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Abstract
This article gives an account of Tejumola Olaniyan’s under-appreciated role in supporting the emergence of the field of queer African literary studies, and provides a provisional historiography and bibliography of that field. The article then reads Olaniyan’s work, in particular Arrest The Music! Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics, through a queer lens. Olaniyan’s examination of the “strange” relationship between the African state, its rebels, and its subjects, across his archive, and his nuanced discussion of transgression and norm—“libidinal” and otherwise—offers rich intellectual potential for African queer studies, and queer studies at large.
Keywords:
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Notes
1 Moradewun Adejunmobi describes it in this way: “That Teju spent so much time editing scholarly books and guest-editing special issues of journals is itself noteworthy, since the time spent editing books that advanced the careers of other scholars undoubtedly slowed down his work on his own books. But throughout his career, there was a constancy to Teju’s intellectual generosity and his dedication to bringing scholars together as part of the process of extending the boundaries of what we know…. The list of service positions occupied by Teju, and through which he worked to bolster scholarship in postcolonial and African cultural studies is too long to be cited in full” (“Tejumola”).
2 Olaniyan’s Citation2018 special issue of JALA on Biodun Jeyifo, inaugurating a new series on “Critical Masters,” which included his essay on Jeyifo and his bibliography of Jeyifo’s work, is one of many examples.
3 He was nominated for the award just before he passed away in 2019.
4 Matthew H. Brown and Akin Adesokan both recall a lecture Olaniyan gave in 2013 addressing gay issues (personal correspondence) and I hope to find the notes to that lecture eventually; this essay will inevitably miss the mark of a complete accounting of his engagement with this issue.
5 I still can’t believe I won’t turn a corner at a conference and start smiling at the sight of Teju’s face and that familiar, worn leather jacket.
6 According to the introduction to the anthology, “its design has been influenced” by a course on African literary criticism Olaniyan had been teaching (1).
7 They seem to have been influenced by then-recent ethnographic and historical work on queer African lives, most prominent of which were Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe’s Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities (1998), Marc Epprecht’s Hungochani: The History of a Dissident Sexuality in Southern Africa (2004), Ruth Morgan and Saskia Wiering’s Tommy Boys, Lesbian Men, and Ancestral Wives: Female Same-Sex Practices in Africa (2005)—and possibly both Zackie Achmat’s Citation1993 article, "‘Apostles of Civilised Vice’: ‘Immoral Practices’ and ‘Unnatural Vice’ in South African Prisons and Compounds, 1890–1920," and the landmark 1994 anthology (published in the United States in 1995), Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa, by Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron.
8 Agenda’s history of inter-disciplinary work on same-sex sexuality began with their 1991 special issue on Sexual Politics (which had a profile of the Organization of Lesbian and Gay Activists by Julia Nicol and an article by Louise Mina titled “Questioning Heterosexism: A Dead Debate or a Valid Challenge?”), and continued with the regular inclusion of articles on LGBTQ issues. Their special issues on queer themes since Reddy’s are Queer & Trans Art-iculations: Decolonizing Genders and Sexualities in the Global South, edited by Haley McEwan and Tommaso M. Milani in 2014; ‘Non-Normative’ Sexual and Gender Diversities in Africa, edited by Zethu Matebeni and Thabo Mbisi in 2015; and Confronting Violence Against LGBTIQ + People in African Contexts, edited by Deborah Ewing, Anthony Brown, Nonhlanhla Mkhize, and Thabo Mbisi in 2020. The journal is a crucial archive for the larger field of Queer African Studies. It is also worth mentioning Mikki Van Zyl and Melissa Steyn’s two volumes, Performing Queer: Shaping Sexualities 1994–2004 (2005) and The Prize and the Price: Shaping Sexualities in South Africa (2009), which also indicate the liveliness of critical work on same-sex sexualities and gender non-conformity within a larger feminist frame in South Africa. The journal Safundi, meanwhile, began publishing on queer themes with a 2010 issue including multiple essays on, and work by, Caster Semenya and Zanele Muholi.
