The Possibilities and Intimacies of Queer African Screen Cultures

This special issue addresses the way that queer African intimacies are lived on screens and through screens. When we sent our original call for papers, we invited authors to contribute articles not just on queer African feature films but also on screen media more broadly. In essence, we wanted to think not just about the queer African movies that make it to the big screen but also about how these films, alongside other forms of digital media, move and circulate and resonate across multiple platforms, multiple screens, and multiple stages. Since this is a special issue that focuses on screen cultures, we’d like to begin with a brief discussion of screens themselves and their ability to cultivate forms of queer intimacies and feelings of belonging. In the short documentary I am Sheriff (2018), produced by Steps for the Future and directed by Teboho Edkina, a gender non-conforming person from Lesotho named Sheriff Mothopeng travels to their hometown of Ha Elia and the surrounding areas of Makheka, exhibiting a film that itself features Mothopeng discussing their gender identity with their grandmother, family, pastor, and other community members. I am Sheriff shows Mothopeng screening their film in three intimate and local settings: a community center, a school, and an open field. The scene we want to focus on occurs about halfway through the film in the village where Sheriff Mothopeng grew up.

In the middle of the afternoon, a Toyota pickup drives up a curved path in a small, mountainous village in Lesotho. Then, the camera cuts to four people assembling a movie screen in a large open field. They begin with the frame, trying to determine where the poles go as children look on. Eventually, they succeed. The screen is erected (see Figure 1). The truck is powered on again, the projector plugged into it by way of a long, orange extension cord.

Figure 1. Still from film I am Sheriff.

As night falls, a small crowd gathers to see the film. Mothopeng provides the introduction. ‘You all know who I am, right? I am Sheriff Mothopeng, I’m from this village. If you want to address me call me Sheriff and not as a he or she, ok? Don’t be scared to ask me anything after you have seen the film. I really want you to understand. If people from where I was born understand me, I won’t need to explain myself to others.’ The film Sheriff shows, called Why Are We Silent?, begins with an image of Mothopeng, wrapped in a Basotho blanket, on a horse riding on the very road the pickup drove up earlier that afternoon. In fact, the silhouette of the mountain behind the audience watching the main film matches perfectly the profile of the mountain behind Mothopeng in the film being shown to the audience. This brief moment of temporal and spatial synchronicity highlights that the camera that filmed Why Are We Silent? and the camera that is filming I am Sheriff are in almost the exact same spot. We, that is the audience of I am Sheriff, watch a brief clip of the film with the audience in the village as Sheriff in the film within the film explains their gender non-conformity to their grandmother. It is one of the few moments of the film when the spectators of I am Sheriff and the spectators in I am Sheriff share the viewing experience together. It is a moment of togetherness that bridges the world outside the screen and on the screen.

But when the two films are no longer in sync and the camera turns back to the audience of Why Are We Silent? to capture their comments and reactions, the audience of I am Sheriff is again asked to watch the affective encounter between Mothopeng and their audience rather than participate in it. The first villager to speak is an older woman. ‘We learnt a lot,’ she says of Sheriff Mothopeng’s film. She adds, ‘We didn't understand your situation until now. We didn’t know how to approach you. We thought your situation was a family secret . . . I am happy and feel lucky to hear you explain . . . We are all God’s children.’ Several other audience members reflect similar sentiments, using the words ‘happy’ and ‘thankful’ several times. Many comment on the importance of the pastor in the film who articulated a message of non-discrimination. When, in response to Mothopeng’s declaration that they want to be called Sheriff, a woman in the audience asks if she can continue to use Sheriff’s previous, female name, Sheriff tells the audience that they find it offensive and offers the nickname, Sher, if Sheriff is too difficult. The woman asking the question smiles and says she’ll practice. The moment remains light, with much giggling and warmth passing between the two. Even as Mothopeng also insists, ‘this is not a joke,’ that they do not want to be referred to as a girl, they add ‘I still love you all though.’ And the audience replies, ‘We love you too.’ They then close the screening with a prayer.

