Lovers not fighters: Afropolitan masculinity in two South African romcoms

Abstract

This paper considers two South African romantic comedies, Tell Me Sweet Something (Akin Omotoso, 2015) and Happiness is a Four-Letter Word (Thabang Moleya, 2016). Both are set in a wealthy, sophisticated version of Johannesburg and feature black casts that include high profile celebrities. Both emphasize versions of black South African masculinity that deviate from stereotyped depictions of black men as workers, warriors, patriarchs and/or enactors of violence. These films center on an aspirational iteration of black manhood that prioritizes consumption, class and social status. I discuss their representations of the various male characters – Nat in Sweet Something and Thomas, Chris, Bheki, Bongani and Leo in Happiness – including their bodily performances, embeddedness (or lack of) in South African cultural forms and modes of dress and speech. Drawing on ideas about Afropolitanism, I argue that the films update cinematic stereotypes of masculinity, particularly the damaging association of black men and violence. This apparently progressive move is, however, ambivalent, as it privileges a neoliberal and one-dimensional understanding of black masculinity and of contemporary African-ness.

Keywords:

• Cinema
• South Africa
• masculinity
• Afropolitanism
• blackness

Acknowledgements

This article is dedicated to the memory of Pier Paolo Frassinelli, a wonderful scholar and colleague.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 See Keyan Tomaselli, The Cinema of Apartheid: Race and Class in South African Film (Routledge, 2013).

2 Adam Haupt, Static: Race and Representation in Post-Apartheid Music, Media and Film (Cape Town, South Africa: HSRC Press, 2012).

3 White Afrikaners, the primary consumers of Afrikaans-language media, make up only about 40 percent of Afrikaans speakers in South Africa. According to Adriaan Steyn, “More Afrikaans language local feature films are produced than in any other language and Afrikaans films, on average, outperform other local films at the box office.” “Afrikaans, Inc.: The Afrikaans Culture Industry after Apartheid,” Social Dynamics 42, no. 3 (1 September 2016): 487.

4 For examples of grittier depictions of Johannesburg, see the Oscar-winning Tsotsi (2015), which focuses on a township gangster, or Sweet Something director Akin Omotoso’s Vaya (2016), which tells a series of interlocking stories of precarious lives in the city.

5 Pier Paolo Frassinelli, “Joburg without Joburg: The Black South African Romcom,” Social Dynamics, 5 (April 2021): 3.

6 Alexia L Bowler, “Towards a New Sexual Conservatism in Postfeminist Romantic Comedy,” in Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (Springer, 2013), 185–203.

7 Alison Winch, ‘“We Can Have It All”’, Feminist Media Studies 12, no. 1 (1 March 2012): 69–82.

8 John Alberti, Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy: Gender as Genre (Routledge, 2013), 3.

9 Maria San Filippo, ‘Radical Rom-Com: Not an Oxymoron’, New Review of Film and Television Studies 18, no. 1 (2 January 2020): 3.

10 Alberti, Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy, 3.

11 Negative representation of black men in recent high profile films includes the criminal main characters in Tsotsi (2005) and Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema (2008); the corrupt policeman in iNumber Number (2013); the “coloured” gang members in Four Corners (2013); and the sexually predatory schoolteacher in Of Good Report (2013).

12 This aspirational and neoliberal vision of masculinity is not standard in South African romcoms, some of which offer different archetypal portrayals of men, for example the naive good guy in Fanie Fourie’s Lobola (2013), the disaster-prone neurotic in Catching Feelings (2017) and the down-to-earth romantic in Mrs Right Guy (2016).

13 See for example, Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (Routledge, 2012); Nancy Abelmann and Kathleen McHugh, South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema (Wayne State University Press, 2005); Christine Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the “New Look” (Routledge, 2002); Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 2–13.

14 If we follow scholars like Jonathan Haynes in approaching popular Nigerian cinema as a form of genre, then one notable exception to this oversight is the vibrant literature on gender in Nollywood. Jonathan Haynes, Nollywood: The Creation of Nigerian Film Genres (University of Chicago Press, 2016); Matthias Krings, and Onookome Okome. Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.

15 Malose Langa et al., “Black Masculinities on Trial in Absentia: The Case of Oscar Pistorius in South Africa,” Men and Masculinities 23, no. 3–4 (14 March 2018): 9.

