Marc Epprecht - Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS

1 A Puzzling Blindspot, a Troubling Silence, a Strange Consensus

Reflections on the Heterosexual Norm in African AIDS

THE RESEARCH QUESTION

HIV/AIDS was identified in Africa south of the Sahara in the mid-1980s. At that time its rapid, atypical progress in populations focused considerable attention on so-called African sexuality. Scientists, theologians, pundits, gender activists, and other researchers were all struggling to explain both the unprecedented rates of HIV infection and the fact that men and women appeared to be equally affected. This suggested a different epidemiology than in the West, where HIV infections occurred mostly in gay and bisexual men. Efforts to solve the mystery were complicated by the relative paucity of African epidemiologists and other researchers in the search for answers. Indeed, the vast majority of those who published their findings in the early years of the epidemic were European or North American. Only about one in twelve of the participants in the very first AIDS in Africa conference in 1985 actually came from Africa (Putzel 2004, 21), while the most widely cited publication to synthesize their findings with the ethnographic record was authored by three Australian demographers (Caldwell, Caldwell, and Quiggin 1989).

Not knowing Africa or African languages all that well, and under intense pressure of time and the looming health calamity, foreign researchers relied heavily on received wisdom and rational logic to fill in the many critical gaps in knowledge about the disease in its African manifestation. Their work in turn contributed to a new problem that in many ways continues to frustrate research, prevention, and education initiatives. The problem resides in the notion that a singular African sexuality exists and that it exacerbates the risks of HIV transmission particularly for women. This hypothetical singular African sexuality includes, above all, the supposed nonexistence of homosexuality or bisexuality, along with Africans purported tendencies toward heterosexual promiscuity, gender violence, and lack of the kind of internalized moral restraints that supposedly inhibit the spread of HIV in other cultures. Another common thread is a tendency toward age discrepancy in sexual relationships (mostly older men with young women, girls, or even female infants), and, compared to the West, a relative absence of romantic affection and a predominance of transactional relationships (sex in exchange for money or gifts). Further examples of such otherizing or pathologizing of African sexuality in the popular media are legion, and many will be discussed in the chapters to follow. But a sobering example in the peer-reviewed academic press is worth pointing out here. Rushton (1997, esp. 17883) claims a relationship between Africans penis size and sexual behavior that can account for the high rates of HIV/AIDS among women in Africa and in the African diaspora.

African opinion makers often responded defensively to Western claims about an African sexuality. Yet ironically, they often at the same time buttressed one key aspect of it. Hence, on the one hand, African critics pointed to the colonialist (or even older) provenance of received wisdom about African sexuality. They have suggested that the long shelf life of negative stereotypes in contemporary discourses was evidence of whites pervasive unthinking racism against Africans. As late as 2004, for example, South African president Thabo Mbeki angrily rejected questions about the high rates of rape and HIV infection in that country by accusing whites of clinging to apartheid-era demonizations of black men. This understanding of African sexuality is now typically so much taken for granted that it does not even warrant a footnote to substantiate or qualify it.

An essentialized, singular African sexuality also suggested a problem that could be fixed with education, aid dollars, and Western advice drawn from painful experiences fighting AIDS in the early 1980s.

It was a winning combination, or a perfect storm, depending on ones perspective. This book takes the latter view. Indeed, I maintain that the idea of an African sexuality and, stemming from it, an exclusively heterosexual African AIDS, are both wrong and decidedly harmful to struggles for sexual health and sexual rights in Africa and globally.

Comprehensive scholarly critiques of crude forms of the African sexuality and heterosexual African AIDS arguments in fact followed closely upon their assertion. In particular, the Rushton penis theory and the promiscuity thesis of the Caldwells and Quiggin drew withering criticism and have by now been refuted with a wealth of empirical data. We know that some Africans do engage in sex with multiple partners and other high-risk behaviors, just as elsewhere in the world. Many do not. Careful studies have shown that sexual initiation for African youth actually tends to come later than in the West and that high rates of multiple partners are associated with the specific circumstances of migrancy rather than with African culture per se (e.g., Dyson 1992 or Crush et al. 2005). High rates of sexual and gender violence that contribute to the risk of infection (where they in fact exist, which is not everywhere) have also been shown to be historically contingent. Far from being essential to Africanness, gender-based violence is often remarkably responsive even to such simple interventions as providing microfinance (Pronyk et al. 2006).

In light of this growing evidence about diverse and historically changing African sexualities, a strong consensus has emerged that HIV/AIDS needs to

A similar discrepancy between the sweeping claims of African sexuality and the empirical evidence has also been established with regard to the claim or assumption of no homosexuality. True, few Africans south of the Sahara even today would identify as homosexual, bisexual, lesbian, gay, queer, or any of the other terms coined in the West to signify a more or less innate individual sexual orientation. We now know, however, that many people who do not so identify nonetheless sometimes, and sometimes even predominantly, have sex with people of the same sex. It was known even in the mid-1980s that such people existed in Africa south of the Sahara and that consequently there were not merely three potential modes of transmission of HIV among black Africans. Admittedly, references to such people were sometimes buried in easily missed footnotes or subordinate clauses following assertions of the predominantly heterosexual nature of transmission. They were nonetheless in the public record. The famously prickly director of one of Africas first AIDS Control Programs, for example, responded to a direct question from a journalist about homosexuality in Uganda in 1986. Dr. Samuel Ikwaras Okware reportedly first asserted that it was rare, but then voluntarily conceded that the situation might be different in the prisons (Hooper 1990, 250).