Queer Malawi

2014

Although many people have been involved and been supportive to the writing of this thesis, I first and foremost want to express my gratitude to my informants that gave me their time, put trust in me and let me hear their stories. I also want to direct my warmest regards to the NGO:s that helped me gather my material. Jessy,

2013

Malawians, sad to say, remain steadfast in their resistance to homosexuality. The perception that same-sex practices are deviant and alien to the social and cultural fabric of Africa (Muula 2007) is still deeply ingrained in the minds of most Malawians, which makes the fight for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights much harder. Some authors have argued that much of the homophobia being witnessed in Africa today is not 'home-grown' (Mutua 2009). I share the same view. In the case of Malawi, much of the revulsion to homosexuality can be traced to its colonial past. This chapter begins with the historical background so as to place homophobia in context. It then presents an overview of recent developments in Malawi in relation to LGBT issues, and the various ways in which these issues are resurfacing and being debated in the country. It concludes with a call for recognition and widespread acceptance of LGBT rights as human rights. Historical background Malawi, like most of Southern Africa, experienced British colonialism, which fundamentally altered and even destroyed many positive values. Tolerance and respect for the otherness of the other, the hallmark of the ubuntu concept, was replaced by hatred and extreme fanaticism. There were no laws criminalising consensual same-sex acts before colonialism-these were introduced by the colonialists. When the country finally gained independence in 1964, it adopted all the laws that were in force during colonialism, including those regarding 'unnatural acts'. After independence, it was expected that the country would speedily embrace democracy and guarantee rights and freedoms previously denied to Malawians. Unfortunately, this did not happen. Instead, the country endured three more decades of a brutal dictatorship under a native regime remembered as much for widespread human rights violations as for strictly enforcing its 'four cornerstones', namely unity, loyalty, obedience and discipline. Failure to Chapter 13, pp. 359-79 of Corinne Lennox & Matthew Waites (eds.) (2013) Human Rights,

Journal of Humanities, 2020

This article examines characterisation and symbolism as narrative strategies that challenge anti-LGBTI (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex) cultures in four short stories – Stanley Kenani’s “Love on Trial” and “In the Best Interests of the Child”, Monica Arac de Nyeko’s “Jambula Tree” and Beatrice Lamwaka’s “Chief of the Home”. The main thrust of the article is that gender as represented in these works of fiction does not conform to the hegemonic social binaries prevalent in Malawi and Uganda, the national contexts for these stories. Instead, it is performative rather than fixed, and more fluid than hegemonic conceptions would have it. Using the Butlerian notion of gender performativity, this article demonstrates how the aforementioned narrative strategies are used to critique cultures (and other social establishments such as laws and religions) that are eventually liable for the prevalent homophobic attitudes towards LGBTI, particularly homosexuality and lesbianism. The article reads the selected stories in ways that help challenge widespread and entrenched bigotry regarding alternative sexualities.

Africa, 2021

This part issue of the journal Africa broadly explores the idea of frontiers and pioneers in the study of queer African lives. We envisage frontiers as exploring new openings in the study of sexuality by putting forward the practices and experiences of people across the African continent. We propose to study queerness as part of broader quotidian realities so as to further theorize the study of sexualities and queerness. We propose the term 'pioneer' for the interlocutors in our studies: (self-identifying) women, men and queerying persons who courageously explore contradictory paths in their various contexts. As such, we encourage an imaginative employment of queer as indicating a horizon of curiosity and imprecision. In making queerness not an object of study but rather a subject of its own theoriza-tion based on everyday experience, this special journal issue explicitly and deliberately asserts the vernacular and the mundane as a locus of knowledge. One implication is especially pertinent: knowledge on queerness cannot be prefabricated or preassembled in theoretical laboratories with the aim of merely applying it to an African context. By doing so, Africa functions-as it always has-only as a variable in the study of cultural difference, one that is different from, by implication , a Euro-American centre. 'Or, as is happening too often, queer African voices and experiences will be absorbed as "data" or "evidence," not as modes of theory or as challenges to the conceptual assumptions that drive queer studies' (Macharia 2016: 185). Foregrounding the mundane rather than the urbane (as in 'suave', for which queer theory has a strong penchant), we are not trying to 'define' African queer sexualities; rather, we seek to provoke conversations about the terms and agencies of their expansion through the prism of frontiers and pioneers. Inspired by Francis Nyamnjoh's and Stella Nyanzi's work, we argue that studying the quotidian is a critical first step. Even as we follow up on an existing body of literature on queer sexualities in African societies, this literature shows how the investigation of the everyday is easily subsumed by other concerns; our aim is thus to centre people's practices and experiences as a focal axis of theorizing. Rachel Spronk is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. In her work on gender, sexuality and the middle classes she combines the ethno-graphic study of practices and self-perceptions with the task of rethinking our theoretical repertoires. Email: R.Spronk@uva.nl S. N. Nyeck is a visiting scholar at the Vulnerability and Human Condition Initiative at Emory School of Law and a research associate with the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation (CriSHET), Mandela University.