16 Raewyn Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); see also R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity’, Gender & Society 19, no. 6 (1 December 2005): 829–59.

17 Robert Morrell, ‘Of Boys and Men: Masculinity and Gender in Southern African Studies’, Journal of Southern African Studies 24, no. 4 (1998): 617.

18 Robert Morrell, ed., Changing Men in Southern Africa (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press, 2001); Robert Morrell, ‘The Times of Change: Men and Masculinity in South Africa’, in Changing Men in Southern Africa, ed. Morrell (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press, 2001), 3–37; Robert Morrell et al., “Hegemonic Masculinity: Reviewing the Gendered Analysis of Men’s Power in South Africa,” South African Review of Sociology 44, no. 1 (2013): 3–21.

19 Shahana Rasool et al., Violence Against Women: A National Survey (Pretoria: Institute for Security Studies, 2003); Nonhlanhla Sibanda-Moyo, Eleanor Khonje, and Maame Kyerewaa Brobbey, “Violence Against Women in South Africa: A Country in Crisis 2017” (Johannesburg: Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, 2017).

20 Morrell, “Of Boys and Men,” 614.

21 Pumla Dineo Gqola, “‘The Difficult Task of Normalizing Freedom’: Spectacular Masculinities, Ndebele’s Literary/Cultural Commentary and Post-Apartheid Life,” English in Africa 36, no. 1 (1 May 2009): 64.

22 Ibid., 63.

23 Liz Walker, “Men Behaving Differently: South African Men since 1994,” Culture, Health & Sexuality 7, no. 3 (May 2005): 225–38; Keith Breckenridge, “The Allure of Violence: Men, Race and Masculinity on the South African Goldmines, 1900–1950,” Journal of Southern African Studies 24, no. 4 (1 December 1998): 669.

24 Malose Langa, Becoming Men: Black Masculinities in a South African Township (Wits University Press, 2020).

25 Morrell et al., “Hegemonic Masculinity,” 25; see also Kopano Ratele, Liberating Masculinities (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2016), 9.

26 Jane Stadler, “Tsotsis, Coconuts and Wiggers: Black Masculinity and Contemporary South African Media,” in Power, Politics and Identity in South African Media, ed. Adrian Hadland et al. (Pretoria: HSRC Press, 2008), 343–63.

27 Kgafela Oa Magogodi, “Refiguring the Body: Performance of Identity in Mapantsula and Fools,” Theatre Research International 27, no. 3 (October 2002): 244.

28 Jordache A. Ellapen, “Geographies of the Black African Masculine in Tsotsi and The Wooden Camera,” Black Camera 9, no. 2 (2018): 235.

29 Kopano Ratele, “Of What Value Is Feminism to Black Men?,” Communicatio 39 (1 June 2013): 258.

30 Other research on popular representation of black masculinities in South Africa considers issues like the co-optation of working class black manhood to advertise consumer goods in an apparently post-racial society and the ‘inauthentic’ local masculinities that draw from African-American hip-hop culture. See A. Mager, “‘One Beer, One Goal, One Nation, One Soul’: South African Breweries, Heritage, Masculinity and Nationalism 1960–1999,” Past & Present 188, no. 1 (2005): 163–94. Adam Haupt, “Black Masculinity and the Tyranny of Authenticity in South African Popular Culture,” in Power, Politics and Identity in South African Media, ed. Adrian Hadland et al. (Pretoria: HSRC Press, 2008), 378–98.

31 Frassinelli, “Joburg without Joburg,” 3.

32 Achille Mbembe and Sarah Balakrishnan, “Pan-African Legacies, Afropolitan Futures,” Transition: An International Review, no. 120 (2016): 28.

33 Simon Gikandi, “On Afropolitanism,” in Negotiating Afropolitanism: Essays on Borders and Spaces in Contemporary African Literature and Folklore, ed. Jennifer Wawrzinek and JKS Makokha (Brill Rodopi, 2011), 10.

34 Kalenda Eaton, “Eternal Blackness: Considering Afropolitanism as a Radical Possibility,” Africa Today 65, no. 4 (2019): 17.

35 Quoted in Stephanie Bosch Santana, “Exorcizing the Future: Afropolitanism’s Spectral Origins,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 28, no. 1 (2 January 2016): 121.

