Whenever I raise the issue of homosexuality in class, students are up in arms. They say “it is not African, that it is purely a Western development”, “our cultures do not condone such behaviours”, “it is deviant behaviour”, and so on. I often ask them: “what would you do if your own sister is ‘a […]

The term vulva, originally a Latin word meaning ‘sheath’ or ‘scabbard’, has been the standard name for the female passageway since the mid-sixteenth century. To this day, the standard view focuses on the reproductive function of the vagina. Ac­cording to the standard medical opinion the main functions of the vagina are to receive the penis […]

It is apparent that pronunciation of the name of the vulva is generally avoided. During our seminar discussions, students have categorically told me that it is not conventional for people in their communities to identify “that part” of the female body by its “name”. Why? The shame linked with various vernacular terms used to describe […]

Mumbi Machera Introduction The term sexuality elicits images of belongingness, physically and emotionally. Sexuality is a complex term with a multifaceted meaning referring to deep emo­tional feeling as well as to issues of power and vulnerability in gendered relation­ships. The feelings and power dynamics seem to be linked to the biological exist­ence of an individual […]

In his analysis of desire in an antiblack world, Lewis Gordon, like Fanon, destroys the link between the penis and the phallus. His response to “the extensive litera­ture on the reduction of black males to their penis” is that to deal effectively with the link between black genitals and black powerlessness we should attend to […]

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 […]

The eroticisation of ‘the other’ has come full circle it seems. The earliest point in circle is the sort contained in Anton Gill’s work on the sexual side of British im­perial history. In his work Gill refers to Edward Sellon. Sellon was an officer in the 1840s in the British Indian Army. He was also […]

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”. […]

At the centre of the texts by Paul and Mzi, as I have argued, as of Bo’nkosi’s below, lies a kink, in two senses of the word: (1) a twist in a rope that causes an obstruc­tion, a tight curl in human hair, a bend in a course or line, and (2) a mental quirk […]

Paul is a twenty-something year old man. He works as a trainer in a non-govern­mental organisation. His essay is about his sexual affairs with “Coloured”[102] wom­en. These affairs he opposes to his experience with African or black women. This means that Paul deploys apartheid identity categories where coloureds although they were not white were neither […]