TRANSGENDER IN YORUBA TRADITIONAL HISTORY

INTRODUCTION:

Right to expression is a fundamental right to all humans. Most times we tend to look at this right only from the aspect of freedom of speech, however an integral part of expression is also gender or sexual expression.

Gender or sexual expression is influenced by culture, which is fluid, in the sense that as the way of life of particular groups of persons are influenced, so is their perception and reaction to things around them, which also change with time. These influences can be in the form of cultural domination or subjugation, religious ideology, etc.

Africa has a diverse form of gender and sexual expression and in the Yoruba traditional belief in particular, gender and sexual expression is fluid as the manifestation of gender can either take the course of male or female even for the same person.

Most opponents of LGBT rights use culture to jettison the idea of respect for the protection of rights of LGBT persons, as the normal cliché is ‘its never part of our culture’. Further, most also oppose LGBTI rights based on lack of or limited knowledge on LGBTI issues, hence when they are probed about these issues, they lack answers to such questions or when they struggle to utter any answer, such are tainted with sentiments that lack basis.

This article will try to explore transgender in Yoruba traditional belief and the role non-gender conforming persons play in traditional society. Its will also explore the life of Omosun on the issue of rights assertion by gender non-conforming persons in Yoruba traditional settings.

TRANSGENDER:

Transgender in simple terms means the state when a person’s gender identity or expression does not match the assigned sex at birth.

Gender identity refers to a person’s internal sense of being male, female, or something else; Gender expression refers to the way a person communicates gender identity to others through behavior, clothing, hairstyles, voice, or body characteristics[1].

Note that gender is a social and cultural construct, hence its fluid as earlier discussed in the introduction, so the issue of expression of gender is also influenced by the same factors as culture.

GENDER EXPRESSION IN YORUBA TRADITION

Yoruba gender construction is fluid and is modulated by other factors such as seniority (age) and personal achievements (wealth and knowledge acquisition)[2]. Although gender is fluid Yoruba traditional culture, in their usage of language gender is limited to binary (male and female). It is worthy to note that binary usage of gender is not only limited to humans but also include expressions in cosmos.

Gender non-conforming expressions in Yoruba culture does not necessarily mean that the person needs to forgo any the social constructions linked to their biological sex, but assuming the gender role of male or female depending on circumstances.

This is more evident in expressions like ‘obirin bi okunrin’ meaning ‘a woman behaving like a man’, which is not a praise but more of implying that the feat undertaking by the female is more of a male role than that of the female and shows how gender expression in Yoruba traditional setting can be fluid, not restrictive.

Careful look at gender expression in Yoruba tradition one will note that in diverse settings, gender non-conforming is never frown upon, as feats and roles played by opposite gender in contrasts to their sex is appreciated and applauded.

The above have tried to examine gender expression and its fluidity in Yoruba tradition. It’s also important that we examine gender identity within the same context.

The issue of gender identity within Yoruba traditional can be more understood through a careful examination of the life of a character, Omosun

OMOSUN

According to history, Omosun is the second child of the 21^st Alaafin of Oyo. After the death of the first-born she wanted to be accorded the same rights and privilege as the first child not even minding the gender.

While her story might be waved away by some as women emancipation, it will be helpful to note that what she wanted was not just to be given a mere privilege as the fist child since the one before her is dead, but she wanted to be regarded as a man and critically looking at the scant history about her will help to expanciate more on this.

Omosun is regarded as a “although a female, was of a masculine character and she considers the right and privileges of the Aremo (Crown Prince) her own”[3]

To better understand the issue of gender identity here, it is good to understand the role of the Aremo in Yoruba tradition.

The Aremo was usually the Alafin's eldest son, and until 1730 he regularly succeeded his father. From then on he was expected to commit suicide on his father's death, a practice that was followed until the 1850s. The Aremo at times shared a good deal of his father's power, but was not subject to the same ritual restrictions[4].

With the knowledge about the power the Aremo welds it will be a misnomer for a person who did not see herself as a man to aspire for such a title, as in the case of Omosun.

Omosun devised a murderous plot to get what she said rightfully belongs to her. When ‘her’ father, Osinyago, adopted Woruale  (Irale) his cousin as the Aremo, Omosun resented the appointment not because ‘she’ prefers another person for the title but she wanted that as her own.

