Basile Ndjio. Africa. Volume 82, Issue 4, November 2012.
The present study addresses general issues of sexuality and ideology in relation to Afrocentric doctrines that have been instrumental in the effort of postcolonial nationalist elites to constitute an exclusive African sexual selfhood. The focus is especially on efforts to ‘Africanize’ the sexuality of the masses in a global context that seems to dramatize the uncontrolled flow of desires and pleasures, and the emergence of new forms of sexual practices that seem to destabilize the heteronormativity imposed upon their masses by post-colonial African rulers. In line with this concern, the study tries to answer the question of how a hegemonic heterosexual identity has come to be constructed and internalized in post-colonial Africa, and how both African men and women have come to believe that to be ‘good’ citizens or ‘real’ Africans, they have to become ‘oedipalized subjects’, who not only limit their sexuality solely to heterosexual desires, but also have a natural aversion to other forms of sexuality such as same-sex relations. My main argument here is that what I refer to as the Muntu, the idealized heterosexist African subject, is partly a result of the post-colonial state’s sexual governmentality, anda by-product of nativist philosophies and Afrocentric ideologies. Together these doctrines have contributed in many African countries to both an edification of phallocratico-patriarchal organizations and a constitution of heterosexist social structures that urge African men to assert their masculinity through a sexual domination of women (cf. Biaya 2001: 71-85; Mbembe 2001; Toulabor 1981: 55-71).
More specifically, this article- mainly based on empirical work conducted in Cameroon—proposes to give an insight into different administrative practices and juridical procedures that, since the enactment of the Sexual Offences Act in 1972, have helped Cameroonian political elites fabricate heterosexual subjects promoted as good citizens in opposition to homosexuals generally misrepresented as ‘uncivic’ citizens or ‘uprooted’ Africans who allegedly flout African traditions and values, or claim a globalized identity over their ‘naturalized’ Africanity.
To achieve the above objectives, the article singles out four dispositifs or devices (Foucault 1981) that mark the progressive deployment of ‘bio-power’ in postcolonial Cameroon. These strategic fields also highlight some of the major shifts in the various dominant indigenous discourses on sexuality, as well as in the way holders of political power in this country have so far dealt with same-sex relations and unorthodox sexualities. The first strategy is the criminalization and demonization of homosexual-related practices by the state power. The second strategy is the sublimation of the procreative and reproductive dimensions of sexuality, which has helped maintain male sexual supremacy and is accompanied by the fetishization of heterosexual relationships; the third dispositif is the essentialization and racialization of the sexuality of native Africans, generally imagined as fundamentally different from the Western ars erotica. The fourth strategy is the Westernization of non-heteronormative sexualities misrepresented as un-African sexual practices. This goes along with the alienation and ‘othering’ of homosexuals whose unconventional sexual desires and practices problematize the very ontology of the African subject (see Johnson 2007).
State Sexual Policy: From Criminalization to Demonization of Homosexuals
In Cameroon, as in many African countries (see Epprecht 2004), gay people are generally seen as a threat to the very foundation of the nation’s moral and social order (Ndjio 2009). They are also viewed as potential destroyers of all that is considered or imagined by both the masses and the ruling class as the African way of life, which is generally contrasted with the so-called decadent and perverse Western modern life. In addition, these sexual minority groups are the object of vilification and stigmatization by the conservative Biya regime (in power since 1982), which has decided to make gays and lesbians scapegoats for the social and economic decadence of the country. This regime has especially committed itself to alienating these ‘enemies from within’, who seem ‘to stand in the way of the nation being united and pure as one body’, as Werbner (1996: 13) would put it. As I have written elsewhere:
The idea that Cameroon, like many African countries, is drifting towards a ‘homosexual peril’, and thus should be cleansed of sex-mongers and peddlers of perverse sexualities, has led the state power over time to launch administrative and juridical offensives against gays and lesbians, generally depicted as agents of the perpetuation of Western imperialism in the black continent at large. In recent years, these homophobic crusades have taken the form of a veritable ‘lynch justice’, which offers to underprivileged homosexuals nothing more than the right to be arbitrarily detained or sentenced to several years of imprisonment. In particular they have taken the form of real witch-hunt campaigns, often spearheaded by magistrates and judges who have become the main instruments for the post-colonial power in pursuit of its ambition to stamp out homosexuality in the country. (Ndjio 2011: 1-2)
These state anti-gay campaigns have been accompanied by the intensification of both juridical and administrative persecutions of men and women rightly or wrongly branded as homosexuals by the ‘new inquisitors’ of modern times. For example, in 2010, four human rights organizations—Cameroon’s Association for the Defence of Homosexuals (ADEFHO), Alternatives-Cameroun, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC)—jointly published a report documenting the many violations of fundamental rights faced by lesbians, gay men and bisexual people in Cameroon (ADEFHO et al. 2010). The report also exposed arbitrary detention, scant regard for due process, and sentencing without evidence of homosexual misconduct. In addition, it documented abuses in detention, both pre-trial and in prison, by police and prison personnel, including beatings, torture and verbal abuse. Even written complaints by prisoners about abuse from guards reportedly received no response from the prison authorities, who often encourage inmates to perpetrate physical violence and aggression against other inmates presumed to be homosexual.
Since 2007, local gay organizations have recorded about a hundred cases of homosexual offences brought to different state courts throughout the country. They also claim to have provided legal assistance to more than a hundred young men and women prosecuted for similar sexual crimes (ibid.). Things have got even worse over the last two years, as evidenced by the growing number of people targeted by the state’s anti-gay campaigns. Indeed, according to one of the leaders of Alternatives-Cameroon I interviewed in Paris in early March 2012, between July and August 2011 nine people were arrested and charged with the practice of sodomy, while between August 2011 and February 2012 as many as 32 men and women were detained in various prisons across the country while awaiting trial for the same sexual offence.
