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Culture, Health & Sexuality: An

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Black skin, ‘cowboy’ masculinity: A

genealogy of homophobia in the African
nationalist movement in Zimbabwe to
1983
a
Marc Epprecht
a
Department of History, Faculty of Arts and Science , Queen's
University , Canada
b
Department of History, Faculty of Arts and Science, Watson
Hall , Queen's University , Kingston, Ontario, Canada , K7L 3N6 E-
mail:
Published online: 06 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Marc Epprecht (2005) Black skin, ‘cowboy’ masculinity: A genealogy of
homophobia in the African nationalist movement in Zimbabwe to 1983, Culture, Health &
Sexuality: An International Journal for Research, Intervention and Care, 7:3, 253-266, DOI:
10.1080/13691050410001730243

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 Culture, Health & Sexuality, May–June 2005; 7(3): 253–266

Black skin, ‘cowboy’ masculinity: A genealogy of

homophobia in the African nationalist movement in
Zimbabwe to 1983

MARC EPPRECHT
Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 17:33 08 October 2014

Department of History, Faculty of Arts and Science, Queen’s University, Canada

Abstract
This paper examines the intellectual and social origins of racialist homophobia in contemporary
Zimbabwean political discourse, exemplified by President Robert Mugabe’s anti-homosexual
speeches since the mid-1990s. It challenges the notions that such homophobia is either essential to
African patriarchy or simple political opportunism. Tracing overt expressions of intolerance towards
male-male sexuality back to the colonial period, it focuses on ways in which notions of appropriate,
respectable, exclusive heterosexuality within the ‘cowboy’ culture of White Southern Rhodesia
trickled into, or were interpreted in, the African nationalist movement. It concludes that
understanding this history could improve efforts to address concerns around sexual health in
Zimbabwe and elsewhere in the region, particularly silences around same-sex sexuality in HIV/AIDS
education and prevention.

Résumé
Cet article examine les origines intellectuelles et sociales de l’homophobie raciste dans le discours
politique actuel au Zimbabwe, illustré par les propos anti-homosexuels du Président Robert Mugabe
depuis le milieu des années 90. Il contredit l’idée qu’une telle homophobie est, soit essentielle au
patriarcat africain, soit un simple opportunisme politique.
En faisant l’historique de l’expression manifeste d’intolérance vis à vis de la sexualité entre hommes
depuis la période coloniale, l’article se concentre sur la façon dont les notions d’une hétérosexualité
appropriée, respectable et exclusive, issues de la culture «cow-boy» de la Rhodésie du Sud blanche,
ont pénétré ou ont été interprétées dans le mouvement nationaliste africain. Il conclut que la
compréhension de cette histoire pourrait contribuer à améliorer les efforts visant à aborder les
questions de santé sexuelle au Zimbabwe et ailleurs dans la région, en particulier celles du silence sur
l’homosexualité dans l’éducation et la prévention du VIH/sida.

Resumen
En este documento, se analizan los orı́genes intelectual y social de la homofobia racial en el discurso
polı́tico contemporáneo de Zimbabue, que ha quedado bien ilustrado en los discursos contra los
homosexuales del Presidente Robert Mugabe desde mediados de los noventa. Se pone en entredicho
la idea de que esta homofobia sea imprescindible para el patriarcado africano o se trate de simple
oportunismo polı́tico. Examinando las expresiones abiertas de intolerancia hacia la homosexualidad
masculina desde el periodo colonial, se analiza el modo en el que las ideas de lo que es una
heterosexualidad apropiada, respetable y exclusiva dentro de la cultura del ‘‘cowboy’’ de los blancos
del sur de Rhodesia surgieron en el movimiento nacional africano o fueron interpretados por éste. Se
llega a la conclusión de que si se conociera esta historia se podrı́an aunar esfuerzos para abordar los

Correspondence: Marc Epprecht, Department of History, Faculty of Arts and Science, Watson Hall, Queen’s University,
Kingston, Ontario, Canada, K7L 3N6. E-mail: epprecht@post.queensu.ca
ISSN 1369-1058 print/ISSN 1464-5351 online # 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/13691050410001730243
 254 M. Epprecht

problemas relacionados con la salud sexual en Zimbabue y la región adyacente, donde esconden bajo
la alfombra la realidad homosexualidad masculina en lo referente a la educación y la prevención de
VIH/sida.

