Powerful Men and Boyhood Sexuality in K. Sello Duiker's Thirteen Cents

In: Matatu, Band 48, Heft 1, S. 33-48

Abstract

In Southern African postcolonial discourses, sexual violation is often deployed as an allegory for either patriarchal control or racial domination. This perhaps explains the huge archive of narratives of sexual violence in the Southern African literary canon. While this archive and its scholarship mainly concentrates on the experiences of women and girls, a substantial number of texts portraying the sexual abuse of boys from the region demand that scholarly attention is paid to this phenomenon. Does contemporary South African fiction's privileging of the sexual violation of boys suggest that boys are as vulnerable to this form of violence in moments of national crisis as are girls and women? Reading K. Sello Duiker's Thirteen Cents1 as a portrayal of the precarious intersection of post-apartheid familial dystopia on children's bodies—articulated through under-age prostitution—I explore how fiction intervenes successfully to spotlight the susceptibility of boys to pederasty in moments of societal crisis. Additionally, I examine how homosexual prostitution is portrayed as a tool for survival for helpless boys, on the one hand, and exhibition of patriarchal power for the men that pay to have sex with these boys, on the other. I argue that the depiction of underage sex work of some boys in South African cities can help rescue these victims from being perceived as mere statistical footnotes to Southern African inequities and patriarchal power.