The appointment of a new Aseyin provided the opportunity for Omosun to carry out her plans. A dispute arose between Omosun and Woruale as to the right of appointing a new Aseyin, and Woruale made the appointment without a recourse to her, Omosun felt her pride as the “real Aremo” was insulted by a mere commoner, in the heat of passion she slew Woruale.

This account, like earlier stated is not about woman emancipation but more of the issue of a person’s inner feeling of who they are, in this case Omosun, although not being called a male, have an inner feeling of not a female but rather a male and demand all the rights and privileges of a male, remember ‘she’ was being described as ‘although a female was of a masculine character’

CONCLUSION:

This paper sought to examine transgender as part of the Yoruba traditional settings, although the issue of the identity most times linked to the sex organs, however, oral traditions and historical records has shown that gender is fluid.

Further, we are able to understand that the concept of transgender as we understand it now, might be different from the understanding of such in ancient times.

Also, we were able to understand that a person might not be able to publicly identify and claim to be of the opposite gender different from their sex organs, but there are instances of others that have openly lay claim to what we can traditionally say is within the jurisdiction of the other gender as in the case of Omosun.

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[1] http://www.apa.org/topics/lgbt/transgender.pdf

[2] http://www.sunypress.edu/pdf/60825.pdf

[3] History of the Yorubas by Rev Samuel Johnson pp 173

[4] http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/yorubat/yt2.html

ECHOES FROM WITHIN

My dilemma is that the pastors are all praying against the spirit of homosexuality in me, but I am not a homosexual, I meet males and have sex with them, but I am a heterosexual...

This is the fifth time in my long ordeal with my parents trying to force out the spirit of homosexuality from me.

Before I go on with my tales of woes, I need to allow you to meet me, although for security reasons I will not be disclosing my name but not withstanding I will only let you into me, only on informal settings.

I am the first and the only son of my middle income earning parents. By the standard in my country Nigeria, my parents are civil servants and we live in a three bedroom Government Issue apartment building in Lagos.

We are such a close knit family that we the children always long for vacations from school, in order to spend a lot of times with our parents.

Dad is always fun to be with, although being a strict disciplinarian that he is, he always makes sure we have something that must connect to our academic every day, like reading of newspaper, not to discuss current events, but to improve our reading skills. My younger sisters always have sweets in packs, because of the free cross-word puzzle in it. Life was fun for us. O! How I long for those days!

My mum was the greatest cook in my world; we longed for her meals and we dear not eat out on our way to school or during the school recess, since we always have our little lunch pack ever ready even before we take our breakfast. She was always keen about what we the children eat.

We grew up looking at each other as our best friends, never hiding anything from each other. Even when my sisters started having the school runs, it was our own little secret, and some other times I get to decide for them which guy is good for them, at least to feel better that my sisters are in safe hands.

All through these times, I have always feel that I am a girl feeling trapped in a male body. I love to do things that girls do, feel need to be cared for the same way like my sisters. I remember that I am the first to always try out any cloth that they buy. I am the family’s model, everyone always wait for me to come and do the cat walk and ease the family’s tension. To them I am only amusing them, but to me, I am just being allowed the place to be myself. They never seem to understand.

The problem started when all the children started leaving for the university, I left after my immediate younger sister, not because I was not good for the admission, because I choose to study a feminine subject, in the opinion of my father, catering and hotel management. “How can my son, the only one at that, study that kind of a course? What about medicine, or even engineering? Why should he fill that in his jamb form?”

So the next year my dad, had to buy and fill the university matriculation examination form by himself on my behalf, even choosing a subject without my knowledge, only to be told that he has bought and submitted the form and I need to start preparing for the examination.

Getting the admission was his headache, but he made sure I got the slot, to study a masculine course that he chose, civil engineering. I struggled to cope, and I just needed to cope if I will still make the family happy, so I started living for the peace of the family, even when it means that I was waging a war against myself internally.

My mum’s worry was about my orientation, just guessing though, she is always on the lookout for the cutest girl in church for me, a conspiracy between her and my sisters. But I am just in a battle against myself, needing not to be a failure by living my life for them and making everyone happy.

I had some relationships with the female folks, but just to make them believe that I am still what they expect me to be. Within me, I was trapped, trapped in my body, looking for a way to be with males.

In my university days, I met males of like minds, although they were all gays, I do not feel gay, I feel that I am a woman, and not a man. I feel the sense of worth when I am with them, not that they fully understand me, but that I get the male attention I needed. I am in a heterosexual relationship not a homosexual relationship. I am a girl, but all you see is a male, just what you want to see.