9 Charles Gueboguo’s La question homosexuelle en Afrique: Le cas du Cameroun was also published in 2006.
10 Feminist Africa, founded in 2002, continues this attention to issues of sexuality and queer studies with their 2020 issue edited by Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué,“Gender and Sexuality in African Futurism,” which is also focused on cultural production.
11 See for example John C. Hawley’s Citation2001 collection Postcolonial and Queer Theories: Intersections and Essays, his 2001 collection Postcolonial, Queer: Theoretical Intersections, and his 2003 special issue on Postcolonial Gay and Lesbian Literature in the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, as well as Arnaldo Cruz-Malave and Martin F. Manalanson’s 2002 collection Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism, all of which include work on African cultural texts. Hawley has been an indefatigable chronicler of queer and, lately, transgender African textuality. “Black Diaspora” has been another important theoretical framework within which work on queer African literature has been cultivated, such as Jafari Allen’s Citation2012 special issue on Black Queer Diaspora in GLQ. It is also worth noting how early in the development of the field Jarrod Hayes’ book Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb was, appearing in 2000.
12 The section includes essays by Stobie, Elleke Boehmer, Drew Shaw, and Alexie Tcheuyap on Zimbabwean and South African literature and Francophone cinema, as well as an important piece by the Nigerian poet Unoma Azuah, “The Emerging Lesbian Voice in Nigerian Feminist Literature”—an emergence she was participating in, documenting, and analyzing in relative critical isolation.
13 Rather than having a separate section on “LGBTQI issues,” African Sexualities includes work on same-sex sexuality, intersex issues, or transgender identity within almost every themed section, from “Sexuality, Power and Politics” to “Pedagogical Approaches.” Tamale models this approach in her introduction, when she makes gay rights an equal part of a larger argument about sexual autonomy: “the criminal legal system in most African states attempts to regulate how, when, and with whom we can have consensual sex. The offenses of prostitution, abortion, and adultery clearly curtail both women’s and men’s sexual autonomy…, and the criminalization of homosexuality affects both men and women who do not conform to the dominant ideology of heterosexuality” (3).
14 2013 also saw other significant publications. S. N. Nyeck and Marc Epprechts’s Sexual Diversity in Africa: Politics, Theory and Citizenship in Africa has a range of excellent essays, although only Nyeck’s piece on mass media in Cameroon can really be described as literary/cultural studies. Nana Akua Amponsah and Toyin Falola’s collection Women, Gender, and Sexualities in Africa includes a section titled “Homosexuality and Identity Politics.” Although that collection includes quite a lot of work on literature as a whole, this section is dominated by anthropology. Falola’s veritable library of edited collections increasingly includes interesting work on queer issues, and Nyeck’s 2019 Routledge Handbook of Queer African Studies is a key recent text in queer African studies as a whole.
15 Julie Moreau and T. J. Tallie define queer African studies, meanwhile, as “a shifting but coherent aggregate of work by scholars, artists, and activists that seeks to re-examine and recast historic relations of gender and sexuality on the continent” (49).