Queer cinema from Africa is often hailed as modeling an important form of visual activism, ‘one that makes hidden histories become visible’ (Hawley 2018, 4). Indeed, the aforementioned shot of Sheriff Mothopeng riding a horse wrapped in a Basotho blanket serves to powerfully disavow state-driven discourses that argue LGBTQ identities in Africa run counter to traditional African cultures. By making visible how Mothopeng is physically, linguistically, and culturally at home and welcome in the small town of Ha Elia and in the Lesotho nation more broadly, despite the slight and subtly rendered forms of gender misrecognition and potential misunderstandings that their film screening project seeks to offset, I am Sheriff articulates a queer politics of belonging over an explicit call for dissident confrontation. Enacting ‘belonging as a thick concept which includes affective and cultural’ registers (Mikki van Zyl cited in Livermon 2012, 299), as a figure/character in the double documentaries, Mothopeng claims their community as a site of belonging, and espouses and embodies an active intimacy born of deep listening, honest engagement, humor, and vulnerability. Both films offer both audiences an opportunity to enter and witness belonging as contingent and mutual as Mothopeng declares, ‘If people from where I was born understand, I won’t need to explain myself to others.’ In I am Sheriff the affective terrain of desire is one of longing to be understood, seen, and heard and ultimately the film suggests that desire is collectively fulfilled and fulfilling.

In many ways, Sheriff Mothopeng, an LGBTQ activist based in Cape Town, and U.S. – born and Lesotho-raised director Teboho Edkins, follow in the wake of African filmmakers who have come before them. The great Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, for instance, famously referred to cinema as a night school for the working class and toured the country with make-shift screens that looked similar to Mothopeng’s, waiting until nightfall to show them to all who gathered. Likewise, Sembène made his films in indigenous languages so that they could be understood by local audiences and then asked people to remain after the film for discussion. And, even before Sembène, colonial film units in many British colonies toured the countryside with educational documentaries, though these were often made in a very paternalistic and developmentalist modes. And yet despite being reminiscent of this early mode of pedagogical African filmmaking, I am Sheriff does more than just aim to educate. Though the goal of Why Are We Silent? is to help local audiences understand trans and gender non-conforming people like Mothopeng, I am Sheriff as a whole is much less didactic. The two films, in other words, do not have the same effect nor do they affect their audiences in the same way. Whereas Why Are We Silent?, which we see just a few short scenes from, seems to be focused on explaining gender diversity, nonconformity, and queerness, I am Sheriff spends much more time on the reaction of the Lesotho viewers. The focus, then, is not the educational film itself, but rather its affective aftermaths.

And what these aftermaths are is precisely what interests us in this special issue: the pleasures and possibilities opened up by different screen media and by the very presence of screens themselves. In I am Sheriff, the screen in question is a large screen that needs to be constructed and deconstructed and physically carried to different places where different and overlapping communities gather. It is a mobile screen, though not the type of mobile screens we most often think of in today’s digital world. But what the screen in I am Sheriff affords is a series of human interactions and embodied encounters centered around African queerness. In the scene discussed above, the screen and the screening make possible expressions of mutual understanding, gratitude, and love. In an earlier scene at a girls school, Sheriff, who in Why Are We Silent makes it clear that their sexual relationships have all been with women, is asked whether they have ever fantasized about sleeping with men. Another student asks a question about vibrators. The school girls make it clear that they have not been privy to, or participants in, many open conversations about sex, lust, or desire. What I am Sheriff does, like many of the queer African films and videos discussed in this special issue, is not just assert the existence of African queerness but also opens up space for an entire range of desires, pleasures, connections, and intimacies to be explored.

Audiences of I am Sheriff, especially those activists and scholars so used to human rights-inflected documentaries that represent African queer lives as structured overwhelmingly by the violence of homophobia, erasure, surveillance, hate crime, health disparity, and poverty, may be surprised and perhaps even unsettled with how the film does not take up these issues. While the necessity to explain oneself and one’s gender identity suggests difficulty, difference, and isolation, whatever trauma Mothopeng may have experienced as a gender non-conforming person is not taken up by the film. Instead, speaking who they are to multiple communities, near and far, in I am Sheriff, Mothopeng opens up intimacy as a possibility and counts on love.

Many of films studied in this special issue locate intimacy in the realms of the personal, everyday, ordinary, and the proximate to glean how intimacy might inspire, transform, and empower African queer subjectivities. The political, aesthetic, and representational possibilities engendered by loving intimacies, however fragile and sometimes failed, which emerge from quotidian African queer lives on screen are at the heart of our critical imperative here. And yet in African, postcolonial, and critical race studies, intimacy has often featured quite differently as scholars have scrutinized how cultures of white supremacy, inequality, and domination are constituted through the violence of attachment and the erotics of possession. For example, in On the Postcolony, Achille Mbembe employs the phrase ‘the intimacy of tyranny’ to account for how the ruler and the ruled share the same episteme in the postcolony and stresses the complicity of the citizen within the erotic rituals and practices of authoritarian rule (Mbembe 2001, 133). From Laura Stoler (2010) to Sharon Holland (2012), intimacy has been analyzed as a central mechanism for the subjection of racialized bodies. Patricia McFadden (2003) has importantly pushed back against the ways that during the AIDS epidemic the intimate and erotic lives of African people had been singularized around disease and pathological unsafe sexual behavior.

