethiopian cuisine and for export as a diaspora condiment and as the infamous red dye #2. Regardless of these issues, Ploughing New Ground is a valuable book that expands our understanding of agroecology in the wider history of Ethiopia. I expect that it will join the classical fare for the next generation that seeks to understand the dynamics of Ethiopia’s modern history.

Two decades of sexuality research in Africa south of the Sahara

The launch of this journal roughly coincided with my personal engagement with the study of sexualities. I had just landed in Zimbabwe at a moment when sexuality was re-emerging as a hot political issue. It had been very hot indeed in the middling days of colonial rule. Then, black Zimbabweans’ anxieties about the impacts of cash, urbanization, and the large-scale influx of male migrant labourers from Malawi, and white settlers’ fears of black male lust for white women were characteristic features of public discourse that helped to shape the form that the colonial state took (Jeater, 1993). The tone of that discourse tended towards moralistic, paternalistic, and often overtly racist. The liberation struggle, the dream of national development, and the shifting etiquette of scholarly enquiry, put sexuality talk largely off the main agenda in the 1970s and 80s. By the early 1990s, however, sexual mores were coming back in a big way as an area of political concern. The HIV/AIDS epidemic was spiralling out of control, and unequal gender relations expressed in normative sexuality were quite evidently a contributing factor to the calamity. What to do about that was complicated by a tendency in the media and among Western donors to pathologize/ otherize ‘African sexuality.’ That tendency was in some ways reminiscent of, and to some as infuriating as, in the colonial age. African critiques of the ‘westocentrism,’ and gender or ‘queer imperialism’ in Western responses to the HIV/AIDS pandemic at times astute, at times angry, at times hyperbolic – struck a chord that beckoned for more sensitive, nuanced research (see Achmat, 1993; Ahlberg, 1994; Arnfred, 2004; McFadden, 1992, for example). Sexualities 2018, Vol. 21(8) 1276–1281 ! The Author(s) 2018 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1363460718774530 journals.sagepub.com/home/sex

THE NATIVE VILLAGE DEBATE IN PIETERMARITZBURG, 1848–1925: REVISITING THE ‘SANITATION SYNDROME’

This article examines the history of debates around the creation of a ‘native village’ in Pietermaritzburg culminating in the construction of the citys first formal township. This, and the decision to locate the new township next to the citys main dump, have commonly been interpreted to corroborate Maynard Swansons influential concept of the ‘sanitation syndrome’. Swanson first coined that term to explain the origins of racial segregation in Durban, but it struck a chord very widely, not only because it problematized science as metaphorical, but also because it shifted responsibility for the antecedents of apartheid onto urban, self-styled progressive English-speaking officials and voters. From the Pietermaritzburg evidence, however, I argue that the concept ‘sanitation syndrome’ now unhelpfully elides or oversimplifies a complex history. I thus question its continued utility as a critique of cultural racism within liberal or modernization discourses in the wider contemporary regional context.

European Sexualities, 1400-1800 (review)

mate apparel and American women’s social or political status that require more explanation. For example, in regard to drawers, she suggests that “when women publically asserted their own claims to sexual pleasure, power, and economic independence, an open crotch was no longer respectable.”(42) While it might make intuitive sense, the explicit interconnections lack explication. My second concern is that though Fields aimed to “show how women’s efforts to shape their lives and their bodies according to their own desires and designs,” we actually find out little about women’s actual feelings or perceptions about intimate apparel or their bodies (14). Thus, women’s subjectivity remains an area ripe for further study. In the meantime, best to enjoy this wonderful volume.

Enriching Gender Studies in Sub-Saharan Africa

Two new books enrich our understanding of women and gender in sub-Saharan Africa. Brimming with empirical, historical detail, they would be useful in a wide variety of Africa and/or women and gender or sexuality oriented courses. They should also, once and for all, preclude the argument that gender, or indeed “women,” are Western concepts of little applicability in Africa. Wicked Women comprises fifteen essays that are united by the theme of black African women’s transgressions against sundry patriarchal norms — running away from husbands and fathers and fields, accumulating bank accounts, publicly criticizing men, having sex with whomever they choose, and more. The introductory chapter reviews the historiography of women and gender in sub-Saharan Africa in a non-controversial manner, beginning with Denise Paulme’s 1960 collection of essays and stretching to a few recent titles that make masculinity their main focus of attention. It praises African women’s contributions to debates around gender. It defines “wicked” as an analytic concept in an open-ended, ironic way that invites us to regard the different chapters as talking to each other about female agency rather than trying to dictate a new agenda. It concludes with the argument that women’s transgressions of

Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902-1935

Black Peril: the crimes violence and justice legislating virtue explaining Black Peril white women domestic labour black women syphilis coloureds, poor whites and boundaries.