1With few exceptions, most African novels continue to stigmatize homosexuality as a profoundly un-African aberration and a contamination from the deviant West (see Zabus 2006). This seems at first confirmed by a few novels of student life in the 1960s and 1970s, which feature African students’ homosexual experiences in Paris, London, Eton, and other European cities, where they find, behind the imperial veneer and the glitter of the Western metropolis, a ‘dark continent’ of alleged ‘perversities’ and, for at least one of them, sexual liberation.
2Like Dorian Gray or Huysmans’s Des Esseintes, the character, Joe Bengoe, in Sierra Leonean Yulisa Amadu Maddy’s No Past, No Present, No Future (1973) wallows in a grim British underworld where homosexuality is discursively aligned with drugs and other potent potions. The novel revolves around the coming-of-age of three boys, who grow up in a Roman Catholic Mission in a fictive West African city (possibly Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone) in the post-independence era. Maddy’s novel opens with a scene of heterosexual violence since a girl, Mary, is driven to suicide after being gang-raped. Joe Bengoe, one of the “Brothers Three,” remembers his first sexual experience with her but also how his friend Ade had come on the scene, “demanding his own pound of flesh like a Black Shylock” (Maddy 20). As a result, the young girl was impregnated and, for fear of being shamed, swallowed a concoction of bicarbonate soda, the way Sybil Vane in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) drank “prussic acid” (Wilde 128) in the loneliness of a tawdry London theatre. Unsurprisingly, Joe Bengoe is “a voracious reader of Oscar Wilde …” (Maddy 85). As a conversationalist, one of the other “brothers,” Santigie, calls up Wilde’s manipulative dandy, Lord Henry Wotton, while Ade, the quintessential misogynist, conjures up Dorian Gray, and Joe, on account of his sexual allegiance, his involvement with the arts, and his escapes to Paris for sexual release, calls to mind Basil Hallward, who, however, in this version, is not killed off midway through the narrative.
3The novel does not so much “rewrite” in the postcolonial understanding of the term (see e.g. Zabus 2001) The Picture of Dorian Gray, as it loosely annexes this ‘breviary of Decadence’ to legitimize the ontologico-sexual quest of three Nigerian educated boys as ‘lonely Londoners’ in the British metropolis, so harrowingly described by the first generation of Caribbean writers like George Lamming and Sam Selvon. For Joe as for his fin-de-siècle alter-ego, Basil Hallward, but also for Oscar Wilde alias Sebastian Melmoth, Paris is a city of sexual liberation away from Victorian prudishness around the sexual mores of the upper class. In Maddy’s novel, homosexuality is depicted as having a somewhat clinical genesis. Indeed, it is intimated that Mary’s death “left an indelible scar on [Joe’s] subconscious” (Maddy 17) and had an impact on Joe’s later homosexual preference, as if homosexuality was born out of trauma. While “his second try with women” (Maddy 24), a young Freetown prostitute, turns into a fiasco, the reader gets early glimpses of Joe’s sexual transactions with the religious Head of the school, Father O’Don, who exerts pressure on the boy in order to “make him do as he wanted all the time. To be with him and … and…! God, I promise myself, I must never think about it; that day, that stupid evening. Joe went blank” (Maddy 30). The boy is constantly haunted by Father O’Don’s “unexpected gesture,” which is never specified and which Father O’Don later jokingly passes as “man’s love for his fellowman,” thereby twisting one of the Ten Commandments to his advantage. During Father O’Don’s subsequent visits to the boy’s room, the boy mechanically holds “his shirt in front of him to hide his private parts” while Padre, as with Harry Wotton and Dorian, but without the pink-petalled daisies, the lilac-blooms and the gauze-winged dragon flies, extols the adolescent’s “beautiful body,” so beautiful that the boy is entreated “never [to] be ashamed of it” (Maddy 31). Father O’Don’s requests for sexual favours intensify to the point that the boy feels that “he had to live with it. He did not dare speak of it” (Maddy 31).
- 1 For more detail on that aspect of trauma theory as it relates to child abuse, see Zabus 2007, 248-3 (...)
- 2 Interestingly, the “raw log” recalls Freud’s infamous metaphor referring to the log-like vagina whi (...)
