Obsessions inherited from apartheid

Let us take Mzi’s essay as an example. Mzi had gone with four friends from his work, “three whites, one coloured, and myself”, to Sandy Bay Beach for a braai. Sandy Bay was a nudist beach. Under apartheid beach laws, it was restricted for the white group. It seems as if at some point the beach had a controlled access point. At the access point the group were ordered to stop the car by a security man because he wanted to do a thorough check. “To my surprise”, Mzi writes, “the other vehicles with white people [only] were allowed free access”. The group asked the security guard if they could see his seniors. They were told they could not. After a couple of hours one of the student’s “white friends decided to call the police” to intervene. It was then that the man allowed the group to go onto the beach provided that they did “not look at the naked white bodies”.

One of the things that can be made of this is that the incident was socially and emotionally important for Mzi. When read with other parts of the essay we can go further and infer that the kinds of views he holds on social, political and cul­tural relationships are shaped by what he sees as emotionally significant interac­tions, in this case the exchange with a white security man. But why was this par­ticular incident available to memory? Because, as we suggested earlier, the relation between race and sex is emotionally significant as it is a crucial part of antiblack, antiwomen societies. Emotions, that is to say, are not inner states but things we do rhetorically and accomplish in social relationships. What is viewed as an emo­tionally significant interaction is produced in the context of relationships with other people and not merely personal. Personally emotionally significant events have extra-individual antecedents and implications, deriving in part from what is emotionally important for a society or culture and in turn having consequences for subsequent views held by individuals.

In South Africa this production of emotion and memory plays out against an historical antagonistic masculine ideology. One of the reasons for the sorts of ac­counts that, for instance, we read in Mzi’s essay, is largely because of this antago­nistic masculine ideology and particularly its obsessions. Apartheid obsession takes many forms. The obsession can be seen in the state’s penchant for division and surveillance. Racialised and ethnic divisions produced under the policy of apartheid were spectacular. This obsession extended to private life. For this rea­son, sex came to mean much in South Africa. That is to say, not only did sex ob­sess apartheid ideologues insofar as sexuality tends to be one of the readily vexing questions. It becomes extra-special, taking on added meaning because within so­cial and cultural systems deeply divided on one or another characteristic, private life is not beyond the severe control and surveillance of the state. Thus sex in the

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South Africa of Slegs Blankes toilets was a sometimes flagrant, often thinly dis­guised motive through which to view race relations. In segregated South Africa sexuality came to possess a fascinating, outrageous character which is yet to be unravelled.

Yet, of course, apartheid sexuality had to do with much more than separate bathrooms and segregated beaches. In a very simplified form, the sexuality of apartheid policy had to do with at least three key facts of white ruled South Africa. The first fact is that of race, of course. This is commonly known and we have dealt with it to some extent. The second is that the ideas of race, racial hierarchy, domination and segregation have a masculine character. Apartheid was a masculine ideology in the sense that Susan Bordo (1987) makes of Cartesian thought. But this masculine thought and practice was inflected by “the problem of the native”. White men worried greatly about the matter of the ‘other’ man, the native. The neglect by many pro-liberation writers, especially, to see apartheid as a sexualised male ideology stems in part from the fact that the struggle for South Africa was also masculinised. The national struggle was cast primarily as a race struggle be­tween black and white men, and less as a radically exhaustive struggle between all those with power and those without. Because of the privileging of the racial strug­gle, the liberation project tended to overlook, for instance, the right of the father to rule. Within such a framework of what it was we were struggling for, and, in fact, supported by legislation on property and marriage, it became easy to see how women became the spoils of the war between white males’ idea of a perfect soci­ety and black males’ quest for freedom. This leads to the third related fact of apartheid sexuality: its heterosexual orientation. Heterosexuality has been viewed as a kind of control males have over female bodies, and sex between men and women as the eroticisation of unequal gender power relations. Heterosexuality fits snugly within the framework of patriarchy. The essence of patriarchal sexual relations is heterosexual. Heterosexual sex is almost always focussed on penetration, and males sometimes liken the act of penetration to conquest, an extension of domi­nation, imperialism, colonialism, and power in general. Since heterosex has been largely for the benefit of men’s pleasure, apartheid and antiapartheid became phallocratic contests with women being the stakes.