16 I offer here an incomplete, chronological list of monographs on literary and cultural production from Africa through a queer lens. It is worth noting, however, that the monograph form tends to be dominated by scholars based in the Global North with access to funding for time and resources; articles, essays in anthologies, and indeed blog posts often contain exciting and important critical work from Africa itself, such as Keguro Macharia’s blog Gukira: With(out) Predicates (https://gukira.wordpress.com), which is essential reading. Nonetheless, this list offers perspective on the contours of the field: Hayes’ Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb (2000), the final chapters of Awam Amkpa’s Theater and Postcolonial Desire (2004), Stephanie Newell’s The Forger’s Tale: The Search for Odeziaku (2006), Hoad’s African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality and Globalization (2007), Stobie’s Somewhere in the Double Rainbow: Representations of Bisexuality in Post-Apartheid Novels (2007), Evan Mwangi’s Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality (2009), Kanika Batra’s Feminist Visions and Queer Futures in Postcolonial Drama (2011), which looks at Nigeria alongside Jamaica and India, Munro’s South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come: Queer Sexuality and the Struggle for Freedom (2012), Jean Zaganiaris’ Queer Maroc: sexualités, genres et (trans)identités dans la littérature marocaine (2013), Chantal Zabus’s Out in Africa: Same-Sex Desire in Sub-Saharan Literatures and Cultures (2013), Joseph Boone’s The Homoerotics of Orientalism (2014), Andrew Van der Vlies’ Present Imperfect: Contemporary South African Writing (2017), Denis M. Provencher’s Queer Maghrebi French: Language, Temporalities, Transfiliations (2017), Keguro Macharia’s Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy Across the Black Diaspora (2019), Xavier Livermon’s Kwaito Bodies: Remastering Space and Subjectivity in Post-Apartheid South Africa (2020), April Sizemore-Barber’s Prismatic Performances: Queer South Africa and the Fragmentation of the Rainbow Nation (2020), Andy Carolin’s Post-Apartheid Same-Sex Sexualities: Restless Sexualities in Literary and Visual Culture (2021), Shola Adenekan’s African Literature in the Digital Age: Class and Sexual Politics in New Writing from Nigeria and Kenya (2021), Kanika Batra’s Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities: Publics, Counterpublics, Human Rights (2021), Lindsey Green-Simms’ Queer African Cinemas (2022), Gibson Ncube’s Queer Bodies in African Films (2022), and the final section of Amanda Lock-Swarr’s Envisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine (2023). Watch this space for exciting books by Z'étoile Imma, AB Brown, Kerry Manzo, Neville Hoad, and Jordache Ellapen. Important anthologies and special issues that include analyses of cultural production that I have not yet mentioned include Zethu Matebeni’s Reclaiming Afrikan: Queer Perspectives on Sexual and Gender Identities (2014); Ashley Currier and Thérèse Migraine-George’s “Lesbian”/Female Same-Sex Sexualities in Africa issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies (2017); Matebeni, Surya Monro, and Reddy’s Queer In Africa: LGBTQI Identities, Citizenship, and Activism (2018); Ernest N. Emenyonu and Hawley’s Queer Theory in Film and Fiction issue of African Literature Today (2018); Osinubi’s critical forum on African Queer Scholarship in College Literature (2018); Lindsay Green-Simms’ and Z’étoile Imma’s The Possibilities and Intimacies of Queer African Screen Cultures issue of the Journal of African Cultural Studies (2021); and Abdellah Taïa’s Queer Migrations: Non-Places, Affect, and Temporalities (2021) edited by Denis M. Provencher and Siham Bouamer. Lexington Books has a “Gender and Sexuality in Africa and the Diaspora” series which includes, so far, Gender and Sexuality in Kenyan Societies, edited by Besi Brillian Muhonja and Babacar M’Baye (2022), and Gender and Sexuality in Senegalese Societies, again edited by Muhonja and M’Baye, both of which contain literary essays. Since 2020 the Queer African Studies Association of the African Studies Association has been awarding prizes for published essays by junior scholars and graduate students: Manzo, Serawit Debele, Wesley Macheso, Princess Sibanda, B Camminga, Aminata Cécile Mbaye, and Bernie Lombardi have all been awarded for outstanding work in literary, cultural, and media studies.
17 Simon Gikandi’s Citation2016 collection The Oxford History of the Novel in English: The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean since 1950 included my essay, “Sexuality and Gender in the African Novel,” and Alison Donnell’s “Sexuality and Gender in the Anglophone Caribbean Novel” in a section on “The Novel and Cultural Politics”; Olakunle George’s Citation2021 A Companion to African Literatures includes “Outing Africa: On Sexualities, Gender, and Transgender in African Literatures” by Chantal Zabus, in a section called “Redoublings and Reconstellations”; and The Routledge Handbook of African Literature (2019), edited by Adejunmobi and Carli Coetzee, includes Edgar Nabutanyi’s “Contestations through Same-Sex Desire in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu” in a section titled “Bodies, Subjectivities, Affect.” The Columbia Guides to African Literature by region, meanwhile, barely contain any references to questions of sexuality, and neither does The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel, edited by F. Abiola Irele in 2009.
