Eroticising raee in Cape Town, South Africa

Bo’nkosi was nearing thirty in 1999 when he wrote his essay. Among the many, complicated emotions revealed in Bo’nkosi’s essays is anger. It is clear from read­ing the essay that his anger is imbricated with desire. He tells us that in his “town­ship” they “usually saw a couple of beautiful ladies who were called prostitutes”. The sentence seems strange. One does not usually see beauty and prostitution in one line. Moreover, but perhaps ironically, these beautiful prostitutes he refers to as “ladies”. But Bo’nkosi is not taking the whole blame, if any, for what these

Arnfred Page 146 Wednesday, March 3, 2004 2:38 PM

Kopano Ratele

women were called. He uses the plural voice—“we usually saw”—and the passive voice to distance himself from much of the happenings. Why were the “beautiful ladies” “called prostitutes”? The assumption you have of what prostitutes do is overturned in the next few lines. He writes that “they were called names by the community because they were sleeping with white men”. Having sex with white men, in other words, is what turned these women into prostitutes. True, there is a sentence about monetary exchange, but it comes later, and it is suspect. The sen­tence follows after Bo’nkosi tells us that because of their relations with white males these women “were regarded as outcasts in our society”. After this line, it is then that he says “they were selling their bodies to white men for the sake of money”. It is important to note that Bo’nkosi sees what was happening in his townships, more likely in a neighbourhood in a township, as affecting all black men. “Black men in South Africa”, he writes, “were furious because they could not have sex with white women whereas their sisters were having fun with white guys”. Once again, this becomes complicated because ‘fun’ is not one of the things we always associate with prostitution.

One of the questions we have to ask at this stage after reading Bo’nkosi is whether the women he is talking of actually sold sex to white men (only), or were they said to sell their bodies because they preferred to have relations with white men? The latter would seem to be the case. It seems to me easier and more lucra­tive for black and African women, if they are going to work as prostitutes, to work in town and city streets, hotels and clubs than it is in townships. And I think it is easier for a white man to know where to find a sex-worker, get a lap-dance or visit a strip-joint if they are in a town or city than to go all the way into a township for coition. But it is Bo’nkosi who wraps the whole thing up for us:

The ladies perceived themselves as moderately different from others. Black men who were neighbours were calling them names and the ladies were careless about those nasty words. They perceived themselves as different from others as they knew they will not be accepted by black guys anymore… Black brothers and sisters had an attitude towards each other… For the love of money people end up having sex with whites. They are not sexually harassed. There is an agree­ment between them they are not forced to go to bed. White men are willing to and always want to have sex with black women. But the laws and regulations of the country did not allow that. Black women were sexual slaves of whites. Our sisters become victims because they are poor and unemployed. Having sex with a white man is a job for them which generates income. The black brothers cannot touch or have sex with white women as they are protected and they are not easy targets like our sisters are. It is not easy to approach them and they cannot be lured by money as they have everything money can buy.

What Bo’nkosi’s words point to is the enduring kinky emotional and social com­plex of anger, disgust, powerlessness and fascination regarding the possibility of sexual congress between people of different colours. This socialised emotional labyrinth lies at the core of sexist, racist cultures. This emotional structure plays a significant part in the reduction of all black and white relations to bodies, sexual­ity, and especially, to perversion. Scholars and activists have shown that sexualised anxieties and fantasies about race run deep within such cultures and societies, and that in accounts of people opposed to racial mixing sex tends to have a privileged place (Fanon 1986; Hernton 1988; Gordon 1997; Zack 1997a, b). From Bo’nkosi’s

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text, as from the other students’, it is evident that these associations of sex and race persist up to today in South Africa. Individuals leap from race to sex and backwards in what seems to be very easy movements, but the leap at times ap­pears to be strange and inexplicable. Yet it is because of the deep-running love — hate historical relationship between the two that it is both easy and somewhat odd. It is odd that other, unknown persons’ practices and relationships can evoke such strong emotions in observers. It is easy because the unfavourable connec­tions between sex and race have been naturalised over centuries and people in these sexist, racist societies inherit these connections with their histories and cul­tures.