Keywords: Homosexuality, homophobia, masculinity, nationalism, Zimbabwe, Rhodesia

Introduction
Denunciations of homosexuality by prominent African leaders have sometimes been taken
as evidence of a deep, perhaps essential homophobia in African society.1 On closer
inspection, however, the real issue behind these denunciations seems not to be the sexual
choices of the men and women involved, but their lack of discretion. This fear of the public
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transgression of sexual norms (rather than of the sex acts themselves) is more accurately
termed transphobia than homophobia or heteronormativity.2 Transphobia may be
oppressive to individuals who seek freely to express their sexuality or to challenge
restrictive notions of gender identity. It none the less implies a passive de facto tolerance/
acceptance of discreet same-sex physical and emotional intimacy that in important ways has
been an ally of gays and lesbians in the region. Border Gezi expressed this in 1996 when he
told the Zimbabwean parliament that his rural constituents ‘hear that there is
homosexualism and lesbianism going on. They have asked us and said that this is not a
good practice. They say that if homosexualism and lesbianism is to go on, it should be done
privately’.3
Kendall (1999) warns that this de facto tolerance of privately expressed same-sex sexuality
has been undermined in recent years in Lesotho (and presumably other African contexts).
The transphobia in African culture is now coming out in explicitly homophobic terms
partly in response to the greater visibility of same-sex relations and identities afforded by
new, Western vocabularies. Phillips (1997) makes a similar argument with reference to
colonial laws around sexual crime in Zimbabwe since the 1970s. Homophobia, not
homosexuality, would appear to be the real ‘White man’s disease’ in the region. Sexual
minorities are obviously threatened by this development, but in a region so heavily afflicted
by HIV/AIDS, there are also dangerous implications for the majority population. The
relative invisibility of non-normative sexuality that homophobic rhetoric condones (or
demands) actively undermines HIV/AIDS education and prevention strategies (Phillips
2004).
This paper extends that line of enquiry by tracing overt expressions of intolerance
towards male-male sexuality back to the colonial period. The focus is on ways in which
notions of appropriate, respectable, exclusive heterosexuality within the ‘cowboy’ culture of
White Rhodesia trickled into, or were interpreted within, the African nationalist movement.
‘Cowboy’ is understood here as it was used by both admirers and critical observers at the
time—boldly macho and heterosexually lusty. The conclusion argues that understanding
this cultural history could improve efforts to address a frustration commonly encountered
in campaigns for sexual health, sexual rights, and gender equity in Zimbabwe and
elsewhere in the region.

Early colonial attitudes

At the time of the colonization of southern Africa by Europeans, Portugal, Netherlands and
Britain all enforced harsh laws couched in religious language against sodomy or ‘unnatural
 A genealogy of homophobia in Zimbabwe 255

lust’. Hogoza, for example, was executed in Natal in 1868 because he ‘did commit and
perpetrate that detestable and abominable crime of buggery (not to be named among
Christians)’.4 Secular explanations of same-sex sexuality in the late nineteenth century were
less stigmatizing, but new theories about the psychological causes of ‘uranism’ and ‘sexual
inversion’ contributed to a progressive ebbing of the ferocious application of the law. By the
1910s and 20s, there was a clear tendency toward more lenient sentencing for male-male
sexual crimes in southern Africa. By the 1930s, an openly gay or ‘moffie’ subculture had
emerged in Cape Town, and by the 40s and 50s in other urban centres as well (including
African townships like Mkhumbane, Durban). Officials meanwhile largely turned a blind
eye to and may have even been condoned male-male sex among Africans in the mine
compounds and prisons.5
The state’s partial withdrawal from the aggressive enforcement of compulsory
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heterosexuality was made possible by a deepening intolerance toward same-sex sexuality