All of this is evident in all the essays. In Paul’s essay the coloured women are the stakes. In Mzi’s essay black men are prohibited from seeing white women “na­ked”. Bo’nkosi says black women who sleep with white men are prostitutes. Thus, although apartheid immorality laws might have been read by some analysts as out to thwart all interracial coupling, what white males set out to do was really to pre­vent sexual relations between white women and black men. This, to be sure, is not an original Afrikaner taboo. Preventing sex between women of one’s group and other men is a widespread taboo in male dominated cultures and societies.

Arnfred Page 150 Wednesday, March 3, 2004 2:38 PM

Kopano Ratele

The body of culture

The common answer to the question by Fanon is likely to be and has historically been that the man and woman of colour are sexually superior. Darker people, that is to say, have better, tighter, more supple, bigger or wilder genitals. The size of their penises or the elasticity of their vaginas and the way they use their body parts elevates them over their lighter counterparts. The answer, that is, always refers back to nature, to biology, to bodies. Even when cultural accounts are deployed, culture is naturalised, inserted into the biologies of individuals and groups. The answer for males and females is different about specifics but all in all similar. The black woman’s sexual puissance, like the black man’s, centres on her body. But as we are dealing with men’s accounts, it is not the bodies of women but those of men, particularly the size of certain parts of the bodies of some men that we con­centrate on.

Concerns about the large size of African penises, and the sexual superiority of Africans and other colonised peoples in general, occur against particular political, social, economic and cultural histories. These are histories of power relations. Be­cause of these histories of domination, there continues to exist an engrossing dis­cursive relation between race and sexuality affecting the ordinary moments of everyday life and relationships between individual Africans and members of other social groups in, for instance, South Africa. The discourse of powerless but well- endowed African males arises out of historical colonial and racist relations. As we saw, this discourse has in fact been supported by a particular ‘scientific’ enterprise beginning from around the middle of the nineteenth century (see Dubow 1995, Gill 1995, Gould 1981).

In his essay Paul reveals and seems to revel in the discourse of sexually pow­erful African males. He writes that when he started working where he ran work­shops, he was a bit uneasy with “the ladies’ reaction” to him. “This made his job difficult”, he says. He then mentions the fact that as he is fluent in Afrikaans this made it easy for “coloured ladies to communicate with [him] and to start a rela­tionship”. This facility with language made his sexual rapport with coloured women (not difficult as he started out saying) but easy, he also experienced this outside the work situation: in “taverns” and “shebeens”. The conclusion he draws from this is that:

Coloured women get attracted to black men very easily if communication is not a problem. On

many occasions I will ask them what they like about me. The reply differs from one person to

another. But many say that I am different and they find it easy to speak to me. They do want to

speak to more black men but communication is always the problem.

From the matter of language, Paul then proceeds to comparing males of different races. The comparison in this case is between black men and coloured men. Paul says coloured women he has known say “there is something about black men that coloured men don’t have”. But what is this that coloured don’t have but black males have? Paul says from his experience and the ‘research’ he has conducted it comes down to two things: “The first one being what they have heard about black men. The second being what they experience with their own brothers (coloureds).

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The second reason is composed of comparison between black men and coloured men”. It is now that Paul reveals the cult of the body. Coloured females, he writes, want black men because “black men have big penises”. Something interesting that he adds, which is obviously part of the sexual stuff, is that “black men take long to ejaculate”.

However, against the predominantly racist, hetero-masculine anxieties about penis size there is a newer and increasingly popular discourse. This set of views gathers momentum in the latter part of the twentieth century. It is inspired in con­tradictory ways by both parts of the women’s liberation movement and feminist theory on the one hand and sexology on the other. This is the discourse that size does not matter which in effect challenges the notion of sex as located in genitals. This new discourse exhorts men and women that to worry about size is misplaced vanity.

Given these two competing discourses, I can hear myself being asked, how come size does not matter now, when African men (like Paul) are beginning to revel in it? Is this new discourse liberating? Why, if this has always been the case, was it not always common knowledge? And, it should be asked, is the answer sim­ply a colonial, racist science and society even when a somewhat sympathetic writ­er like Anton Gill seems to be convinced of the facts of black sexual superiority?