4What is at first perceived by the reader as a priest’s sexual assault on a non-consenting boy and therefore a source of trauma is confirmed by Joe’s delayed understanding of “the wound in the mind,” which Caruth aptly described as “a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world” (Caruth 3) and is characteristic of victims of sexual abuse.1 Subsequently, Joe acquires “a taste for pornography” (Maddy 31) and secures erotic, men-only, nude magazines of all types, which reveals the boy’s nascent interest in sexuality. And that interest would indeed have been wholesome, if it was not couched in suspicious prose and morally gauged by Ade, who suspects Joe of enjoying “extra favours” from Father O’Don: “Extra favours to which one could pin a name; extra favours which were not usual between Padre and server-boys” (Maddy 113). Daniel Vignal mentions a similar scene from Central African novelist Cyriaque R. Yavoucko’s Crépuscule et défi (1979), in which Reverend Father Boussin attempts to rape his altar boy (Vignal 74). However, rather than staging the offertory of the altar-boy’s body as Yavoucko does, Maddy takes great pains to highlight the shift in the boy’s assessment of his relationship with the priest from a shameful secret to an initiation by an older man that helped him discover his own sexual preference. Ade, an adept of the straightgeist, is unaware of Joe’s sexual pilgrimage and uses what he thinks he knows about the “not usual” relationship to confront Joe later when the “Brothers Three” are in England: “’Were you not naked on the sofa with Padre’s hands all over your body? Did you not have your bottom oiled, you screw scum, you dirty depraved dog?’ … Homosex … battyman … hog boy’” (Maddy 117). In his suggestion that Joe is a “hog boy,” Ade is amalgamating homosexuality with bestiality, in this case, intercourse with a feral pig. Also, that “batty man” as a West Indian derogatory term to refer to a “male homosexual” (e.g. Cliff 209) is uttered in the context of West African immigration to London in the 1960s means that the Caribbean term was passed on to the ‘Black bros’ of African origin through the inevitable process of linguistic cross-pollination. At this point, Maddy only feebly challenges such allegations. Ade’s homophobic, insulting tirades against Joe whom he also calls “Mr Joe Homosi” go hand in glove with an aggressive heterosexuality, which verges on misogyny and reveals Ade’s deep-seated sexual anxieties. For instance, Ade scorns the inevitable consummation of (female) virgins as smelling, “dead and heavy” bodies, who are “like raw logs,” who then get hysterical in the paroxysms of defloration.2 His summary views of womanhood as a dish to “be relished” (Maddy 46) do not gain in depth once in London, where he lapses into heavy drinking and sedulously applies his alliterative motto concerning women:“‘find them, fool them, fuck them, and forget them’” (Maddy 143). Santigie, the third member of this dissolute troika, who has failed his G.C.E. exams in London for the third time, pledges “sex revenge” (Maddy 99) on the British female population. In his revenge scheme, his European female conquests have to pay “colonial debts of conscience for their white skins” (Maddy 164) and for being involved by Governmental proxy in the slave trade and the Middle Passage. In a perverse twist on sodomy, Santigie asks: “did your grandmothers and sisters understand when their brothers and fathers left them with little brown bastard babies? Those who had their asses corked with corn stalks and were thrown overboard into the raging Atlantic ocean because they had caught dysentery and could not stop shitting…?” (Maddy 164). Santigie’s anal-ysis is paired off with dithyrambic ratiocinations which hold that “‘any black girl who goes out with a white man is a confirmed prostitute and must be eliminated, liquidated. … Any African woman who goes to bed with a white man must be sterilized. So also must any Black man who marries a white woman. He must be castrated’” (Maddy 165). Clearly, Maddy refutes what he calls Santigie’s “Black Nazi doctrine” (Maddy 165) around heterosexual interracial intercourse with its fear of miscegenation and its call for the Final Solution.
5As the novel unfolds, Maddy more courageously affirms Joe’s sexual preference by devoting more narrative space to the “jolly good time” (Maddy 76) and the “two lovely months” (Maddy 77) Joe spends in a fictive West African village and, later, in “gay Paris,” “a place of freedom” where Joe discovers “the pleasures of sexual vagaries, the lunacies of sexual excitement,” away from Sierra Leonean surveillance and malicious gossip: “Now he knew what gaiety and laughter and perversion and moral complexity were all about in the world of the whites. It was his first taste of the white scene …” (Maddy 77, my emphasis). Joe’s growing debts as a result of his expensive living habits in the city of lights and his drug dependency cause him to be dismissed from the London drama school he had been hoping to graduate from. Joe reflects that he should have confessed to the woman principal, who asked him whether he was homosexual, that he “was a corrupt pervert, an Afro-queer” (Maddy 90), which is a statement before the term was theoretically validated and certainly ahead of the crystallization of queer thought in Western academic circles, if we consider that the novel was published in 1973.