Between February 2007 and November 2010, I have personally witnessed at the Douala High Court a number of cases (seven in total) for homosexual offences, which generally involved young men and women from underprivileged backgrounds. One of the first cases involved six young men (aged between 25 and 39) who were arrested between 19 and 21 July 2007 by members of the special unit of the 3rd branch of the Douala central police, and charged with ‘sodomy practices’ and ‘gross indecency’. Their arrest and detention followed the discovery by the police of their telephone numbers in the address book of one of two teenagers accused by their aunt of being members of a ring of homosexuals to which the defendants reportedly belonged. Thus the six accused were among a larger group of men suspected of having committed homosexual offences with the two adolescents. During the trial the defence, led by barrister Alice Nkom, a prominent lawyer and human rights activist in Cameroon, asked for the immediate release of her clients and the dropping of all charges against them. In support of her plea, she emphasized the fact that the police officers had operated outside their territory of competence, and without any arrest warrant signed by the prosecuting magistrate. She also pointed out that the detention of her clients was illegal because it grossly violated the new Cameroonian criminal code. However, her arguments were dismissed by the prosecutor, who instead called for punitive sentences against the defendants, whom he depicted as corrupters of youth. Describing himself as a fervent Christian, he dramatized the trial as offering society, represented by the ministere public (government prosecution office), an unprecedented opportunity to eradicate from within a ‘mauvaise graine’ (‘bad seed’). In their (sworn) statements, the accused disclaimed any close connections with the two teenagers presented by the prosecutor as the victims of their immoral sexual practices. Yet this did not prevent the judge from finding them guilty of homosexual offences, and sentencing them to six months’ imprisonment.
The second case of homosexual offences witnessed in the course of January 2008 at the Douala High Court concerned two young hairdressers and a street vendor, who all lived in the popular neighbourhood of Deido. They were prosecuted for ‘flagrante delicto of homosexuality’ (being caught in the act of committing the homosexual offence). As in the previous case, the accused were arrested and detained in a special cell of the judiciary police of Douala on the strength of the denunciation of one of their close neighbours. After spending several days in custody, the accused were lodged for almost five months in pretrial detention at the notorious New Bell prison. During the trial, the prosecutor regularly made use of expressions such as ‘sexual crime’, ‘sinful sexual practices’, ‘animalistic sexual behaviour’, and ‘unnatural passions’ to denounce the defendants’ behaviour, which, according to him, undermined moral and ethical values. He ended his accusation by calling for drastic actions against those he characterized as moral perverts and dangerous pederasts. When the main prosecution witness was called to the witness box, he claimed to have overheard a sordid conversation between two of the defendants and another young man about their permissive sexual activities. This was indecent enough to convince him that the young men were mademoiselles (passive gay males) who traded their bodies to Western foreigners in exchange for gifts and money. In an attempt to counter the defence lawyer, who dismissed the declarations made by the prosecution witness as pure fabrication, the prosecutor requested from the judge the expertise of a medical doctor to examine the rectums of the accused to see whether they bore traces of acts of sodomy. This request was finally conceded by the judge, despite the protestation of the defence. Although the defendants’ intimate parts were examined thoroughly, the results of this degrading medical examination have never been sent to the court. Thus, with no evidence of the real involvement of the defendants in homosexual-related practices, they were finally convicted on a charge of tentative d’homosexualite (attempted homosexuality) and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment.
The cases discussed above are limited in their scope and therefore cannot lead to simplistic generalizations about the new political management of the sexuality of the masses by the Biya regime. Yet it would be intellectually dishonest not to acknowledge the fact that they shed light on the recent intensified judicial persecution of gay people in Cameroon, as well as the way this regime has been trying to deal with the so-called ‘homosexuality problem’ since the end of 2005.
The state’s ongoing anti-gay campaign makes it hard to believe that up to the early 2000s, despite their contemptuous attitude towards both effeminate-looking men and mannish women, state officials in Cameroon did not perceive same-sex relations as a social problem so threatening to Cameroonian society that it necessitated the state’s home-front war against these practices. The relative sexual indulgence that characterized the first two decades of Paul Biya’s regime partly explained why state officials up till then had tolerated the existence of nightclubs, cafes, karaoke bars or restaurants in Douala and Yaounde where many local gays and lesbians regularly met (see Gueboguo 2006; Ndjio 2011).
However, since the dramatic shift in the state’s approach to sexual governmentality evident since 2005, this political tolerance towards sexual minority groups has come to an end. As a result, nowadays gays and lesbians face the state’s homophobic violence, which generally finds its mode of expression through permanent harassment, blackmail, rackets and the extortion of money from gay people by representatives of the state (cf. Epprecht and Gueboguo 2010). Over the past three or four years, regular attacks on homosexuals, arbitrary arrests, and illegal detentions of people marked as gays or lesbians have become one of the main manifestations of the state’s new anti-homosexual policy.
Several events exemplified the new twist in the Cameroon government’s antigay policy that finally led to the present hatred and vindictiveness against men and women juridically and administratively construed as gay and lesbian. As I demonstrated in a recent study of the state’s aggressive policy towards sexual minority groups in Cameroon (see Ndjio 2011), the first major event was a remarkable move from the regime of secrecy, hypocritical silence, and feigning unawareness that formerly characterized the attitude of state officials towards gay people to the prevailing explosion of extremist discourses about sexual minority groups. Instead of claiming that there were no gays in the fantasized Cameroonian (heterosexual) community because all Cameroonians had a natural proclivity for heterosexual relations, it was rather a matter of disclosing to the light of day ‘all these sexual perverts who conspired with some malevolent Western forces to destroy our beautiful country’, as Issa Tchiroma Bakary, Minister of Communication and government spokesman, once pointed out in a progovernmental daily newspaper.