In what some LGBTQ activists and scholars have argued is an attempt to distance non-normative sexualities from the trauma of HIV/AIDS stigma and death, representations of queer intimacy are increasingly under pressure to surface in terms of public, respectable, and neoliberal forms of legibility: couple formation, marriage, adoption rights, shared material resources, social and economic mobility, etc. To recenter intimacy in the realm of the personal, affective, and the small-scale relational at the same time that homonationalist, bio- and necropolitical assemblages continue to govern queer life, especially those Black and African queer lives structured as disposable, may reek of apolitical escapism. Furthermore, as Senayon Olaoluwa argues, recent debates about homosexuality in Africa have often been articulated through and acted to reestablish ‘discourses of intimacy’ which work to overdetermine queer bodies within the troublesome binaries of gender and sex (Olaoluwa 2018, 24). Still Danai Mupotsa and Moshibudi Motimele’s recently put-forward definition of intimacy as ‘a way of organizing the world; [which] alerts us to the forms of relation in our public and private lives, and shapes the ways we interact with forces of power’ (Motimele and Mupotsa 2020) highlights how both the imprint of power and personal relation co-constitutively map the geographies of dissident sexual identities and practices.

Keeping these tensions and terminologies in mind, standing from within the interdisciplinary, increasingly trendy, and unevenly transnational contours of the field of African queer studies, we aim to situate intimacy as a critical site and mode of cultural production. Attending to a study of intimacy beyond its violent manifestations in the context of African queer representations and realities, allows for an exploration of the more mundane and everyday forms of engagement between persons, bodies, and spaces not entirely mediated by normative regimes. More specifically, for African queer screen cultures, we follow intimacy as a crucial imaginary where desire, in its broadest sense, might offer us a new visual language, one that speaks in terms less invested in explicit narratives of resistance and domination, but instead enacts visions of interaction, touch, and longing which anticipate African queerness as possibility and belonging. While African queer screen cultures continue to serve as strategic tools for LGBTQ representational politics on the continent, many of these images and stories also reflect African queer intimacies at the interstices, subverting and at times contradicting the mainstreaming of Western constructs of sexual identity. As such, without vacating power or the necessity of resistance, many of the authors in this special issue grapple with and study the space of possibility that rests in what Keguro Macharia describes as intimacy’s ‘proximity and contact, pleasure and irritation’ (Macharia 2019, 5). The films and videos discussed in this special issue reflect just a fraction of queer screen content being produced on the African continent, yet brought together, they highlight how queer African films and videos might relocate intimacy in the energetic terrains of embodiment, vulnerable enactments of tenderness, and quiet performances of mutual care that might seem small in light of the visibility politics and neoliberal lure of bright-light recognition but nonetheless push us to see differently.

The first four articles in this issue examine queer African films that circulate internationally and might be classified as art or festival films. Whereas I am Sheriff documents intergenerational exchange and community-centered belonging as intimacy, many of the films discussed here affirm sexual desire, romantic love, and sensuality as primary sites of intimacy, affirmations that have in many instances resulted in local censorship or backlash even as the films were globally successful. We begin the issue with Kwame Edwin Otu’s discussion of Mohamed Camara’s 1997 Guinean film Dakan, a film that follows the story of two teenage boys, Sori and Manga, who fall in love, are separated by their families, but eventually set off to make a life together. Dakan, the first West African celluloid film to feature same-sex intimacy, was a film that was, in many ways, ahead of its time. Indeed, its opening scene, which consists of Sori and Manga making out in the intimate space of Sori’s red convertible car, was the first of its kind outside of South Africa, and for nearly a decade, Dakan was one of the only African films to suggest that it was possible for two people of the same sex to fall in love and to have sustained intimacy. But Otu insists that Dakan not be read as a simple teleological mapping of African progress where the continent emerges from a state of intolerance to a state of tolerance. Rather, he reads ‘Dakan as a visual intervention that undermines the trope of Africa as a site in need of critique, by reimagining Africa instead as a site that furnishes critique.’ Otu’s analysis of the film is therefore just as much about the way that the film depicts the failure of heteronormative institutions like marriage, the nuclear family, and schools as it is about the way that the film opens space for the homoerotic/queer possibilities that emerge at sites where these heteroerotic norms fail. Building on the work of Ugandan scholar and activist Stella Nyanzi, Otu articulates the way that Dakan expresses an afro-queer future that ‘queers “queer Africa” through characters that contest the stifling rules, regulations, and innuendos animating the heteronormative cultural terrain that is their backdrop.’