18 Osunde begins her astonishingly inventive 2022 novel Vagabonds!, about a cast of queer, otherworldly, and outlaw denizens of Lagos, with a series of definitions of the word, illustrating how the language of criminality both targets and “redacts” same-sex loving and gender non-conforming people: “Vagabond (n) Definition [Nigerian]: In the states of Bauchi, Gombe, Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, Kebbi, Sokoto, Yobe, and Zamfara, ‘any male person who dresses or is attired in the fashion of a woman in a public place or who practices sodomy as a means of livelihood or as a profession’ is a vagabond. In the states of Kano and Katsina, ‘any female person who dresses or is attired in the fashion of a man in a public place’ is a vagabond…. Synonyms: [redacted], [redacted]. Fucking [redacted], [redacted], bloody [redacted [redacted]. In other words: hunted. In other words: wanted. In other words: kept secret. In other words: invisible, hypervisible, threat, trouble. There are punishments for this.” (2). All the instances of “[redacted]” in this quote are part of the original text.
19 See Ugonna-Ora Owoh’s “Queer Nigerians Face Police Brutality: Why Were They Erased From #EndSARS?” (2020), Matthew Blaise’s “Resistance and Resiliance: Why Queer Nigerian Lives Matter in the #EndSARS movement,” (2020), and Tami Makinde’s “#EndSARS Protests Show That The Youth Wants Change, Now” (2020).
20 See Diabate’s “Genealogies of Desire, Extravagance, and Radical Queerness in Frieda Ekotto’s Chuchote pas trop” in Research in African Literatures (2016), “The Forms of Shame and African Literature” in the Routledge Handbook of African Literature (2019), “African Queer, African Digital: Reflections on Zanele Muholi's films4peace & Other Works” in African Literature Today (2018), and her superb study Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa (2020)—scholarship that takes up and re-makes queer thinking on sexuality, bodies, and gender, whether specifically focused on LGBTQI identities and experiences or not.
21 Two key interventions in this debate, both discussed by Moreau and Tallie, are Matebeni and Mbisi’s “Vocabularies of the Non-Normative” (2015) and Stella Nyanzi’s “Queering Queer Africa” (2014).
22 As Moreau and Tallie put it, “Scholars of queer Africa must contend with the notion of ‘African sexuality’ itself, as it has been constructed through racist anthropological, bio-medical, and historical discourses (Epprecht 2013; Hoad Citation2007). Thus, deconstructing monolithic notions of ‘African sexuality,’ instantiated in and through colonial languages, requires ‘new ways of listening to how people speak of themselves and bring meaning to their existence. Destabilizing the normative standards that are used to limit how we speak and name ourselves is a necessary eruption’ (Matebeni and Msibi 2015, 5)” (53).
23 I owe my sense of this direction in the field to compelling discussion by T. J. Tallie across several panels at the African Studies Association Conference in 2020.
24 Macharia is referencing Oyewumi’s highly influential book The Invention of Women: Making an Africanist Sense of Western Gender Discourses (1997), Luis White’s The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (1990), and Nkiru Nzegwu’s Family Matters: Feminist Concepts in African Philosophy of Culture (2006), as well as the work of Amina Mama, author of Beyond the Masks: Race, Gender, and Subjectivity (1995) and one of the founding editors of Feminist Africa.
25 To quote Otu from an article preceding his book: “I turn to Akan philosophical notions of personhood to demonstrate how African philosophy can be harnessed to make sense of queer self-making in neoliberal Ghana, engaging, in particular, with the Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye (1987). Gyekye asserts that the Akan people of Ghana construct personhood ‘amphibiously,’ unsettling Eurocentric dichotomies such as African communalism versus European individualism…. sassoi in the era of increased LGBT visibility politics and concomitant homophobia amphibiously navigate the uncertain terrains in which their lives are nestled” (“Normative Collusions” 215).