Our last born was the first to have noticed my attraction, her friends consider me cute, but I just cannot see myself in a relationship with a fellow female, really a no go area.

After my graduation, I needed to get married, after much pressure, some friends advised that I move out of the country, but I cannot see myself leave my parents, it is like turning my back against them, I really love them, so that option was never considered. Another friend, later sold an idea to me that I look better and if well put together I can still be safer with me and also pleasing my parents.

He advised that I get a lesbian girl who will agree to get married to me and we both can still continue with life style. Based on this we contacted a friend of ours who is a lesbian and I narrated my plight to her. She agreed to help talk to some of her friends who were in the same state as I am. Eventually, I was able to get someone, who will be my live-in friend, but to my parents my lovely wife.

We signed a pre-nuptial agreement and we started ‘dating’, not long afterwards we got married in one of the society weddings in my area. My parents were the happiest parents; their first and only son is now married. The very thing they were expecting were their grand children, according to my mother and sisters with of course the subtle encouragement from my dad.

It is at this stage that I really need to confide about myself to my mother, I told her about what I feel inside, that I feel more like a female than being a male. Did hell let loose? No, but that opened the torrents of prayer sessions.

I am now tired of the fasting and prayer sessions, the fifth in the series, but my dilemma is that the pastors are all praying against the spirit of homosexuality in me, but I am not a homosexual, I meet males and have sex with them, but I am heterosexual, no wonder their prayers are never answered. I am only a female trapped in a male body; I need the freedom, which is what I need prayers for. (To be continued...)

This true life series was put together by Michael Akanji

NIGERIAN WRITER WHO FELL IN LOVE WITH BINYAVANGA

BY EVAN MWANGI 

 If I were to write a novel to respond to the anti-gay politics seeping through the Ugandan border into Kenya, it would probably be like the Nigerian author Jude Dibia’s Walking with Shadows. But I’d write mine in my mother tongue.

Dibia’s novel is a fearless book that is reputed to be the first work by a Nigerian literary artiste to explore in detail the theme of male homosexuality.

Dibia is a bold writer. One of the many admirers of Kenya’s Binyavanga Wainaina, the Nigerian writer does not shy away from taboo topics, including writing graphically about incest. His other favourite authors include Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Virginia Woolf.

Besides Binyavanga, among Dibia’s contemporaries the Nigerian novelist is most closely drawn to the Zimbabwean Petina Gappah (author of An Elegy for Easterly) and NoViolet Bulawayo (pen name of Elizabeth Tshele, author of We Need New Names).

Born in 1975, Dibia belongs to the “third generation” of Nigerian writers, a loose group of artistes that comprises such household names as Chris Abani, Helon Habila, Sefi Atta, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Adichie is the best known in Kenya among these writers.

Dibia’s Walking with Shadows was first published in Nigeria by Blacksands Books in 2005.

Noting the pervasive presence of subversive queer desire, one of the leading queer theorists in the world today, Tavia Nyong’o (cousin to our golden Lupita), urges us to take seriously that “figure of absolute abjection that is, paradoxically, part of our everyday experience.”

Dibia uses language exquisitely to examine an issue that many writers would give a wide berth: homosexuality among married men in Africa.

Sympathy for gay people in Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters (1965) is very oblique. It took Gaurav Desai’s essay, ‘Out in Africa’ (1997), to clarify to most critics that Soyinka’s novel is not homophobic in its portrayal of one of its characters, Joe Golder, as both African American and gay.

Like the South African K. Sello Duiker — author of The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001) and Thirteen Cents (2000) — Dibia is more open in his sympathies towards gay men than Soyinka in The Interpreters. However, Dibia avoids the confrontational tone we encounter in Duiker, some of whose passages read like angry pornography for the queer oppressed.

Dibia’s novel is a deftly told story about Adrian, a Nigerian head of a risk business unit. His job description connotes the “risks” he has to negotiate around, as he is also a gay man in the closet, married to a beautiful woman, the father of gorgeous daughter, and a respected mentor to many young men.

It becomes public that Adrian is gay, thanks to Tayo Onasanya, a former employee whom Adrian had sacked for corruption. Tayo learnt about Adrian’s sexual orientation from a lesbian mutual friend.

The narrator depicts in detail and with great sympathy the crisis that hits Adrian when his wife, Ada, is told about his sexual past.

His relatives’ responses are varied. Younger people sympathetically reach out to Adrian, but his elder brother, Chiedu, engages a priest to exorcise the ghost of gayness from Adrian.