6In its daring insolence and salutary lessons for West African students, Maddy’s novel paves the way for Zimbabwean Dambudzo Marechera’s short story, “Black Skin, What Mask”(1978), which toys with Frantz Fanon’s famed treatise on racism and features Marechera’s fictional alter-ego who suggests to his Oxford companion, who has been unsuccessful with women: ‘“Why don’t you try men?”’(Marechera 98). When brought to the edge of suicide (but saved by his boyfriend in the nick of time), Joe sums up his life, Dorian Gray-like: “I sold my youth to perversion. I have lived rough. Homosexuality, drug addiction, drinking, and finally madness. The sum total of me is, I am a confirmed disciple of the permissive society’s worst cult” (Maddy 155). Notwithstanding the pejorative alignment of homosexuality with inebriation and insanity, the allusion here is to Europe’s permissive attitude to sexual orientation, especially in its capitals –London, Paris, Rome. It is intimated that Joe will rejoin his boyfriend in Rome, where he will take up his training in mime and drama, thereby identifying homosexuality as a form of performativity. Rome is the holy city of permissiveness (with the blessing of the Vatican?) where he can be with his friend, “be he a man, a woman, a homosexual, lesbian, or hermaphrodite” (Maddy 158), as Santigie puts it in unexpectedly lenient terms, giving his prior, segregationist views of interracial heterosex.
7The further implication in Maddy’s vision of “the white scene” is that African societies are not cognizant with homosexuality and that only a white priest could initiate the poor, lost African soul. Indeed, the threesome in Maddy’s novel is unaware of the black scene ‘back home’. For instance, in Hausa (Northern Nigerian) society, such relationships involve the ‘yan kifi or ‘male lesbians,’ who take up the receptive role, or the ‘yan daudu’ who have relations between themselves rather than with their ‘active’ ‘husbands’ (miji). These sexual variants in Northern Nigeria and the Northern Islamized West African regions do not exclude marriage with a woman under Muslim law (see Gaudio 118). Challenges to the Hausa, and more largely West African, concept of masculinity, thus come from these men who talk or act ‘like women’ (kamar mata) and their (Bori) shamanic practices which challenge Islamic (and Christian, for that matter) endorsement of the appropriateness of male dominance (see Salamone 77). Only Joe seems to have an insight into African homosexualities. When Joe confesses to Ade’s Danish girlfriend in Copenhagen that he is homosexual, she is very much taken aback and mutters: “You are the first African male I have known who …,” and Joe retorts: “How many Africans do you know?” (Maddy 173).
- 3 See Vignal 78. In Why Are We So Blest? (1974), however, Armah displays more empathy with homosexual (...)
8In Nigerian novelist Kole Omotoso’s The Edifice (1971), the main character recalls at some point how, during his British schooldays, his English Literature teacher, a priest, had made a pass at him and how he ran away screaming, “[f]rightened more by the thought of holding my English teacher tight, the representative, the son of God, tight rather than the thought of sex” (Omotoso 39). We are told that the boy runs away from the scene of temptation until he reaches “Heathrow Airport and heard that it was permitted between two consenting adults” (Omotoso 40). Omotoso is silent on how our boy on the run “heard” of English ‘permissiveness’ in such a bee-hive as Heathrow Airport but, as in Maddy’s novel, it is intimated that the ingénu is sexually initiated by a European priest and the white scene is foregrounded at the expense of any potential black scene. When the protagonist undergoes such an initiation at home, the premise is that homosexuality is the prerogative of English and French missionaries, teachers, and artists who imported ‘vice’ to Africa, or, as in Ghanaian Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons (1979), of invasive Arab emirs, who penetrated the passive SubSaharan land and introduced “new abominations”(Armah 64).3
- 4 All the translations from the French are my own.
9Published at approximately the same time as Maddy’s No Past, No Present, No Future, Guinean Saïdou Bokoum’s Chaîne (1974) also depicts an abysmal “descent into hell,” as if homosexuality amounted to perdition in a morality tale. By contrast with Maddy’s novel, however, homosexuality is entirely synonymous with moral depravation and ranks fourth in an implicit sequence after the first three “aberrations”: sex with a white woman; masturbation; and sex with (female) prostitutes. Kanaan Niane, who was born in Conakry, Guinea, roamed through the racially segregated United States, where there is “a third sex or a second human species” (Bokoum 56),4 then through Algeria, before becoming a Law student at Nanterre-la-Folie, a parody of the University Paris X. There he slips into a depression after his failed relationship with a young French woman because of, as he later confesses, “an ontological masochism” (Bokoum 50).