at the level of local culture. This followed a pattern common throughout Western Europe
and North America. Industrialization had destabilized many of the old certainties of
hegemonic masculinity, notably, men’s ‘natural’ dominion over wives and daughters. Men’s
dominion over ascribed feminine or passive characteristics in their own sexuality then
emerged as an alternative way to perform an active, dominant masculine identity. Revulsion
against same-sex sexuality was internalized as ‘common sense’ so that sexual discipline came
to be policed more by self-repression or peer pressure than by church or state (Fone 2000).
The destabilization of hegemonic masculinity in the late nineteenth century was
especially acute on the frontiers between White settlement and non-White societies, where
discrepancies in power, and gender and racial ideologies were most pronounced.
Internalized homophobia played a critical role in this context to conflate masculinity with
virility, respectability and the right to rule. Ann Stoler’s observations about Dutch
colonialization in Java are pertinent to southern Africa in this regard: ‘The colonial measure
of what it took to be classified as ‘‘European’’ was based not on skin colour alone but on
tenuously balanced assessments of who was judged to act with reason, affective
appropriateness, and a sense of morality’ (Stoler 2002: 6). The cult of virility among
White men, and of a complementary domesticity among White women, was key to
upholding an assessment of moral worth that was otherwise so relentlessly, intimately
threatened by day-to-day social and sexual interactions (by White men taking local women
as concubines, for instance, or ‘native boys’ cleaning White women’s underwear).6
This cult of virility in White colonial masculinity was typically expressed in public
hygiene and scientific terms, then reinforced through every day activity and socialization.
Morrell (1996, 2001), for example, has shown how the sport of rugby was actively and self-
consciously promoted in late nineteenth century Natal in order to train a clear, élite class of
White youths. Public schools were another critical piece in the transformation of sexually
unruly boys into refined gentlemen who could, in turn, tame unruly women, natives and
the natural world. Indeed, a whole genre of literature that pitted White men against savage
African wilderness emerged to celebrate this coolly virile masculinity, from King Solomon’s
Mines to Jock of the Bushveld. Periodic ‘moral panics’ also served to remind the White
population to remain vigilant against lapses in sexual self-discipline.
No equivalent moral panics took place in the colony of Southern Rhodesia. But the
situation there was in many ways even more fraught than in South Africa. Whites were
fewer in number relative to Africans (only 4% of the total population before World War II).
They also faced constant economic, cultural, and political pressures from their neighbour
to the south. The need to develop a distinctive colonial identity was thus an early and
 256 M. Epprecht

enduring theme in Southern Rhodesian discourse. In the beginning, this tended to focus on
the relatively harmonious relations between English-speakers and Afrikaners. After the
harrowing wars to suppress African uprisings in 1896–97, Southern Rhodesians also took
growing pride in the notion of themselves as more astute in approach towards ‘their’
Africans compared to Whites in South Africa. Debates among Southern Rhodesian Whites
about how best to civilize ‘perverse’ African sexuality and gender relations played an
important role in honing this enlightened self-image (Jeater 1993).
A further factor shaping Southern Rhodesia identity was that White men hugely
outnumbered White women for the first few decades of the colony’s existence. As late as
1911, only one White woman could be counted for every two White men (Rogers and Frantz
1962: 15). This led to the concern by opinion and law-makers to shame, and ultimately to
legislate White men away from sexual relations with African women. It also gave rise to a lustily
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adulterous reputation among White women that opinion-makers were at pains to counter.7
For White men in this strongly racialized, homosocial environment, the need to keep up
defences against homosexual relations was acute. Even to admit the danger was a danger.
Suggestive of the unspoken power of internalized homophobia is the fact that (unlike in
South Africa) no explicit mention of the topic took place in public fora until 1914. The
Immigration Act passed in that year included a clause that prohibited persons convicted of
sodomy or unnatural offences from settling in the colony. But so obvious was the wisdom of
this exclusion that no debate was necessary.8
Southern Rhodesian identity gained a boost in 1923 when the settlers voted to become
self-governing. World War II was a further defining moment, in part due to the
disproportionate role that the air force played in the colony’s contribution to the war effort.
As Campbell (2003) has argued, the air force experience left a legacy of hyper-masculinity
in Southern Rhodesia’s political culture, later personified in the intransigence and
arrogance of leaders like Ian Smith, a hero of the Battle of Britain. Ironically though, mass
mobilization for war also gave rise to the region’s first real gay scene in Johannesburg, and
to generally more relaxed attitudes towards sexuality in other urban centres.9