The novel broaches several issues about sexuality. It demonstrates that even the most liberal people might become suddenly conservative when it comes to homosexuality.

Adrian’s wife, an innovative interior designer, is not one to believe in such a thing as an immutable African culture. But it is impossible for Ada to even begin to wrap her mind around her husband’s non-normative sexual desire.

Although he insists he had not slept with a man since he met his wife, Ada cannot believe what she has heard about her husband’s sexuality even without waiting for him to put everything in context.

She asks: “You knew this and still deceived me and still married me and still had the guts to make love to me and put your thing in me!”

The infelicitous repetition of “still” signals her shock, anger and bewilderment. The narrator rubs in her disbelief to also underscore her coldness towards a man she had claimed to love.

“She could not bring herself to look at him,” the narrator says. “She kept trying to wipe out the mental image in her head about him and another man.”

Queer theorists mostly see sexual identity as socially constructed. But Dibia’s novel seems to present Adrian’s gayness as congenital. He has always liked boys and enjoys playing girls’ games as a kid.

In presenting Adrian’s homosexuality as somewhat in-born, the author is trying to enhance our sympathy towards the character. There is nothing Adrian can do about his gayness. He would even want to leave it behind him, to no avail.

MANY VIRTUES

The novel has many virtues in its characterisation. While men are usually presented negatively in novels critical of patriarchy, African feminist novels usually depict at least one good man who is sympathetic to women’s issues in order to avoid demonising all men as gender-insensitive.

Following this trajectory, Dibia added an episode in a revised edition of the novel published in South Africa in 2007, in which a straight young man, Rotimi, stands by Adrian in his troubles at work.

We learn from Rotimi, one of the novel’s voices of reason, that right-thinking straight people should always stand with the oppressed minorities.

From its inception in the 1950s, African writing has always painted the folly of a society that mistreats its minorities. For example, in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the society disintegrates partly because it pushes its minorities to defect to new religions.

Male gay novels tend to represent women negatively, including lesbians. Although we don’t see many positive traits among female characters in Dibia’s Walking with Shadows, Dibia is deferential to the few women who feature in the novel.

His next novel, Unbridled (2007) is, to the best of my knowledge, the only African novel by a male writer that convincingly uses an autobiographical female voice. It is hard to tell from the story itself that the author is male.

Reminiscent of Nuruddin Farah’s Ebla in From a Crooked Rib (1970), Ngozi in Dibia’s Unbridled narrates with great candour her experiences in abusive relationships. But unlike Farah’s novel, Dibia’s work uses the first person narrative voice.

Besides Walking with Shadows and Unbridled, Dibia is the author of Blackbird (2011), an equally provocative novel about the moral and political corruption in Africa.

Dibia’s Walking with Shadows demonstrates that queer is the new colonised. But it does not explore in detail the factors behind homophobia among African elites, except suggesting that homophobes are either stuck in the past or are negatively influenced by American Pentecostalism.

According to Richard Ryan, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, homophobes are usually closeted gay people.

The all-male anti-gay caucus in Kenya’s Parliament and the equally comical all-male Maendeleo ya Wanaume should be read in a similar light when they make statements dismissing “gayism” (sic) and “resbianism” (sic): they are acting out their repressed homosexuality.

evanmwangi@gmail.com

Culled from: http://mobile.nation.co.ke/lifestyle/Jude-Dibia-Binyavanga-Wainaina-Homosexuality-Africa/-/1950774/2235606/-/format/xhtml/-/phy7a/-/index.html

SEX IN AFRICA IS MORE DIVERSE THAN GAY-OR-STRAIGHT.

BY CHANTAL ZABUS

On 13 January the Nigerian president, Goodluck Jonathan, signed a bill against gay relationships, outlawing gay marriage, public displays of same-sex relationships and membership in gay groups. A few days later, Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, refused to sign an anti-homosexuality bill that has been in the works since 2009 on the grounds that there are other ways of dealing with “an abnormal person”. Pondering the issue earnestly, he wrote: “Do we kill him/her? Do we imprison him/her?”

Museveni is not alone in pondering how to kill sexual dissenters. In the wake of the trial for “sodomy” of the first president of Zimbabwe, Canaan Banana, his successor Robert Mugabe spoke of homosexuals in a 2002 campaign speech as “mad person[s]” who will be sent to jail. “We don’t want to import it [homosexuality] to our country,” he said. “We have our own culture, our own people.”