The second event was the refinement and sophistication of the different disciplinary machineries, techniques and procedures through which state power had disciplined the bodies of gay people up to then. Concretely, for example, this means the new use by members of the security forces of Internet, mail lists and mobile phones to crack down on gay people. It also implies the backing of some groups of young extremist anti-LGBTI activists, who are increasingly instrumental in the government’s bid to silence vocal local campaigners who now openly advocate for the rights of gay people. For example, on 27 March 2012 a group of young men connected to SOS Jeunesse Libre, the government-sponsored youth association, burst into the conference hall of the Mansel Hotel in Yaoundf, where a three-day workshop was scheduled on ‘human rights and sexual minority groups in Cameroon’. There they attacked the participants, among whom were several journalists and representatives of Western diplomatic missions based in Cameroon. After the group had chanted anti-gay slogans and insulted the workshop participants, its ringleader-Simondi Bitchoka, who is also a well-known local anti-gay activist-reportedly called in the police and the local authorities. Upon his arrival at the venue, the Sub-Divisional Officer of Yaounde District 5, accompanied by a squad of heavily armed policemen, ordered the participants to clear the room immediately. Accused of holding a meeting that would feature ‘perversity and satanism’ rather than its advertised topic, Mr Stephane Kocke, the president of the organizing committee, was arrested and taken to the police station, where he was detained for about three hours for ‘false reporting and breaking of public order’ before being released under pressure from Western diplomats.
The third event was the reinterpretation of the anti-gay law enacted in 1972. For example, beyond the theatricalization of the accusation and the spectacular punishments, the examples discussed above reveal how homosexuals at large are increasingly submitted to the authoritative and inquisitive power of magistrates and gendarmes. The latter have come to play a crucial role in the state’s exuberant production of normative discourses about homosexuals, to the point that they have become the ‘eyes and ears’ of the post-colonial power in the impenetrable world of (deviant) sexualities. The examples above show how these representatives of the state power generally take advantage of the Cameroon’s sodomy law of 1972 to abusively arrest and detain young Cameroonians—mostly from underprivileged backgrounds—on suspicion of being gays or lesbians. Indeed, the notorious section 347 (2) of this law imposes prison terms of from 6 months to 5 years on ‘anyone who performs homosexual acts whether in public or private, or who commits or is a party to the commission of any act of gross indecency with another person from the same sex’. In addition, the convicted person has to pay a fine ranging from 20,000 to 200,000 FCFA (from 30 [euro] to 300 [euro]). Thus, in terms of this questionable legislation- it has never been debated or passed by Parliament, but is an ordinance issued by presidential decree in September 1972—the state is not content with depriving sexual offenders of their liberty. It also extorts money from them on the grounds that they have used their bodies and sexuality improperly.
These representatives of the post-colonial state also take advantage of the vague and imprecise character of this law, which allows for the arbitrary and fanciful interpretation of gays’ and lesbians’ sexual behaviour as an ‘affront to public decency’ (outrage a la pudeur) and ‘contrary to accepted standards of sexual behaviour’ (contraire aux bonnes moeurs). In some instances, the sexual conduct of gay people is misrepresented as satanic, sinful or animalistic sexual practices that defy public order and corrupt ethical values. The sodomy law of 1972 especially allows for their criminalization as sexual delinquents who allegedly break the official codes of sexual conduct. As the various cases discussed earlier show, in their desire to crack down on homosexuals suspected of plotting to turn Cameroon into the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah, some zealous judges have no qualms about incorporating into the procedural artifices controversial notions such as ‘breaking of public order’, ‘attempted homosexuality’, ‘homosexual appearance’, ‘affront to public decency’, ‘unnatural sexuality’ or ‘sexual perversion’, although the existing sodomy law only acknowledges the ‘flagrante delicto of homosexual acts’.
What is particularly striking in the state’s anti-gay policy is that since 2006 some reactionary magistrates and police officers have decided to move homosexual offences from the juridical logics of crime, infraction and delinquency to a frenetic vocabulary of sorcery and occultism. In many respects, this steady transition from the criminalization of homosexual-related practices to their occultization has caused these representatives of the state power to associate male and female homosexuality with sexual malevolence and witchcraft-related practices. More important is the fact that this shift has led to the demonization of homoerotic feelings. In line with this demonization of same-sex relations, gays and lesbians are now increasingly designated in state courts or police stations as dangerous witch-others or sorcerers (Ndjio 2010). In so doing, the representatives of the state power seem to take up the popular notion that occultizes same-sex relations.
This is evidenced by a recent case of three lesbian women from the locality of Ndikinimeki in the central region of the country, who were charged with homosexual offences and witchcraft-related practices. As a matter of fact, taking a lead from the forces of law and order who first marked the accused as ‘lesbian witches’ (sorcieres lesbiennes), the prosecution associated the alleged engagement of the three young women in same-sex relations with involvement in witchcraft-related practices, considered by the Cameroonian penal code a criminal offence liable to severe penalties. The prosecutor reportedly declared that ‘only women driven by evil spirits could engage in homosexual relations, whereas there were many virile men in the village, who could satisfy their sexual desires’. One can understand why the gendarmes did not scruple to detain in a cell one of the accused women who was accompanied by her 9-month-old son. In their eyes, the alleged lesbian woman was nothing but a dangerous sorcerer who deserved no mercy.
Another recent case denounced by many local and international human rights organizations involved two young married women from the locality of Abam on the Cameroo—Gabon border. Accused by the husband of one of their close friends of being lesbian, the defendants were arrested on 19 February 2012 and detained for several days at the local gendarmerie. Despite the fact that they have been released on bail subsequently, the defendants face a sentence of five years’ imprisonment and a fine of at least 200,000 FCFA (300 [euro]) if they are found guilty of homosexuality. As one of the accused women, who has now been rejected by her family members, explained in a local newspaper, ‘during our hearing at the gendarmerie, we were coerced into admitting that we were sorcerers, and that we harboured a demon in us’.
All these examples, like numerous other cases recorded by local gay organizations, reveal how representatives of the post-colonial state actively draw upon a language of witchcraft and sorcery in their desperate attempt to heterosexualize the sexuality of the masses. It is also illustrative of how the entire legal system (judges, lawyers, police and prosecutors) in Cameroon becomes engaged in the administrative and juridical invention of the category of witch-gay or witch-lesbian generally held responsible for the depravity of morals in this country.