Modern homophobia
The relatively free and exuberant sexuality of the immediate post-war period proved to be
short-lived. The National Party came to power in South Africa in 1948, determined to put
to an end any ‘immorality’ that might call the dignity of the White race into question. State
persecution of White homosexuals took its mandate from both teachings of the Dutch
Reformed Church and from increasingly strident pseudo-scientific and political arguments
emerging from the USA. In the context of the Cold War, those arguments went, over-
protective mothers who effeminized and homosexualized their sons were not just bad
mothers. They were a weak link in the defence against global Communism.10
Cold War homophobia percolated into official policy in the USA and many of its allies,
resulting in bureaucratic witch-hunts and suicides of accused homosexuals. They also
permeated American popular culture, which, through Hollywood, was avidly consumed by
the public in South Africa in the 1940s and 50s. In this way the apartheid state gained an
unlikely ally in fomenting homophobia in the wider culture—White youth gangs. At a time
of increasing state efforts at social engineering, of repressive sexual morality, and of family
dislocation caused by rapid urban—and suburbanization, these gangs allowed White youth
to develop and express their identity independently of parents, state and church. Mooney
(1998) has shown how they cultivated a machismo that stressed conformity of style and
 A genealogy of homophobia in Zimbabwe 257

heterosexual display as idealized in Hollywood imagery around masculine toughness.

‘Moffie-bashing’ or ‘bunny-bashing’ was one such display.
A popular culture of intolerance against homosexuality coalesced in a less explicit but
equally repressive form in Southern Rhodesia in the early 1950s. In addition to the same
Hollywood and Cold War influences, Southern Rhodesia experienced an influx of
immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, which diluted the relative homogeneity of
the White population and threatened to undermine earlier consensus about settler identity.
‘Sea kaffirs’ (Portuguese), carrying a reputation of sexual indiscipline from Mozambique,
were especially worrisome to respectable Southern Rhodesians. The imperative to nurture a
new national identity that cut across such emerging ethnic and class divides among Whites,
and that could be mobilized to resist growing political pressure from outside, became
almost an obsession of the colony’s cultural and political elites.
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Post-war settler nationalism claimed a unique responsibility to protect Africans from

themselves, together with a possessiveness towards the wild, romanticized landscapes,
fauna and flora that still remained in much of the country. The masculinity that it
celebrated was a muscular one, hard-drinking, womanizing, laughing-in-the-face-of-
danger, at-ease-in-the-bundu (wilderness), and at-ease-with-the-natives. Nowhere was the
can-do essence of this masculinity symbolized more powerfully than in the massive
engineering projects of the period, above all the Kariba Dam. Not only did the dam’s sheer
size and technical achievement reflect well on Southern Rhodesian capabilities. The much-
publicized care taken by the builders to rescue wild animals trapped by the rising waters
was also portrayed in propaganda from the period as emblematic of a uniquely Southern
Rhodesian heroism.11
Idealized Southern Rhodesian masculinity stood in stark contrast to socialistic,
effeminate, treacherous, and wimpish liberalism presumed to be sapping the morale of
the West (and abetting native and White female uppitiness). This sexualized nationalism
was endlessly re-iterated through the popular media, including by clumsily didactic
humour that idealized horny heterosexuality and mocked the gender-bending that was
beginning to appear in the West.12 Just to be on the safe side, the Immigration Act of 1914
was revised in 1954. It prohibited anyone deemed to practise ‘homosexualism’ from
entering the country even as tourists (let alone settling in and effeminizing the colony).13
The unilateral declaration of independence by Rhodesia in 1965, the outbreak of the
bush war soon after, and the consequent militarization of White society in the 1970s
combined to bring stigma against those who ‘let down the side’ to a violent boil.
Kaarsholm’s study of Rhodesian war novels shows how murderous male fraternity among
Whites was approved through crudely drawn dualisms of ‘natural’ Rhodesian manliness
and a communistic, sadistic, and/or homosexual enemy. Davis, for example, depicts his
protagonist reconstituting his masculine wholeness after a dissolute life in town by moving
to the wild Zambezi valley where battles terrorists (1967). Davis again rails furiously against
‘lily-livered’ (implicitly ‘faggy’) Whites, while offering a nostalgic wink and nudge at both
the adulterous bed-hopping of Rhodesian society, and the ‘cowboy’ derring-do of the
Rhodesian leadership (1984). The heroic policeman in Robert Early’s 1977 A Time of
Madness makes the homophobia in this masculinity explicit. He first rescues a South
African man from debauchery in Johannesburg, then goes on to defeat in battle and to
humiliate in wit a whole range of communists, terrorists, meddling Whites from overseas,
and homosexuals (Kaarsholm 1991: 44–48).
The ultimate expression of this homophobia occurred in 1972 when two White men,
including a police constable, hunted down and beat to death a middle-aged gay White man
 258 M. Epprecht

because he was a ‘poof’ (Hawkins 1973). The climate of hostility against suspected gays got
so bad that the following year the commissioner of police almost expressed sympathy
toward them. He promised to take greater efforts to protect discreet (implicitly White)
homosexual men from juvenile (implicitly Black) extortionists.14