10Kanaan Niane’s existential despair is very much imbued by Sartre’s La Nausée, which he reads and re-reads ad nauseam. As an insomniac, he starts hallucinating and is doomed to walk the night in endless meanderings through “Paris by night” (Bokoum 58)—Saint-Denis, Pigalle, Saint-Lazare. He at first takes an interest in the obscene graffiti on washroom walls; then he lapses into a true cult of the phallus, like his later South African counterpart, Angelo, in K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001). After placing coy ads such as “Young man seeks young man” (Bokoum 59), his personals quickly escalate in vulgarity and self-deprecation, as he signs “Black slave” (Bokoum 60) and, in self-loathing, embraces ithyphallic views of Black sexuality. He then starts indulging in mutual masturbation with anonymous partners in public urinals and sodomizes himself with the gauzed handle of a knife smeared with Vaseline. While wallowing, by his own reckoning, in “a profound metaphysical desolation,” his nightly wanderings take him to the banks of the Seine, which is portentously “mute” (Bokoum 63-64) and murmurs not with the vows of proverbial heterosexual lovers but with the din of hurried homosexual intercourse. He drags himself to a cabaret tellingly called “Le Néant” (after Sartre’s famed essay on Being and Nothingness) or to Barbès, a meat market thronging with “Hottentot venuses” oozing with fat on sale (Bokoum 68). Sperm mixes with urine and diarrhea in this liquid no exit, where hell is boundless desire. Later, he is gang-raped by hooded youths in the woods of Fontainebleau. This is the point when Bokoum’s Chains links up with Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams. Both novels indeed refer to the god Osiris, dismembered, then reborn, which recalls Sartre’s comment in Orphée noir, on “the black dying at the hands of white culture in order to be reborn into the black spirit” (Sartre xxiii). Both novels also make use of African myths about the creation of the Universe out of a fleshly severance, what Kanaan calls “a humongous reaming” (Fr: “une gigantesque enculade”; Bokoum 76), which is reenacted in his own flesh in a primal initiation rite and allows for a rebirth.
11Now that Kanaan Niane has sunk low enough to be excluded by even what he calls the banlieue marginals, the adventures of K. come to a standstill, as he contemplates suicide from the heights of the Sacré Coeur. But from the promontory, he sees a Pentecostal flame, which takes him to the South-Eastern slum of Montreuil, where he is shaken out of his torpor by African (mostly Soninke and Bambara) immigrants trying to save their meager belongings from a derelict house on fire. He almost dies in the ordeal by fire by refusing the helping hand of a white fireman. In these primitive dwellings filled with “black troglodytes” (Bokoum 110), Kanaan Niane deems, as in Maddy’s telltale novel title, No Past, No Present, No Future, that Africans are “without a past, without a future. Present, zero” (Bokoum 116). Having reached an anal degree zero of sorts, since, to Kanaan, the rectum is definitely a grave, he can only start again. Psychologically buttressed by the griot Kouyaté, who tells him of his grand Njãn ancestry, Kanaan engages on a path of self-discovery and becomes the advocate of immigrant workers’ rights in France. This takes him abroad with a newly formed traveling theatre group, like Joe Bengoe in Maddy’s novel. Kanaan then gets involved into a relationship with the bourgeois Senegalese militant Sana, who reveals that she had lesbian affairs with women who “filled her with physical disgust” (Bokoum 182) only to spite her mother in her feckless ways with men. In other words, homosexuality, male and female, is, in this novel, equated with an episode of utter self-deprecation and degeneracy before achieving the true essence of love, which is unambiguously located in heterosexuality. Homosexuality precedes heterosexuality the way essence precedes existence. Sartre redux.
12In both novels on each side of the linguistic divide (francophone [Guinea] versus Anglophone Africa [Sierra Leone]), the novelists seem to have an autobiographical vestment in the painful journey of their characters as African University students in a Western metropolis. Published a decade later but written in 1969, Nigerian Dillebe Onyeama’s Nigger at Eton (1972) is animated by the same autobiographical compulsion to relate traumatic events linked with African student life. As a Nigerian and the son of an Oxford-trained lawyer, Onyeama’s name is booked at Eton at birth. He leaves Nigeria a year before the country comes to independence (on 1 October 1960) and he quickly comes to realize that he cannot complain of racism, for he was privileged to have gone to get insulted at such a famous establishment as Eton that churns out future members of the British House of Lords.
- 5 According to all dictionaries which I consulted, “fagging” is chiefly British for “a tiring and unw (...)