From a historical perspective, the state’s intensification of repression towards LGBTI people in Cameroon after almost two decades of a fairly tolerant sexual policy-was prompted by the spread towards the end of 2005 of alarming rumours that the country was ruled by what one local popular singer, Foly Dirane, called ‘pederastes sectaires’ (sectarian pederasts). According to Radio Trottoir—the main source of information in Cameroon because of the growing distrust of the public media these ‘sectarian pederasts’ became rich and powerful as a result of their involvement in what one Cameroonian journalist once dubbed ‘growing homosexual sects’. These rumours were followed by the publication in early January 2006 by local tabloids of lists of so-called ‘notorious homosexuals’ in Cameroon. In these lists, which attracted a very large readership, several prominent members of the government and top-ranking officials at the Presidency and Prime Minister’s Office were branded as the ‘pedes de la republique’ (homosexuals of the republic). These powerful men were accused of ‘bousiller’ (wrecking) the ‘derrieres’ (backsides or buttocks) of the weak and powerless through ignoble and degrading homosexual-related practices (see Ndjio 2009). They were also denounced for compelling underprivileged youths to ‘earn their living by the sweat of their buttocks’, a popular refrain in local newspapers. In addition, it was widely believed that Biya’s regime had planned not only to impose the practice of homosexuality as the main condition of gaining access to dwindling state resources, but also to make homosexual-related practices ‘a method of managing the public good’ (une methode de gestion de la chose publique). The public generally refers to this new form of sexual domination as pouvoir sodomiseur (sodomite power) or anusocratie (power of the anus). The first expression makes reference to a wicked and villainous power which makes the rectum of the powerless and weak not only a place for perverse pleasures and sexual fantasies but also a privileged site for expressing political and economic supremacy (Ndjio 2009). The second concept accounts for the promotion of an ‘anal politics’ which sublimates the practice of sodomy as the sanctioned way for upward mobility and social promotion (see Kemogne 2006: 5-6).
One might regard pouvoir sodomiseur and anusocratie as expressive collective fantasies about one of the most conservative and corrupt powers in post-colonial Africa (Bayart et al. 1999). Or one might construe them as a schizophrenic representation by disgruntled Cameroonians of a regime that has turned their expectations of modernity into an enduring experience of poverty and misery (Konings 2011). Yet these notions have to be taken seriously, because they are key metaphors through which Cameroonians depict the seamier side of the men in power, notably their unbridled sexualities. The concepts of ‘sodomite power’ and ‘anusocratie’ are also important because they reveal how socially and economically disenfranchised groups in Cameroon attempt to give meaning to the new forms of social and economic exclusion they have been experiencing under Biya’s regime.
Therefore, the recent disciplinary deployment of sexuality by the Cameroon state as well as its ongoing anti-gay rhetoric can be seen as a tepid reaction to the popular belief that Biya’s regime has institutionalized a ‘politics of the perverse’, which involves not only the sexual exploitation of powerless and underprivileged youths, but also the transformation of their bodies into a space of desire and fantasies for the ruling classes. It can also be interpreted as a political response to a growing perception of this regime as a ‘sodomite power’. Indeed, by launching their crusades against gays and lesbians, representatives of the state power in this country have been desperately trying to fend off the accusation that the Cameroon government is promoting the homosexualization of society. More importantly, by dramatizing the so-called ‘homosexual peril’ these political elites hope to regain popular support for a regime whose rule is vigorously contested by many Cameroonians.
As in the early 1970s, when Ahidjo’s regime (1960-82) relied on Afrocentric ideologies to enact repressive legislations against same-sex relations, generally misrepresented as an un-African phenomenon or a vestige of Western colonialism, nativist doctrines have also played a pivotal role in the recent antigay campaigns of the Biya regime. First, these philosophies of essentialized African identity have provided ideological and moral justification for both administrative and juridical discourses and practices tending to construe gay people as ‘uprooted Africans’ (africains deracines) and perpetrators of Western perverse sexualities. For example, in a trial for homosexual offences I witnessed at the Douala High Court in November 2009, and which involved two young men, the prosecutor requested severe penalties against the offenders on the ground that they were ‘acculturated’ Africans who were deliberately perverting the traditional African culture. He also called on the Cameroonian government to resist the forces of ‘alienation’, which were allegedly lobbying for the de-criminalization of perverse sexualities foreign to African custom. Second, nativist ideologies have contributed to the pervasive idea endorsed by most Cameroonian legislators and lawmakers that Cameroonians, like most Africans, have a (distinctive) sexe propre rooted in local custom and tradition. It is on the basis of this theory of an original African sexuality that—in police stations, state courts or prisons—gay people are generally bullied because their unconventional sexual behaviour allegedly undermines the so-called African mode of sexual conduct and expression.
Over the last six years, the Biya regime has intensified its homophobic policy until it has come to resemble a witch-hunt against people branded gays or lesbians. Yet many Cameroonians, having lost faith in their government, remain sceptical about the state’s repressive actions against LGBTI people. Symptomatic of this scepticism is the recurrent use by many popular independent newspapers of expressions such as ‘smokescreen’ (poudre aux yeux) and ‘pretence’ (faire-semblant) to characterize the state’s ongoing attacks on gay people. One local journalist has even dismissed these actions as ‘diversionary tactics’ (manoeuvres de diversion) used by members of the ruling classes to screen their own homosexuality. This popular incredulity towards the state’s recent anti-gay campaigns might have been exacerbated by the observation that Biya’s regime was selectively targeting, with excessive zeal, gay people from underprivileged backgrounds and with no political connections. For example, while during this period many underprivileged youths have been profiled as gays or lesbians and sentenced to several years in prison, none of the ‘big men’ regularly named in the notorious lists of the pedes de la Republique has ever been questioned by the forces of law and order over their alleged homosexuality. Instead, the state power has decided to engage in legal action against some newspapers for ‘defamation’ (diffamation), ‘slanderous denunciation’ (denonciation calomnieuse) and ‘violation of people’s privacy’ (atteinte a la vie privee des personnes). This has led many Cameroonians to believe that their government was providing a measure of protection to the so-called ‘sectarian pederasts’ connected to the ruling Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement.