At least 76 United Nations member countries have laws that criminalise same-sex relations; some 37 African countries, along with Middle Eastern countries, constitute a majority of those. It is still dangerous and even life-threatening to be out in Africa.

In many places, homosexuality – itself a slippery category, with roots in 19th century medical literature – is still thought to be quintessentially “un-African”. South African Bishops were the only ones among African Anglican bishops not to help defeat the Church of England’s 1998 attempt to improve attitudes toward homosexuality. The Church in Africa, especially in its Evangelical garb, is still often ready to identify homosexuality as an abomination to God. Ugandan film-maker Roger Ross Williams, director of God Loves Uganda (2013), argues that American missionaries are often behind this frenzy against gay sex – this in a country that happens to be one of the top global consumers of gay porn.

Homosexuality is also often depicted as an import from the deviant west. But the African continent has always been more queer than generally acknowledged; it has always rainbow-hazed into a huge range of sexualities. It is therefore a serious matter of political and critical concern that homosexuality (of all kinds) and African cultures are read as mutually exclusive. In fact, many African sexualities fall outside of the purview of the law – and even of language.

Same-sex practices are common throughout the African continent; it is the claiming of homosexual identity that remains widely forbidden. The question of what constitutes “sex” in Africa, and in particular same-sex sex, is still something of a blind spot. As the work of Marc Epprecht has revealed, not all African men who have sex with men or women who have sex with women think of themselves as gay, homosexual, bisexual or queer. They are seldom members of activist LGBT organisations and are not computed as such in the health literature on HIV/AIDS. In Africa, as in Latin America and other parts of the world, there is a tension between homosexual identity and homosexual practice.

Anything but straightforward

What we see in recent legal developments is the policing of African or Islamic same-sex desire as a form of resistance to westernisation. Terms such as “gay” and “lesbian” (which reek of western liberation struggles), and more recently “queer” (a movement generated in academe), certainly point to the globalisation of sexual identity. These words were originally imported to the African continent via English, French and other western languages, and often clash with indigenous designations and practices. In South Africa, a “masculine man” playing a dominant role in a relationship with another man is called “a straight man”, and is not perceived as “gay” because he acts as penetrator during sexual intercourse.

The term “male lesbians” is an attempt at translating the northern Nigerian Hausa for “passive” male partners, or “yan kifi”; conversely, “lesbian men” in Namibia are women who play the dominant “butch” role in a same-sex relationship. Even though the terms “butch” and “femme” are not known in Namibian Damara culture, various sexual practices and dress codes have some resonance with the western butch-femme dynamic. Meanwhile, in Kampala, Uganda, where sections 140 and 141 of the Penal Code condemn same-sex relations, some Ugandan women identify themselves as “tommy-boys” – biological women who see themselves as men (rather than “lesbians”), who need to be the dominant partner during sex, and who often pass as men.

From Senegal to Southern Africa, many African gay men invoke animistic beliefs in ancestor spirit possession. A gay Shona man in Zimbabwe might claim he is inhabited by his “auntie”, whereas in Senegal, the “gor-djigeen” (“male-female” in the Wolof language) is haunted by the primordial severance between male and female in the creation of the universe.

In her autobiography Black Bull, Ancestors and Me, written in the safety provided by the new South African constitution and its ground-breaking sexual orientation clause, Nkunzi Zandile Nkabinde recounts her gradual empowerment as a lesbian “sangoma”, or traditional healer. But beyond the famed sexual orientation clause, the relationship between her and her “ancestral wife” is sanctioned by Zulu spiritual possession cults, which often privilege female men over male women.

Upon closer scrutiny, it appears that lesbian sangomas and their ancestral wives are not united in a common identity based on shared sexual orientation but rather are distinguished from each other according to gender difference, complicated by spirituality. Ancestral wives can only exist in their relation to masculine females or “male women”, the way “dees” (a term from the last syllable of the English word “lady”) exist solely in their relation to “toms” (from “tomboys”) in Thailand. Thai toms are capable (“khlong-tua”) biological women who protect and perform sexually for dees or female partners, without toms and dees being thought of as lesbians. Even though Zandile Nkabinde, unlike the Thai tom, translates her gender identity into “tomboy”, “lesbian” and “butch”, the Zulu label for her “ancestral wife” is simply not part of the global gay rights vocabulary.