The second article, Lwando Scott’s reading of John Trengove’s South African film Inxeba (2017) does not, as Otu’s article does, focus on heterosexual failure, but it does rely heavily on thinking through the critical possibilities that are opened up by locating same-sex intimacy within traditional African spaces. Inxeba is a complex film set in the mountains of the Eastern Cape during several weeks of male initiation rites. Two of the caregivers, Xolani and Vija, have, for years, secretly engaged in an intimate affair during the initiation season. But when Xolani is placed in charge of Kwanda, a brash, queer initiate who challenges many presumptions of masculinity, his relationship with Vija too is challenged. What Scott suggests in his reading of Inxeba is that the film challenges dominant forms of Xhosa masculinity and shows audiences how ‘black men’s bodies relate to each other in ways that are not normally seen, and in ways that force the viewer to challenge their ideas of what exactly black bodies are supposed to be like and to do.’ In this way, Scott positions Inxeba against narratives of failure but specifically those that see queerness as a failure of Xhosa masculinity. In the 20 years between Dakan and Inxeba a handful of other queer African art films – Karmen Gei, The World Unseen, Stories of Our Lives – have also challenged notions that queerness is un-African by showing the multiple ways that same-sex intimacies do indeed exist, but what makes Inxeba so provocative for Scott – and what made the film so controversial in South Africa – is that Inxeba shows that they ‘exist deep in the most sacred of Xhosa cultural spaces.’ Indeed much like I am Sheriff, Inxeba articulates a politics in which African communities can be imagined as sites for queer belonging even though in Trengove’s film, queer intimacy is not, at the end of the day, sustained.

In her article on Wanuri Kahiu’s critically acclaimed narrative feature film Rafiki (2018), which tells the story of two young women in Nairobi who fall in love, Lyn Johnstone echoes many of the claims about queer possibility that Otu and Scott make. But Johnstone pays specific attention to the potentialities of what Kahiu calls Afro-bubblegum filmmaking, a direct response to the erasures of play, pleasure, and joy in African lives on screen. If I am Sheriff’s mobile screens act as a house of mirrors for its audiences, in Rafiki the screen acts as a prism reflecting African queer intimacy and pleasure for an entangled set of Nairobi-based, Kenyan, African, and Western markets and audiences. Unlike Inxeba, which despite its provocative portrayal of queer Xhosa intimacy, ends by cutting off the possibilities of queer joy, Kahiu’s love story offers us new visions of pink-hued and Black queer sustained intimacy beyond the stark. Still, Kahiu’s film does not present a utopic vision as the girls are made victim to homophobic violence in a distressing scene of mob cruelty that threatens their lives, their love, and Kahiu’s bubble making endeavor. In Rafiki, however, the violence is not the finale and the possibilities engendered by their shared intimacy, including a viable happy ending, remain, intact. As Johnstone argues, ‘Rafiki stands out as exemplary in the way in which it not only creates the impression of a happy ending for its queer protagonists, but, through the visual affirmation of this ending, offers a kernel of hope for queer Kenyans and provides them with a glimpse of what a queer Kenyan future could be.’

Our fourth article on queer African art films moves away from a focus on Sub-Saharan films and focuses instead on North Africa. In his article on three Maghrebian films, Nadia El Fani’s Bedwin Hacker (2003), Raja Amari’s Al Dowaha (Buried Secrets) (2009) and Abdellah Taïa’s L’Armée du Salut (The Salvation Army) (2013), Gibson Ncube suggests that unlike Sub-Saharan African films, which often contain explicitly intimate scenes, North African films communicate queerness in more silent, muted, and secret ways. Therefore, while Dakan, Inxeba, and Rafiki might be categorized as what Otu calls visual interventions, the films Ncube discusses present queer subjects who ‘negotiate and explore, often in secrecy and privacy, the sensual potentials of their bodies.’ In this way, the physical screen is not the main way that queer intimacies and pleasures are made visible in Maghrebian queer cinema. Rather, Ncube focuses on the way that skin itself becomes a type of screen or surface on which queer desires and intimacies are projected. Ncube focuses not on what is visualized or represented on the movie screen but ‘on the murky areas and what remains unsaid, unrepresented and unscreened.’ And yet despite the different aesthetic gestures in Maghrebian queer cinema, Ncube, like Otu, Scott, and Johnstone, focuses on ‘the intimate process of space-making’ and the way the films can create knowledge and openings to challenge racialised/gendered/sexual norms.