The ‘Muntu’ or the Idealized African Straight
In the African nationalist literature the term ‘Muntu’ is generally discussed in relation to the ontology of the person in Africa, the metaphysics of the African self, and more specifically the natives’ specific way of being and existing (Eboussi-Boulaga 1977; Kagame 1956, 1976; Ndaw 1983; Senghor 1964, 1977; Tempels 1949). For example, in his classic La Crise du Muntu.” authenticite africaine et philosophic, published in 1977, the Cameroonian philosopher Fabien Eboussi-Boulaga defined the Muntu as ‘a man in his African condition, who has to assert himself by overcoming what contests his humanity and puts it in danger’. In a 2006 interview with the Cameroonian magazine Potentiel, he described the Muntu as an African man concerned with ‘la reprise de sor (self-recovery): that is, ‘the desire to attest for his contested humanity’, and ‘the desire to be by and for himself’. In his view, both Western colonialist ideologies and post-colonial nativist discourses were partly responsible for what he referred to as the ‘crisis of the Muntu’. If the former denied Africans their humanity, the later deprived them of their subjectivity and agency. Thus the Muntu needs to fight in order to recover his own self and free himself from what the Ghanaian historian Emmanuel Akyeampong calls ‘the intellectual rigidity of pan-Africanism’ (2006:310).
Although the term ‘Muntu’ (plural Bantu), which derives from many Bantu-speaking languages, is usually translated as a ‘man’, several authors have argued for the inclusiveness and superfluity of the concept. For example, the famous ethnologist and Belgian monk Janheinz Jahn ([1958] 1990:11) interprets the term ‘Muntu’ as an inclusive and elusive concept which embraces many things, among them ‘living and dead, ancestors and deified ancestors: gods’. The same author discusses the concept of ‘Muntu’ in relation to traditional African culture, African nationalism, the philosophy of authenticity, and Western colonialism (ibid.).
Because I share the idea that the term ‘Muntu’ should not be reduced to a single, exclusive and hegemonic interpretation, in this study I understand this concept as making reference to the African man in his expression of masculinity, and especially in his ars erotica. I do not intend, though, to reduce the African ontology to the sole expression of libido, sexual desires and use of pleasure. Nor is it my intention to overlook the many other ways of imagining the Muntu subject that arise in various African societies. Yet I think it is important to focus on one aspect of the Muntu subject that remains unexplored in the African political anthropology: his role in the nativist imagination of African masculinity since the independence period, and particularly in the present-day context dominated by the retour enforce of Afrocentrist philosophy (Mudimbe 1988). Thus, I propose to read the Muntu as an African subject whose sexuality is caught in an authoritarian heterosexist ideology. For this sexually conditioned subject has been trained, instructed, required or urged to be disgusted by other forms of sexual desire such as homosexuality and sodomy, generally represented as a threat to both his manliness and Africanness (Epprecht 2008). Thus, the Muntu, as an iconic figure of the African heterosexual male, strongly believes that it is only by sexually assaulting a woman that an African man can (re)gain his lost authority and respect (cf. Biaya 1999: 41-6; Friedman 2001; Nyamnjoh 2005: 295-324). For example, in an interview with a local newspaper, Woungly Massaga, a Cameroonian political commentator and prominent member of the Union des Populations du Cameroun (the nationalist party that was so fiercely opposed to the French colonial administration in the 1950s), earnestly declared that ‘a real African male is the man who makes his female partner cry for pleasure, or who arouses from her an ecstatic enjoyment that can make her faint’. In the same interview, he went on to reveal that in many traditional Bantu societies, people generally derided women who were involved in same-sex relationships because only a man’s phallus could enable a woman to enjoy sexual pleasures or experience the delight of orgasm.
Massaga’s remarks reveal a nativist ideology that has instrumentalized in many post-colonial African societies the man’s phallus as a technology of power. The same philosophy also imagines African sexuality within dichotomizing binaries of masculinity/femininity, passivity/activity, virility/impotency, strength/weakness. This implicitly means that, in the post-colonial regime of sexuality celebrating simultaneously virile promiscuity for men and chastity for women, the Muntu is assumed to play an active role, while his female partner is rather expected to play a passive role in the sexual act. His view especially echoes a received understanding of sexual intercourse in post-colonial Africa as an assertion of men’s domination over women, a means of expressing the sexual authority of one gender over the other, as several studies have demonstrated (Miescher 2005; Ombolo 1990). For example, across sub-Saharan Africa, men often refer to sexual intercourse as ‘ecraser le pistache’ (crushing the pistachio nut), ‘labourer lafemme’ (furrowing a woman), ‘chicotter le derriere de lafemme’ (snatching the woman’s backside), ‘piquer la femme’ (pricking the woman), ‘defricher le gazon de la femme’ (cleaning a woman’s grass), ‘couper la femme’ (chopping the woman), et cetera (see Barker and Ricardo 2005; Biaya 2001: 71-85). In Cameroon, for instance, sexual intercourse is generally referred to as ‘playing a grand match’ (livrer le grand match) or ‘playing a championship’ in which the Muntu is expected to ‘score as many goals as possible’, as the urban vernacular expression puts it; that is, to make his female partner enjoy orgasm several times. He is also expected to make her feel the virility and strength of his phallus in a violent way (Mbembe 2001; Ndjio 2005:265 94; Sindjoun 2000).
