Suchergebnisse

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.

The late nineteenth-century Bugandan king Kabaka Mwanga is perhaps one of the most controversial Ugandan historical personalities because of the perceptions that have shaped and continue to shape how his sexuality is understood. The Kabaka's sexuality, which has been placed at the center of contemporary sexuality debates in the country, is colored by complexly paradoxical spatial and chronological registers. These registers that stretch from the colonial to postcolonial moments in public discourses in the country variously mobilize Mwanga's sexuality for propaganda purposes. While the colonial archive mobilizes Mwanga to argue that colonialism and Christianity rescued Ugandans from homosexuality, two versions of the postcolonial library simultaneously lionize and demonize this historical figure for differing ideological purposes. While the earlier postcolonial library briefly constructed Mwanga as a patriot who resisted colonialism, the most recent postcolonial record characterized by an alliance between the Ugandan state and Pentecostal Christianity demonizes Mwanga to justify their project of criminalizing same-sexualities. Writing in the throes of these topically polarizing Ugandan sexuality debates of the last decade, Ugandan novelist Nakisanze Segawa strategically inserts Mwanga's nonnormative sexuality in the first section of her debut historical/political thriller novel to provide a counter characterization of a historical figure whose sexuality has been used as a metaphor in Ugandan public discourses on sexuality. Nabutanyi argues that Segawa's representation of Mwanga, which counteracts his politicized portrayal, shows how same-sex loving men are ordinary and flawed.