Whereas the first four articles focus on queer African art films made on celluloid and screened at festivals and art-house theaters across the globe our last two articles discuss films and videos that appear on the small screen and that circulate mainly through internet sites like YouTube. For instance, in a discussion of queer African refugee stories, AB Brown reads the documentary Getting Out, a 2011 film produced by the Uganda-based Refugee Law Project, alongside the web-based Seeking Asylum series produced by the queer African digital storytelling project None on Record. While Brown describes Getting Out as a type of film that reproduces nationalist asylum logics and identitarian gay rights politics, they see the Seeking Asylum series as offering ‘aesthetic explorations of intimacy, distortion, humor, intersubjectivity and mundanity’ that allow for creativity beyond those structures. Seeking Asylum consists of four short films, each approximately five minutes in length, that are available on YouTube as well as on None on Record’s own website. Therefore, Brown suggests, the films engage audiences in a way that NGO documentaries or films shown at international film festivals might not. The Seeking Asylum films, Brown writes, ‘may be encountered accidentally, almost anywhere in the world, as a series or individually, and in whatever order and with whatever repetition the viewer chooses. As such, they become experiential episodes that expose us to these individuals’ stories without directing a specific response from their viewer or even a specific viewership in the first place.’ In this way, Brown’s article offers not just a reflection on the genre of queer African refugee stories, which often project queer African subjects as monolithically victimized, but also on ways in which screen media can queer and disrupt these representations by embracing alternate aesthetic practices as well as alternate distribution platforms.

Likewise, in our final article on South African video logs, or vlogs, Grant Andrews underscores the ways in which YouTube is a platform that allows for a range of queer South Africans, many from marginalized communities, to become their own content creators and to celebrate and document their lives and struggles in the way that they see fit. Andrews reminds us that, despite South Africa’s progressive constitution, queer screen media in the country is still relatively limited and often focused on men, and in particular, white, Afrikaans-speaking men. By contrast, the queer vloggers that Andrews discusses represent a diverse group of queer African subjects who depict their own lived experiences in the spaces that they inhabit. In this way, Andrews suggests that viewers anywhere in the world can witness on their smartphones or computers or other mobile devices ‘the possibilities of freedom, love and self-acceptance which the vloggers present on screens’ alongside ‘the anxieties, uncertainties and feelings of insecurity that are part of vloggers’ lives.’ Andrews himself documents the very complex ways that these vloggers use entertainment, personal narrative, and documentary elements to engage with questions of race, sexuality, intimacy, and activism in contemporary South Africa. Moreover, he examines how vloggers ‘appeal to authentic connection despite the performative nature of YouTube videos and the physical distance which might exist between users.’ Therefore, like the large screen in I am Sheriff, the small screens Andrews discusses create moments of belonging and shared intimacy that bridge the world outside the screen and on the screen.

We end this special issue with a conversation between Lindsey Green-Simms, Jude Dibia, and Olumide Makanjuola about the 2019 cinematic adaptation of Dibia’s 2005 novel Walking with Shadows, the first West African novel to feature a gay protagonist, that Makanjuola helped produced. The conversation addresses many of the topics covered by other articles in this special issue – the relationship between art and activism, the way cinema can create spaces and open possibilities for conversation, the ways queer films might perform their resistance in quiet and subtle ways. But the conversation also focuses on some of the more logistical elements of queer African filmmaking: How does one find a director or funding? What types of stories might engage a homophobic audience? What types of stories do queer people want to see and tell? What types of strategies are necessary to get a queer film screened in a country that has recently codified harsh penalties against homosexuality? In many ways, these logistical concerns are in the background of several of the special issue articles that touch on questions of censorship, transgression, and the risks and potentialities of broaching taboo subjects or performing one’s identity in a way that defies expectations. But by bringing these practical matters to the foreground in this final conversation, we hope to highlight how the forms of intimacies and feelings of belonging that queer African screen media cultivates are deeply entangled with the unique challenges and pleasures of queer life in each of the particular countries discussed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).