Massaga’s view of African masculinity in terms of the subjugation of women’s bodies by sexually aggressive men reminds me of the advice that one of my elder cousins used to give me when I was a teenager: ‘a real man is a good lover’ (un vrai homme est un bon demarreur) and ‘without his phallus, a man is nothing in the eyes of the woman’ (sans son sexe, l’homme n’est rien devant la femme). These comments by a man who defined himself as a ‘traditionalist African’ suggest that the Muntu is the living representation of a libidinal African man to whom Boris de Rachewitz (1963: 37) once referred as an ‘eternal deflowerer of women’. Above all, he epitomizes the man for whom a Cameroonian female writer has coined the term bitocrate, one who conquers and subdues the bodies of African women to the authoritarian power of his insatiable and voracious bite (phallus).
Two forms of sexual aggression particularly characterize the Muntu bitocrate. First, the entanglement of African women of all ages and classes in a moral economy of rape through which the disempowerment of their bodies and personhood is achieved by violent means, as several reports on sexual and gender-based violence in Africa have forcefully demonstrated. For example, in the 2007 UNFPA report on gender-based violence in Eastern and Central Africa (UNFPA 2007), it is stated that this kind of violence is endemic in countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cameroon, where more than 52 per cent of young girls and women have reportedly been victims of different forms of sexual coercion and gender-based violence, ranging through female genital mutilation, rape, sexual battering, trafficking and forced prostitution, forced marriage, and sexual harassment or intimidation. Second, such sexual aggression implies also the ‘dehumanization’ and ‘humiliation’ of the bodies of the weak by some powerful men who generally take advantage of their dominant position in the society to subjugate the underprivileged, both men and women, to their perverse sexual fantasies. According to one Cameroonian social activist, these figureheads in post-colonial African elites have a perverted propensity to ‘enslave’ their innocent victims in what he calls ‘anusocratie’ (see Kemogne 2006: 5-6). This is what happened in early August 2006 to Narcisse Djomo Pokam, a Masters student from the University of Yaounde I. After being tortured to death and sodomized by his tormentors, who also took pleasure in ironing his buttocks, the victim was thrown down from the eighth floor of the Hilton Hotel, which at the time enjoyed the reputation of being one of the safest hotels in the country. The fact that the police never questioned the key suspects, who were two top-ranking state officials and a high-profile businessman connected to the ruling CPDM party, confirmed people in the belief that free rein was given to some perverted local ‘big men’, not only to ‘wreck’ the backsides of the powerless at large, but also to prey on underprivileged youth.
The revelations made by Ndoumbe, a well-known undertaker at the Douala Laquintinie Hospital mortuary, show that in his violent expression of manliness the Muntu has no qualms about turning even the dead bodies of young women into sexual fantasies or objects of wicked pleasure. Indeed, in a radio talk show broadcast in mid-March 2009, the notorious undertaker revealed that he regularly performed sex on young deceased women while washing them. The middle-aged man explained further that these beautiful dead women had irresistible vaginas, which could leave no normal man indifferent, and he took pride in having ‘tasted’ about one hundred of them. He added that his ‘lovers’ often smiled at him as he was taking possession of their dead bodies. In response to one caller who dismissed his behaviour as psycho-pathologic, the undertaker-cum-necrophile replied that the government had given him unlimited power to take care of the deceased. Thus, as ‘the king of the realm of the dead’, he had ‘the right to sexually possess the bodies of deceased women who belonged to his kingdom’, as he put it. Ndoumbe’s narrative of unlimited access to women, and the appeal to authority in his argument, are telling instances of the sexual expressiveness of the Muntu, who often mimics the post-colonial African power in both vulgarity and intemperance.
Despite his fluid and multiple identities, despite the fact that he often has recourse to different strategies to capture his ‘prey’, the Muntu bitocrate is characterized by a desire to assert the hegemonic power of the phallus in sexual relationships. Little wonder that the Muntu somehow embodies what R. W. Connell ([1995] 2005: 5) has referred to as ‘hegemonic masculinity’, which she defines as ‘exclusive, anxiety-provoking, internally and hierarchically differentiated, brutal, and violent’. According to her, ‘misogyny, homophobia, racism and compulsory heterosexuality are the main characteristics of a hegemonic masculinity’ (ibid.).
To a certain extent the theorization of the Muntu subject re-enacts and even reinforces colonial racist stereotypes about African Eros. Yet, his political invention especially embodies the nationalist effort to rewrite colonial narratives about the African body and sexuality. This new imagination of the African self positions itself as a counter-history to colonial sexual policy. Indeed, the Muntu’s virilized and energetic body was initially meant to obscure the sexual violence of colonialism, which led for example to the castration and emasculation of native men (cf. Aldrich 2003; Hyam 1990; see also Clancy-Smith and Gouda 1998; Ruscio 1996). It was especially meant to move the African’s phallus from a condition of impotency and devirilization in which it had been encapsulated by the aggressive colonial ars erotica to a situation of liberation in which the black phallus recovered its lost sovereign power. This liberation process-implying a new use of body, sex, and new expressions of pleasure-assigned a cathartic role to the African’s phallus, re-energizing and revitalizing the African male body.
It is against this redemptive mission—aiming not only at purging African sexuality of so-called Western colonial taints, but also at rehabilitating the traumatized African masculine selfhood—that we can understand why, in most post-colonial African countries, the everyday expression of masculinity has been reduced to what one Congolese anthropologist once characterized as ‘hunting of girls’ and ‘ostentatious consumption of women’ (Biaya 2001: 83). It also explains why, despite official discourses on the emancipation of African women, native women continue to be seen as sexual objects which are to cater for the sexual needs of the local big men. Some recent studies on post-colonial sexual governmentality have pointed out that in many African countries nationalist politico-bureaucratic elites have mischievously turned some cultural festivities and traditional practices into strategies for conquest of young women, who are often barely mature girls (Biaya 1999: 41-6). For example, in countries such as Cameroon, Senegal, Togo and the former Zaire visits of state officials to a particular locality for national-day celebrations, party rallies or state-sponsored beauty contests generally serve as a pretext for the big men to seduce young majorettes and cheerleaders who are generally selected for their beauty (see also Bayart et al. 1992; Biaya 2001:71 85).