Agenda, 2015

In a continent notorious for its cultural negation of sexual rights, the unapologetic and intimate lived experiences of characters that populate this potpourri of short stories are an extraordinary achievement and celebration of sexual minorities. Queer Africa, published in 2013 by MaThoko's Books and edited by Karen Martin and Makhosazana Zaba, is an eye-catching collection of 18 stories that imagine queer Africa in a way certain to raise consciousness and sensitivity to alternate ways of being. Davina Owombre, Sello Duicker, Dolar Vasani, Wame Molephe and Monica Arac de Nyeko are just some of the authors in this collection. Awarded the Lambda Literary Award for best LGBT anthology in 2014, these iconic tales are significant milestones of sexual affirmation and emancipation in African societies that are socialised in heterosexual values and which ridicule and shame the idea of difference and ambiguity. Queer is an umbrella term that refers to all LGBTIQ people.It is a political statement as well as a sexual orientation, which advocates breaking binary thinking and seeing both sexual orientation and gender identity as potentially fluid. The stories in Queer Africa (2013) dramatise the discursive nature of this term. Five of the narratives have been selected for critical analysis here; each utilises diverse personas to reimagine queer experience as a contested terrain that challenges a reductive and binary construction of identities.

New Literaria An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities ISSN- 2582-7375 [Online], 2023

This paper aims to explore recent developments in queer representation in 21 st century African literature. Africa's history with the legitimization of homosexuality is complicit with politics of invisibility, silencing, erasure and rigid cultural ideologies. The Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act (SSMPA) of Nigeria which was enacted in 2014 saw a furore among both old and new generation African writers who were embittered by the systemic erasure of LGBTQIA+ lives. Wole Soyinka's portrayal of the mulatto Joe Golder in The Interpreters was the closest that an African writer had come to representing a non-straight, non-heterosexual character in the panorama of African literature. While the only accomplishment of Soyinka's character remains a sympathetic portrayal of a homosexual, it also suggests the possibility of closeted queer presence in Africa. The beginning of the 21 st century witnessed a bold flourish of queer literature-Chris Abani's GraceLand (2004) and Jude Dibia's Walking with Shadows (2005) present queer protagonists who struggle to come to terms with their queerness and radicalize anachronistic notions of gender and sexuality. Later works by new generation African writers have effectively succeeded in debunking the premise that 'homosexuality is un-African' on which the draconian SSMPA had been built. Chinelo Okparanta's Under the Udala Trees (2015) reinvents the bildungsroman by placing a queer African girl as the hero of her story. Akwaeke Emezi's The Death of Vivek Oji (2020) explores the liminalities of gender and sexuality, the rites of passage that presages the fate of self-identified queer people within a social context that is hostile to sexual difference. This paper will analyze how all these works rewrite the history of African queer people into the nation's body politic by strategically applying pertinent theoretical frameworks like race, gender and sexuality, biopolitics, politics of heteronormativity, and queer necropolitics.

2013

and enthusiasm about the work of your students changed the course of my life. Thank you! The Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project (funded by the NIH) helped to fund several research trips to Malawi and place me in a network of researchers and friends at home and abroad. There are so many of you who supported my work but I especially want to thank Pete Fleming (founder of Invest in Knowledge Initiative),

abstract In a continent notorious for its cultural negation of sexual rights, the unapologetic and intimate lived experiences of characters that populate this potpourri of short stories are an extraordinary achievement and celebration of sexual minorities. Queer Africa, published in 2013 by MaThoko's Books and edited by Karen Martin and Makhosazana Zaba, is an eye-catching collection of 18 stories that imagine queer Africa in a way certain to raise consciousness and sensitivity to alternate ways of being. Davina Owombre, Sello Duicker, Dolar Vasani, Wame Molephe and Monica Arac de Nyeko are just some of the authors in this collection. Awarded the Lambda Literary Award for best LGBT anthology in 2014, these iconic tales are significant milestones of sexual affirmation and emancipation in African societies that are socialised in heterosexual values and which ridicule and shame the idea of difference and ambiguity. Queer is an umbrella term that refers to all LGBTIQ people.It is a political statement as well as a sexual orientation, which advocates breaking binary thinking and seeing both sexual orientation and gender identity as potentially fluid. The stories in Queer Africa (2013) dramatise the discursive nature of this term. Five of the narratives have been selected for critical analysis here; each utilises diverse personas to reimagine queer experience as a contested terrain that challenges a reductive and binary construction of identities.

Africa, 2021

In her work on gender, sexuality and the middle classes she combines the ethnographic study of practices and self-perceptions with the task of rethinking our theoretical repertoires.

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