26 See Olaniyan’s first footnote: “For trenchant explorations of the ‘morbid symptoms’ of the postcolonial incredible, see, in a different context, Achille Mbembe, “The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony,” Public Culture 4, no. 2 (1992): 1– 30, and On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Mbembe and Janet Roitman, “Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis,” Public Culture 7, no. 2 (1995): 323– 352” (Arrest the Music! 191). I want to note that critics who take Mbembe as their starting point for thinking about sexuality can be rather resistant to feminist and queer interlocutors. For example, in a 2022 blog post, Wale Adebanwi engages Mbembe’s work on the carnal—not Olaniyan’s—and suggests “Perhaps we need to inaugurate a new area of postcolonial studies, what I will call political sexology, that will pay greater attention to the study of the copulation of the political and the carnal” (“Carnal Power”). There is of course a rather large body of work that already exists on sexuality and power, which I have been charting in this essay. This blog post accompanies Adebanwi’s article “The Carnality of Power,” a lively analysis of public discussion of sexual scandals involving male politicians in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, and how male political power re-works sexual norms that order ordinary people’s lives. Homosexuality is forthrightly addressed in the essay: “in reflecting on Mbembe’s famous essay, I intend to…reinterpret the essay on the carnality of commandement: (1) by extending its reach to contemporary times, noting its persistent value in accounting for the meshing of licit and illicit sexuality as part of the licenses of power in the postcolony (and beyond); (2) by extending its reach to include homosexual relationships—which Mbembe did not emphasize and which, since the original essay was published, have been largely removed from under the cloak of silence in public discourse in many parts of the continent” (“The Carnality of Power” 115). Nonetheless, the essay’s bibliography, while including the work of Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Elizabeth Povinelli, and even Judith Butler, on the one hand, and Saeed Aderinto and Marc Epprecht on the other, does not include Tamale, Nyanzi, Macharia, or Kopano Ratele—or indeed the many feminist and queer scholars who have analyzed the Zuma rape trial he discusses and its intersection with lesbian sexuality: Gqola, Reddy and Cheryl Potgieter, Shireen Hassim, Desiree Lewis, and the doctoral work of Stephanie Selvick, for example.
27 Olaniyan’s wrestling with what to make of Fela’s contradictions finds an echo in Azuah’s recent writing about an “incredible” queer figure in contemporary Nigerian pop culture, the occasionally homophobic transgender social media celebrity and skin-lightening cream entrepreneur Bobrisky. Azuah argues that Bobrisky offers a queer mirror to Nigerian society: “The parallel between Bobrisky’s contradictory life to Nigeria’s bundle of inconsistencies and two-facedness is striking…. For instance, Nigeria enacted the law that sends homosexuals to jail for 14 years, yet Nigerians are one of the highest consumers of homosexual porn according to Gay Star News.[2] Nigerians are some of the most religious people in the world, but their diabolic politicians buy salvation through tithing from equally predatory pastors. Nigeria is one of the richest countries in Africa, yet more than 40 percent of its population live in dismal poverty…. So, yes, Bobrisky plies the kind of wares they buy: she is hypocritical with a creative twist. Still, Bobrisky, perhaps unintentionally, continues to revolutionize the Nigerian concept of queerness and chips away at the concrete slab of gender normativity in Nigeria” (“Bobrisky”).
28 See Ashley Currier’s important book, Out in Africa: LGBT Organizing in Namibia and South Africa (2012). Visibility can often bring vulnerability and increased persecution, and Currier argues that activists in Southern Africa have deployed both visibility and discretion in their forms of organizing.
29 I would like to thank one of my reviewers for suggesting this analogy. (See Laura Edmondson, “The Theater of Tejumola Olaniyan: African Performance and the Possibilities of Strangeness” in the Journal of the African Literature Association, vol 18, no 2, 2024, eds. Moradewun Adejunmobi and Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi.
30 Here I echo Moreau and Tallie: “What would it mean to bring Macharia or Matebeni or Tamale or Nyanzi to bear on theoretical concerns in North America, Europe, or Asia?” (58).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Brenna M. Munro
Brenna M. Munro is an associate professor at the University of Miami. She is the author of South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come: Queer Sexuality and the Struggle for Freedom (University of Minneapolis Press, 2012), and co-editor of a 2017 issue of The Scholar & Feminist Online, “Thinking Queer Activism Transnationally.” She is working on a book about global Nigerian queer writing, digitality, and migration.