with Fanon’s question, Fanon being among the list of authors prescribed for the class.
The aim of this chapter is part of an ongoing project to think about practices surrounding the multiple, shifting, piled up, crosscutting divisions that re-write our identifications and relationships, in order to sharpen our appreciation of the histories of the current debates around the transformation of South African society. In spite of good intentions transformation debates and resultant policies, institutions and programmes have tended to re-produce certain old as well as creating new cultural, social, economic and political divisions. Specifically, these debates, policies, institutions and programmes have tended to gloss over certain blind-spots, to re-install particular inimical cleavages, and to follow certain lines of argument. Examples abound. One of these is that some political, business and cultural leaders, programmes and institutions continue to deploy race as a fact of nature, act as if sex and gender at some moments are unraced, and almost always completely ignore desire, or at best keep it separate from, the politics of race, and similarly sex and gender.
What this means is that while on the one hand these leaders and society need reminding of what the facts of being queer, being female, or being male might mean politically, economically and socially, on the other hand the attentions of sex and gender researchers and activists need to be drawn to the racialised troubles in the desiring practices of some men and women, lesbians and gays. I will try to do this by tracing moments of African identification, in particular of male identifying practices, from the one side, and sexual politics and masculine desire from the other side, and their connections to and disconnections from efforts at transforming South African society. As indicated above, I do this with the help of three purposively rather than randomly selected semi-autobiographical essays by African male students, Paul, Mzi, and Bo’nkosi. That is to say, the chosen essays are not representative but rather limited to only those that contradicted the objectives of the class in specific ways.