Both in and outside of Africa, there is a frenzied debate raging around the instability of gender and sex, fuelled by a complex array of interests. These legal skirmishes are at their worst potentially deadly in Africa, as the Ugandan example showed. But the answer to these conflicts goes far beyond western gay/straight categories. The array of African homosexualities that is already accommodated by indigenous cultures shows how we must embrace and protect a diversity that dare not speak its many names.

CHANTAL ZABUS HOLDS THE “INSTITUT UNIVERSITAIRE DE FRANCE” (IUF) CHAIR OF COMPARATIVE POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES AND GENDER STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY PARIS 13-SORBONNE-PARIS-CITÉ, FRANCE. © COPYRIGHT © 2010–2014, THE CONVERSATION TRUST (UK).

HTTP://THECONVERSATION.COM/SEX-IN-AFRICA-IS-MORE-DIVERSE-THAN-GAY-OR-STRAIGHT-22500

- Culled from: http://www.arsrc.org/features/sex-in-africa-is-more-diverse-than-gay-or-straight.html#sthash.nZmSue8q.dpuf

SANGOMAS ARE NOT UNAFRICAN

Gay sangomas are not un-African, rather they hold an important place in cultural tradition, a new study suggests.

A practising sangoma and graduate student at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Lindiwe Mkasi, has published a study which challenges the traditionally-held belief homosexuality is “un-African”.
The study argues the existence of gay relationships among Zulu healers means they hold a fundamental place in cultural tradition.
Mkasi followed 10 female traditional healers in same-sex relationships in Kwa-Ngcolosi and Inanda and her study found male and female sangomas practised same-sex relationships without discrimination.
Sangomas, or healers, are thought to serve as human links to ancestors and to the divine.
Many researchers call sangomas “custodians” of Zulu culture and heritage.
Yet many Zulu leaders have condemned homosexuality, decrying it as a cultural import from the West.
Titled “A threat to Zulu patriarchy and the continuation of community”, the study on lesbian sangomas shows homosexuality is not “un-african”.
Dr Sarojini Nadar, Mkasi’s research supervisor and a professor of gender studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, said Mkasi’s research was “a sort of spin-off” on a wider study on HIV prevention they had worked on together in 2008.
In that study, one woman revealed she had not slept with her husband in several months because she suspected he might be HIV-positive.
Nadar said they had asked how the woman could have this kind of sexual control in such a patriarchal context, and it emerged the woman was a sangoma.
She had then taken a lesbian partner because, according to her, it was safer.
Some study participants said they had been possessed by male spirits when having sex with other women.
“When ancestors do not want men… you actually feel it, yourself,” said one.
Another sangoma, Nkabinde, said she had been possessed by a male spirit named Nkunzi, saying: “Nkunzi loves women especially young women.
“If I am with a woman of 21 or 22, normally Nkunzi will want to have sex with her… I have more power when Nkunzi is in me, especially when we both desire the same woman.”
Becoming a sangoma has long served as an alternative for Zulu women who find traditional marriage “burdensome,” according to Gina Buijs, a social anthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand.
“As a sangoma, there is a space for a lesbian woman to be herself without the pressure to form a relationship with a man,” said Buijs.
But Nadar said Mkasi’s findings also pointed to the extensive homophobia in traditional Zulu culture, where “ordinary men and women don’t have that kind of freedom”.
The title of sangoma may protect lesbian women in townships, where they face serious dangers if they come out as lesbian.
In particular, a woman who is perceived as homosexual may be subject to “corrective rape,” where she is raped in an effort to “turn” her straight again.
The emphasis on hyper-masculinity in traditional Zulu culture can also lead to gang formation in urban settings, according to Buijs.
Since 1994, the constitution has forbidden discrimination on the basis of gender and sexual orientation. Yet prejudice persists in the highest strata of society.
Two years ago, many prominent Zulu leaders campaigned to have this clause removed, and Jacob Zuma’s failure to condemn Uganda’s recent anti-gay legislation has drawn international scrutiny.
Yet there are signs South Africa’s leaders are catching up to its constitution.
Last April, the first traditional Zulu marriage involving a gay couple took place. Tshepo Modisanea and Thoba Sithole, both 27-year-old young professionals, faced a lot of negative backlash from social media outlets and some Zulu academics. But other citizens took heart at the news.
One, a blogger named Lenox Magee, called the story “beyond epic”.
“Undoubtedly, this wedding will go down… as one of the most significant events in South African LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersexual) history,” he wrote.


Pretoria News

http://m.iol.co.za/article/view/e/1.1679062