African transitions
The ancestors of the Shona and Ndebele of today regarded sex as a means to reproduction,
spirituality and community harmony.15 The hegemony of heteronormative culture was
partly sustained by dire punishments for flagrant sexual misbehaviour. Mostly, however, it
was preserved by turning a blind eye to sexual transgressions, or by explaining them in non-
threatening or even praiseworthy terms. For example, possession by a respected spirit of the
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opposite sex could explain a person’s lack of interest in marriage. The ideal of heterosexual
marriage resulting in numerous offspring for all adults was also belied by tacit acceptance of
a diversity of sexual behaviours behind closed doors or out in the veldt. Evidence of the
latter can be found in the fact that African males were disproportionately caught for same-
sex crimes within the areas of Roman-Dutch jurisprudence in Southern Rhodesia from the
earliest years of the district court system (Epprecht 1998b).
Africans’ relative casualness about sexuality was the object of concerted attack by
Christian missionaries. African men working on the mines in the Johannesburg area were
the first in the region to be subjected to direct propaganda against same-sex sexual practices
on a mass, graphic basis. The message was not just that such conduct was bad. It was also
that morally reprehensible sexual acts would be punished regardless of whether they were
reported, whether compensation were paid, and whether one was the active partner or a
consenting, passive one. Moreover, punishment would not be a short to middling stint in
prison or a few stripes from a cane. Punishment would be everlasting torment at the hands
of the sadistic minions of the devil.
Many African men regarded the Christian vision of hellfire and damnation as nothing
less than deranged. However, evidence given to the Leary and Taberer enquiry into
‘unnatural vice’ suggests that it was beginning to have an impact among African migrant
labourers even as early as 1907. The testimony of Bob Zandemela, a Chopi miner, makes
the connection between his conversion to Christianity and to exclusive heterosexuality
completely plain: ‘I was an ‘‘inkotshane’’ [mine wife] myself once; I gave it up when I heard
it was an evil thing. I practiced this both at the Chimes and at this compound. When I
learned in the Book [the Bible] it was wrong I stopped it. I submitted to being an
‘‘inkotshane’’ because I did not know better’.16
In addition to Christian missionary intolerance toward same-sex sexuality, more subtle
cultural influences arising out of European discourses around both sexual morality and
economic development had a profound effect upon African consciousness. As Jeater (1995)
has convincingly shown, the hegemony of modern values among Black Zimbabweans was
imparted insidiously and enduringly by the penetration and co-optation of indigenous
languages. The subtleties of ‘Deep Shona’ that allowed the language to maintain certain
social fictions, or that allowed empirically contradictory ideas to co-exist, were lost in
missionary translations. The word inkotshane, to give the most obvious example, originally
included the meaning of servant. It was neither pejorative nor necessarily entailed a sexual
relationship (moreover, where it did the latter, it connoted thigh sex). Yet missionary
translations stated its meaning, baldly, as ‘sodomy’. Where African languages lacked an
explicit word equivalent to the English ones, missionaries sometimes did them the service
 A genealogy of homophobia in Zimbabwe 259

of inventing Biblical neologisms—isono samadoda ase-Sodom in McLaren’s 1923 Xhosa

dictionary, for example, or Hamel’s 1965 mosodoma in Sesotho (Epprecht 2004).
Jeater does not specifically address European fears about homosexual perversion. But
those fears were communicated through material culture as well as through language.
Thus, the notion that homosexuality was contagious but could be resisted by proper spatial
arrangements was strongly implicit in restructuring institutions and public housing to
provide for separate sleeping arrangements. Where traditionally it had been considered
entirely normal, non-sexual and non-threatening for African men to sleep together under
the same blanket in the nude in the early days of urban development (as had been the case
in pre-colonial days), by the 1950s state and mission schools had largely ensured that such
behaviour be regarded as improper. One South African ‘expert’ on African sexuality
actually described urban planning in Southern Rhodesia as a model for his country in its
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efforts to stamp out homosexuality among Africans.17

