Neville Wallace Hoad

There have been few book-length engagements with the question of sexuality in Africa, let alone African homosexuality. African Intimacies simultaneously responds to the public debate on the “Africanness” of homosexuality and interrogates the meaningfulness of the terms “sexuality” and “homosexuality” outside Euro-American discourse. Speculating on cultural practices interpreted by missionaries as sodomy and resistance to colonialism, Neville Hoad begins by analyzing the 1886 Bugandan martyrs incident—the execution of thirty men in the royal court. Then, in a series of close readings, he addresses questions of race, sex, and globalization in the 1965 Wole Soyinka novel The Interpreters, examines the emblematic 1998 Lambeth conference of Anglican bishops, considers the imperial legacy in depictions of the HIV/AIDS crisis, and reveals how South African writer Phaswane Mpe’s contemporary novel Welcome to Our Hillbrow problematizes notions of African identity and cosmopolitanism. Hoad’s assessment of the historical valence of homosexuality in Africa shows how the category has served a key role in a larger story, one in which sexuality has been made in line with a vision of white Western truth, limiting an understanding of intimacy that could imagine an African universalism. Neville Hoad is assistant professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin.

Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization

African Intimacies

Karen Martin

Graeme Reid

This book tells how South Africa came to lead the world in enshrining sexual equality in our Bill of Rights, which forms part of the Constitution. The achievement, which has been hailed as a model for the rest of the world, did not come about without a long struggle. This was spearheaded by gender activists and movements during the 1980s, whose campaigns on the one hand evoked hostility from the apartheid state and were also dismissed as an irrelevance by conservative factions within the liberation movement. Indeed, the end of apartheid did not automatically guarantee that sexual equality would be realised, and the book explains how in the end this was achieved. The volume draws upon the rich archive of the Gay and Lesbian association and incorporates fascinating first-hand documents from the time as well as essays by participants in the events and later commentators.

Neville Wallace Hoad

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