13The Eton system called “fagging”5 involves performing menial duties for other schoolboys and various forms of corporal punishment, which were in decline and then abolished shortly before Onyeama’s graduation in the late 1960s, in the wake of the Biafran civil war. As a “fag,” he has to perform chores following the “boy-call” and tidy the room of the house prefects, who have a reputation of sadism and megalomania. Every “fag” longs to enjoy the privilege of having one day a personal fag so that this aspect of public school culture is safely transmitted. Dillebe’s fagging duties are made worse by the sense of isolation that he experiences as a result of ingrained racism. Dillebe’s earlier perceptions of British boys as effeminate, gently reared angels worthy only of dainty treatment soon change when he is confronted with the violent and clamorous beatings that the ruddy, callous housemasters and prefects inflict upon the younger boys. Although homosexuality is at first confined to allusions to the sexual molestation of small boys by their elders in the early hours of the morning, it takes center stage in a chapter titled “Homosexuality,” which has tellingly been expurgated from the 1976 Nigerian edition. This chapter hinges on rumours spread by scandalmongers, which are later blown out of proportions with the collapse of the fagging system and the freer associations between seniors and juniors. Dillebe’s hefty bear hugs of smaller boys earn him wide-eyed cries of “Queer! Homo! Scandal!” (Onyeama 87). Allegations of Dillebe’s queerness get subtly grafted onto his Africanness, as African homosociality, which allows boys to put their arms around each other’s necks, is considered in England “too seductive and much too friendly” (Onyeama 165).
14Matters come to a head with the rape of Dillebe’s “rather handsome” friend, which causes the two boy-rapists to be expelled from school and elicits Dillebe’s self-righteous condemnation. But his friend’s subsequent, halting confession in the privacy of Dillebe’s room that he had “a queer-up” with one of his assailants meets Dillebe’s staunch but concealed disapproval, as he reflects: “homosexuality was unnatural and outrageous! That, I considered, was not how God made sex” (Onyeama 163). Although he acknowledges that homosexual attraction can take place in Nigeria, “between mischievous, naïve children only,” he denies that “serious homosexuality” exists “between peoples of all ages” (Onyeama 164). Onyeama thus remains ignorant of Nigerian male intimacies but also of other African relational nexuses such as “boy wives” and “female husbands,” female husbandry being a Nigerian institution that deserves to be revised and sexualized (Zabus 2008).
15Onyeama’s other novel Sex is a Nigger’s Game (1976) reinforces, in Chris Dunton’s words, “the stereotypical identification of homosexuality with the West … with a bizarre regurgitation of Western racist myths of black sexual superiority” (Dunton 424). Indeed, Sir Brian, who picks up a male African prostitute, “absolves Africa of the stigma of sexual inversion, commenting that this was ‘largely imported by the early colonists and by westernized Africans’” (Dunton 424). In both his 1976 pornographic novel and his autobiography, Nigger at Eton, Onyeama endorses this myth of homosexuality as a Western aberration that contaminated the non-West. For all his understanding of the mechanics of oppression and his reading of James Baldwin, Onyeama’s attitude is typical of many individuals who fail to understand that oppression as it pertains to race follows the same agenda when it comes to gender and sexual preference.
16More sympathetic assessments of African homosexuality, as in Cameroonian Mbella Sonne Dipoko’s A Few Nights and Days (1970) or Malian Yambo Ouologuem’s Bound to Violence (1971) disrupt the exclusive attribution of homosexuality to the West but remain predicated upon the African students’ lessons from experiencing what Maddy calls “the white scene.” Chris Dunton has located the situation of African students in the West in a number of different contexts like “the colonial situation; the neo-colonial state ruled through collusion with Western advisers; the prison system under Apartheid,” in which “homosexual activity is identified with exploitation, being enabled by money power relations, and understood to be all the more disturbing because (supposedly) alien to African society” (Dunton 424).
- 6 To Plutarch, the love of boys is acharistos, that is, it lacks this harmonious, consensual conjunct (...)
17With the possible exception of Maddy’s novel, such novels of the 1960s and 1970s document, as in early anthropological discourse and colonial discourse, unequal relations between partners (differences in age, social status, and pecuniary means). We have to await the 1990s to see a growing number of African literary texts project what Plutarch used to call charis,6 which Foucault shifted from marital love to “l’amour des garçons” (Foucault 220) and could be translated as “obligingness” or “gracious reciprocity,” and, in a recent legal discourse imbued with Human Rights vocabulary, as “consent.” With the increasing creation of consensual charistos characters, writers are now definitely on the path to being “out in Africa.”
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