36 Emma Dabiri, “15. The Pitfalls and Promises of Afropolitanism,” in Cosmopolitanisms (New York University Press, 2017), 201.

37 Eaton, “Eternal Blackness,” 7.

38 Gikandi, “On Afropolitanism,” 10.

39 Eaton, “Eternal Blackness,” 4.

40 Ibid., 5.

41 Akin Omotoso, “The Significance of Akin Omotoso’s Romcom ‘Tell Me Sweet Something,’” Africa is a Country, 2016, https://africasacountry.com/2016/02/the-significance-of-akin-omotosos-romcom-tell-me-sweet-something. This call to exhibitors to “give Black films a fair chance” seems to have had at least some success, as evinced by the higher profile of local romcoms like 2017’s Zulu Wedding and Catching Feelings, which has since been made internationally available by Netflix.

42 Nicky Falkof and Cobus van Staden, “Traversing the Anxious City,” in Anxious Joburg: The Inner Lives of a Global South City, ed. Nicky Falkof and Cobus van Staden (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2020), 1–18.

43 Frassinelli, “Joburg without Joburg,” 5.

44 Alberti, Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy, 3.

45 Maponya, the model-actor who plays Nat, is never pictured without thick-rimmed glasses or, occasionally, sunglasses, and is an eyewear ambassador for the high end fashion brand Tom Ford.

46 Mager, “One Beer, One Goal, One Nation, One Soul.”

47 M. Amah Edoh, “Redrawing Power? Dutch Wax Cloth and the Politics of “Good Design,” Journal of Design History 29, no. 3 (2016): 258–72.

48 Leon De Kock, Louise Bethlehem, and Sonja Laden, South Africa in the Global Imaginary, vol. 4 (Brill Academic Pub, 2004).

49 Lilie Chouliaraki, “Post-Humanitarianism: Humanitarian Communication Beyond a Politics of Pity,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (2010): 107–26.

50 Lilie Chouliaraki, “The Theatricality of Humanitarianism: A Critique of Celebrity Advocacy,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (1 March 2012): 2.

51 “Despite a well-developed narrative of inclusivity, Maboneng is actively engaged in gentrifying urban space: the neighbourhood functions as a fortified enclave within the inner city, where it caters exclusively to middle- and upper-income people seeking to ‘take back the city’ from the urban poor. These actions erode the rights of ordinary individuals to inhabit, appropriate, and move within urban space.” Caitlin Vejby, “The Remaking of Inner City Johannesburg and the Right to the City : A Case Study of the Maboneng Precinct” (Masters, Santa Barbara, University of California, 2015), 1; see also Shannon Walsh, “‘We Won’t Move’: The Suburbs Take Back the Centre in Urban Johannesburg,” City 17, no. 3 (1 June 2013): 400–408.

52 Tamara Shefer and Kopano Ratele, “Racist Sexualisation and Sexualised Racism in Narratives on Apartheid,” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 16, no. 1 (1 April 2011): 27.

53 Frassinelli, “Joburg without Joburg.”

54 Winch, “We Can Have It All,” 69.

55 Kopano Ratele, Tamara Shefer, and Lindsay Clowes, “Talking South African Fathers: A Critical Examination of Men’s Constructions and Experiences of Fatherhood and Fatherlessness,” South African Journal of Psychology 42, no. 4 (1 December 2012): 554.

56 Chouliaraki, “Post-Humanitarianism: Humanitarian Communication Beyond a Politics of Pity.”

57 Mehita Iqani, Consumption, Media and the Global South: Aspiration Contested (London: Palgrave, 2015), 31.

58 Shefer and Ratele, “Racist Sexualisation and Sexualised Racism in Narratives on Apartheid.”

59 M Mamdani, When Does a Settler Become a Native?: Reflections of the Colonial Roots of Citizenship in Equatorial and South Africa. Inaugural Lecture as AC Jordan Professor of African Studies, University of Cape Town (Cape Town, 1998), http. hrp. bard. edu/resource_ pdfs/mamdani. settler. pdf.

60 Frassinelli, “Joburg without Joburg.”

61 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Danger of a Single Story (TED Talks, 2009), https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.

62 San Filippo, “Radical Rom-Com: Not an Oxymoron,” 3.