Structural changes that flowed from colonial rule and racial capitalism also profoundly
affected African sexuality. Most worrisome to Southern Rhodesians was the appearance of
prostitution among Africans, and the rise of an assertive type of African woman in town,
mahure (from ‘whores’). Efforts to protect indigenous African patriarchs from the
disruptive effects of these women included the Native Adultery Ordinance of 1916,
periodic police round-ups and deportations of female ‘vagrants’, and compulsory vaginal
check-ups for sexually-transmitted diseases.18
The practice of African men taking ‘boy wives’ while away from home on labour
contracts was less talked about but was certainly well-known in Southern Rhodesia from as
early as 1907 (Epprecht 1998b). Indeed, by the 1920s the practice had given rise to a new
distinctly Shona word for it—matanyera. Shona journalist Lawrence Vambe shied away
from naming the homosexual connotation, but he none the less described matanyera as ‘the
lowest of the low’, a kind of man ‘who caught syphilis just as easily as he caught the
common cold’ (Vambe 1976: 196). Matanyera were initially regarded by Shona as despised
men from the impoverished nearby colony of Nyasaland (Malawi). Yet the same forces that
had socially unmanned Malawian migrants and identified them with male-male sexuality in
town were also at work upon the Shona. Growing land shortages, declining real wages, and
the interference of colonial bureaucrats in daily life all combined to extend the period of
social boyhood (that is, inability to acquire a wife) for some men to a permanent condition.
Vambe recollects the shock of realization that this calamity had come to his people when
the first of its sons left for good in 1923: ‘The reason for the fear and despondency at
Nhawu’s departure was the possibility that it could trigger off an exodus of their educated
young men for the El Dorado of the distant South Africa. They were afraid of the
development of a Nyasaland-type situation, with its deserted wives and children, frustrated
virgins and neglected fields. Until Edward Nhawu made this break, they had thought that
only inadequate, unpatriotic and deprived Africans from abroad could be attracted to this
extreme form of vagabondage…’ (Vambe 1972: 242–243).

‘Nervous conditions’ and African nationalism

African men in this era of rapidly changing gender relations and sexuality did devise new
ways of signifying or performing social manhood, including through sports, through
ostentatious consumption of European products such as soap and liquor, and through
achievement in the White man’s terms (school, church, police, master farming, and so
on).19 Yet racially-coded discourses continued to define even the most Westernized African
 260 M. Epprecht