Homosexual: The Problematic Muntu
On 18 November 2011, two young men (aged 19 and 20) were found guilty of homosexual misconduct and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment by the Yaounde Tribunal of First Instance. Arrested in August 2011 by a night police patrol for their ‘effeminate aspect’ (d’aspect trop effemine) which allegedly cast doubt about their ‘real’ manhood (vraie maseulinite), the defendants were subsequently charged with being passive homosexual males who allegedly allowed themselves to be sodomized by other men as if they were women. During the trial, which enjoyed wide media coverage, the judge insisted on the fact that the accused young men ‘behaved like women’ and did not seem to show any interest in women, like ‘normal’ African men. The alleged ‘femaleness’ of the two accused was partly due to the fact that both were carrying a female handbag and wore wigs when the police arrested them. The preference of the defendants for a soft alcoholic drink called ‘Baileys’—a drink generally associated in the local popular imagination with women—was also interpreted by the magistrate as proof of their homosexual behaviour and lack of virility (see Le Jour, 19 January 2012). The ‘man of the law’ reportedly justified the heavy penalties inflicted on the powerless young men by the fact that these sanctions were aiming to ‘correct’ (corriger) their ‘deviant behaviour’ that was ‘an insult to all African men’. In his eyes, these young effeminate-looking gay men who flouted both the dress and sex codes posed a threat to the dominant post-colonial sexual and gender order. This genital organization generally assigns two distinctive social roles to both male phallus and female vagina: while the former is made the woman’s piston (pestle or puncture), the latter is socialized as the man’s hole, which needs to be filled with semen.
Beyond the fact that it dramatizes a philosophy of suspicion that profiles some people as gay on the basis of their appearance and dress style, the above case illustrates an important aspect of the efforts by post-colonial nationalist elites to format a certain type of sexual citizenship. This new form of citizenship not only attempts to reduce African personality to a single sexual identity, but also exalts the aggressive and predatory modality of masculinity (bitocratie). One can also see in these state-led persecutions of gay people the post-colonial power’s ambition to purify the body of the nation by means of the administrative and juridical annihilation of any kind of sexual difference that could constitute an obstacle to the achievement of the nation building so dear to many nationalist political elites in Cameroon. In addition, the state’s ambition to remove ‘legally’ from the post-colonial public sphere all those sexual ‘inverts’ whose unconventional sexual behaviour problematizes the very ontology of the African subject might suggest that we are dealing here with an authoritarian regime whose leaders increasingly see gay people, not only as ‘problematic subjects’ but also as ‘acculturated Africans who deliberately pervert the traditional African culture’, in the words of the Douala High Court prosecutor mentioned earlier.
Yet the recurrent use by the juridical apparatus in Cameroon of disparaging terms such as effeminacy, weakness, indolence, passivity and sexual impotence to depict some male homosexuals suggests that the official discourses in this country tend to construe effeminate-looking gays generally characterized in the popular language as mademoiselles as the reverse side of the idealized virile Muntu bitocrate. Indeed, contrary to the Muntu bitocrate, who has made the bodies of native women a container of his insatiable sexual desires and fantasies, the un Muntu gay is generally disinclined to hunt women and subjugate their bodies and sex to the power of his phallus. Nor does he seem interested in making his phallus a main instrument for expressing sexual authority, as the Muntu usually does. Little wonder that gay men-who exhibit signs of ‘femaleness’ suggesting a passive role in sex acts, and especially of a lack of interest in women—have always been the prime targets of the state’s authoritarian sexual governmentality. And, since the launching of the state’s aggressive anti-gay campaigns in late 2005, state agents have awarded themselves unlimited rights to keep a watch on these sexual minority groups. They also make it their business to survey their private lives, violate their intimacy, spy on them, inspect their bodies, and especially examine their backsides to see whether they wear nappies, as the public imagination in Cameroon usually asserts. For example, during a trial for homosexual offences I witnessed in early February 2009 at the Douala High Court, one witness for the prosecution declared that he knew that the defendant was a mademoiselle because he had observed him for a long time. In support of his accusation, the middle-aged gendarme adduced the fact that the accused (a 23-year-old hairdresser) had prominent buttocks and behaved like gay people-who, according to the gendarme, were widely recognized by their appearance and mannerisms. His indiscreet and inquisitive appraisal of the offender’s backside led him as far as to suspect the young hairdresser of wearing nappies in order to protect his backside from incontinence.
Several reasons can explain why mademoiselles have become the main concern of the post-colonial power, and why, for example, the Cameroonian penal code has endorsed the Judaeo-Christian conservative view of homosexual acts and desires. A first consideration is that the unconventional sexuality of gay people embodies a form of sexual inversion that contravenes the heterosexual fantasies and desires juridically and politically sanctioned as “bonnes moeurs’ or ‘natural’ sexual drives. Their inverted sexuality encourages what Judith Butler (1990: 33) calls a ‘proliferation and subversive play of gendered meaning’—exposing the narrowness and arbitrariness of the dominant gender division of sexual roles alluded to earlier. A second consideration is that the unconventional sexual desires of homosexuals at large bring into question the relevance and consistency of the normative nativist ideologies regulating desires and pleasures in Africa. In other words, the local mademoiselles confront the post-colonial power with the unpleasant truth that the so-called ‘African sexuality’, so far represented by the post-colonial nationalist bourgeoisie as essentially and exclusively heterosexualist, is complex and elusive. To that should be added the fact that the effeminate mademoiselles who prefer to be passive partners in erotic relationships, thus depriving their phalluses of their ‘legitimate’ rights to ‘dig’ the women’s vaginas, expose the dilemma of African masculinity as a ‘precariously held, endlessly tested, unstable condition’, to quote Gregory Rochlin (1980: 91).
However, it is not only men behaving like women who allegedly undermine African manhood or males’ superiority. The tantouses, mannish lesbians who overtly exhibit the signs and symbols of the masculine power, also put at risk the male sexual supremacy. That is why representatives of the post-colonial state in Cameroon and other social moralist reformers are more and more concerned with the emergence of a society where women no longer accept subjugation to the tyrannical power of the man’s phallus. Indeed, if these sexually active lesbians are placed under the ‘eyes of power’ and the state’s surveillance, it is because they are the supreme symbols of what could be called unsubmissive African women who reject the passive and enduring role that the patriarchal African society generally imposes on women in sexual intercourse. These are people who do not content themselves with challenging the myths that the post-colonial bourgeoisie has always produced about the sexual passivity and docility of African women. They also assert their rights to sexual freedom and pleasure, even if this implies bypassing or putting into perspective the man’s phallus.
All this leads us to the conclusion that if the Muntu is the figurehead of what Deleuze and Guattari ([1972] 1983: 15) call the ‘oedipalized and conditioned subject’, who has surrendered his sexuality unconditionally to ‘the nativist ideologies of patriotic and civic heterosexuality’ (Watney 1989:15), the mademoiselle rather incarnates the image of a ‘schizophrenic subject’. By schizophrenic subject, Deleuze and Guattari mean more than an ‘anti-oedipalized subject’ liberated from agencies of the post-colonial power. They also refer to a courageous and brave subject who escapes, disrupts or contests the state’s totalizing and unifying process of desires and pleasure (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983: 341). Thus, as an ‘anti-Oedipus’ who has freed himself from ‘a dominant phallic economy’ (Irigaray 1985), the un-Muntu gay willingly or unwillingly breaks the link of sexual subordination of women by men, and especially subverts the moral economy of sexual exchanges based on gender. By so doing, he positions himself above all as an uncaptured subject who is delighted to ridicule and betray the dominant myth about the Muntu’s virility.
Conclusion
This study has demonstrated that any thoughtful research on sexuality in postcolonial Africa should take into account the critical role played by a deep-seated African nationalism, which has been instrumental in (re-)shaping the contours of the so-called African sexuality—a reality that has so far been ignored or poorly studied by most students of sexuality in Africa. Indeed, since the late 1950s and early 1960s, African nationalist thought has constructed African sexuality through dominant sexual codes that have always given priority to heterosexual relationships over homoerotic acts generally conceived of as unproductive, and especially alien to the so-called traditional African culture. In the heyday of African nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s, heterosexual relationships were idealized, and sometimes fetishized, for they were imagined as an efficient means of achieving the nationalist project to increase the numbers of the African population. All this sexual governmentality has led over time to the authoritarian heterosexualization of African sexuality by many post-colonial nationalist leaders. As discussed in this study, this heterosexualist policy was part of the pan-African redemptive mission to recover the lost African self. In many respects, this post-colonial regime of sex was accompanied by the suppression or negation of other forms of sexuality, which were contrary to the compulsory heterosexual relationships promoted by the post-colonial state. In Cameroon, for instance, where the regimes of both Ahmadou Ahidjo and his successor Paul Biya did their best to impose upon the masses one type of sexuality as a norm, the claim of a deep authentic African subjectivity was first embedded in the promotion of what can be called heterotitude. This concept accounts for a ritual celebration of heterosexual relations, and especially a tyrannical imposition of heterosexuality as the sole mode of socially approved sexual practices and desires.
If we fail to acknowledge this fact, we won’t be able to have a better understanding of the sexual governmentality of many post-colonial African leaders, their deterministic vision of the sexuality of Africans, their fetishization of heterosexual relations, their glorification of traditional imageries of masculinity, and especially their support for social and cultural practices that encourage the objectification of women’s bodies or neglect their sexual desires- to the point of making African women mere reproductive machines and containers of men’s sexual fantasies. If we overlook the different nativist ideologies, which have locked up the African sexual identity in what Mbembe (2002: 239-40) would have called ‘the metaphysics of difference’, we will fail to understand the voluntary submission of many Africans to the homophobic policy of the post-colonial state power, and especially why many have easily endorsed the colonial myths about the so-called exceptional character of African sexuality.
In other respects, this work has shown that the sexual governmentality of the African post-colonial power, as well as its anti-gay rhetoric, was quite different from the Western sexual politics studied for example by Michel Foucault ([1978] 1981) and Jeffrey Weeks (1977; 1981). Indeed, in Africa at large, it was through the excessive phallocratization of the society, the tyrannical imposition of heterosexuality as the sole mode of sexual pleasures, and especially the ‘naturalization’ of the sexuality of black Africans that nativist ideologies managed to (re)invent what we have referred to as a Muntu heterosexist subject. In Cameroon, as in many other African countries, the ‘creation’ of this virile African straight who allegedly has an unrestrained passion for women’s vaginas went along with the prohibition, suppression, denial or negation of other forms of sexual desire such as male homosexuality and lesbianism, generally misrepresented as un-African sexual practices. In addition, it was also through an authoritarian monitoring of the sexual practices and desires of the masses that many African nationalist political elites not only hoped to cure Africa’s alleged sexual emasculation and acculturation, but also aspired to recover the ‘authentic’ African sexuality. Thus, it was in line with this particular theology of redemption and liberation that sexuality has been forced to become Africa’s principal mode of transcendence, and its main touchstone of authenticity and purity. It was also consistent with this nationalist moral economy of difference, and its cult of authenticity and purity, that homosexuality and other forms of transgressive desires were denounced as another attempt by neo-colonialist forces to re-alienate the so-called authentic African selfhood that African nationalist leaders tried to re-authenticate through pan-Africanist projects and liberation movements.
In a country such as Cameroon, African nationalist projects have resulted—as elsewhere—in the state’s exuberant production of normative and moralizing discourses that not only categorize gays and lesbians as sexual perverts, but also criminalize them as sexual delinquents. Yet in recent years we have recorded a radical change in the way in which representatives of the state power in this country have represented homosexuals at large: they have moved steadily from the former practices of criminalizing sexual inverts to their demonization. Symptomatic in this occultization of same-sex relations is the pervasive figure of the witch-gay, which now permeates both the official and popular discourses on homosexuals in contemporary Cameroon.