men as imitative or childish. Moreover, by the early 1950s some of the most respectable
avenues to social manliness were being closed down. The Native Land Husbandry Act of
1951 and subsequent birth control programmes in particular were widely perceived by
Africans as intolerable assaults on the rural and sexual base of African masculinity. They
sparked the first stirrings of anti-colonial rebellion in the countryside since 1897, stirrings
that nationalist leaders sought to harness to their own emergent agenda. It was a context
that gave rise to all kinds of ‘nervous conditions,’ to use the term coined by Fanon (1967)
and used to biting effect by Dangarembga in her 1989 novel of Black middle-class mores in
the 1960s. Among these nervous conditions was overt revulsion and anger against African
men who betrayed the putative dignity of African masculinity by having sex with males.
Only one African nationalist leader ever explicitly brought up this issue in public during
the long struggle for Zimbabwean liberation. Charles Mzingeli, the self-styled Mayor of
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Harare, was leading a protest in 1952 against police harassment of suspected mahure.
Rather than deporting the women from town, he argued, African women should be given
secure accommodation so that the men who lived there could enjoy their company. ‘Most
of these men in the Old Bricks have wives but when they visit their husbands they are
arrested, how do you expect the men to survive?’. Mzingeli is purported to have challenged
municipal officials, ‘Do you want the men to be homosexuals?’ (cited in Barnes 1999: 143).
Among other African nationalist leaders from this early period, we can infer an incipient
homophobia from their hostility towards ‘uppity women.’ Employing terms such as
‘emasculating’, ‘impotent’ and ‘womanly’ to describe their predicament under colonialism,
these leaders fanned popular perceptions that the humiliation of African men could be
linked to the supposed looseness of modern African women. Often, barely disguised, they
favoured violence against such women as a strategy to restore masculine dignity.
Ndabaningi Sithole, for example, recalls in his memoirs with pride how he ‘soundly
thrashed’ an insolent school girl (Sithole 1968: 17), an act he construes as modern and
liberating in relation to the accommodating traditionalism of the girl’s father. The
modernity of Sithole’s relationship with White men is also articulated in a striking claim to
shared virility. ‘African males fell down at the feet of White Madonnas and forgot all about
their Black ones. This should not surprise us because both the African male and the White
male have the same thing in common, and that is the ‘‘male principle’’’ (Sithole 1968:
161). The ‘White magic spell’, he argued, that had been maintained by forbidding African
men to have sex with White women, was beginning to break down and would eventually
lead to political independence (1968: 158).
The growing conflation of male virility with African nationalism became apparent during
the first big industrial strike by Africans, in Bulawayo, 1948. The strikers lashed out with
seemingly gratuitous acts of violence against African women.20 State repression then
inflamed emotions, squeezing out political space for moderation in the 1950s and early-
60s. From that time, prominent nationalist leaders began to attack African women who
adopted Western fashion (the mini-skirt above all), and to use rhetoric that equated
compromise with femininity. Obed Muteza, for example, put his choice to go to prison this
way: ‘clearly, the honourable choice is the life of hardship, even death, than to go down in
the annals of a nation as a collaborator or indeed a woman. The choice before me is simple;
am I a man or a woman?’ (Sithole 1970: 144–145). Muteza further emphasized that real
African men repressed any ascribed feminine instinct to laugh or smile and abstained from
‘sex’ before battle. They self-consciously cultivated ‘distance between man and man’.
This masculinist message was also implicit in leaders’ refusal to condemn violence
against women. Undoubtedly the most dramatic demonstration of the latter was the mass
 A genealogy of homophobia in Zimbabwe 261

rape of young women in Harare’s female hostel in 1956, an atrocity that was tacitly
pardoned by prominent nationalist leaders. The women, including some who were injured
trying to escape from second story windows, were said to have provoked ‘unruly youths’
because they had refused to participate in an anti-colonial protest. To Maurice Nyagumbo
this was an intolerable affront to the men and to the nationalist movement as a whole.
‘Personally I had no reason to feel regret for the incident. I actually believed the girls
deserved their punishment’ (1980: 104–105).
Nyagumbo, like almost all the Zimbabwean nationalist leadership, was the product of
Christian mission schools. Robert Mugabe, notably, was educated at a Catholic mission
school run by the Canadian Marist Brothers. Joshua Nkomo describes himself in his
memoirs as a proudly monogamous, tea-totalling Christian (Nkomo 1984), while
Ndabiningi Sithole fondly recalls learning how to treat a lady at Dadaya mission (Sithole
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1968: 15). Their education not only provided them with anti-homosexual arguments from
the Bible, but also left them with a deep ambivalence toward African custom.21 Indeed,
their statements on gender policy were commonly infused by a puritanical Christian
preachiness and dogmatism. Naomi Nhiwatiwa, a Zimbabwe African National Union
(ZANU) official, for example, asserted to a American audience in 1979 that ZANU had
abolished the custom of brideprice, insisted upon monogamous marriage among its
fighters, prohibited divorce and adultery, and condemned beer-drinking.22
One especially suggestive indication of the nationalist debt to conservative Christian
propaganda on homosexuality comes from the Reverend Canaan Banana, the first
president of independent Zimbabwe. A Methodist, Banana authored a number of homilies
on how to build a revolutionary society. The latter included rejection of European luxuries
and habits in favour of African traditions of modesty and community, and the need for men
to dominate women as explained in the Bible (Banana 1980: 147). In The Woman of My
Imagination Banana adjures wives to be subject to their husbands by citing St. Paul, and
blames boys’ sexually irresponsible behaviour on ‘the poor upbringing of the girls’ (Banana
1980: 9). What makes this argument so interesting to us now is that Banana’s own
behaviour was less than exemplary, as revealed in the multiple charges laid against him in
1997 of sodomy and indecent assault (on males). Banana, who by that time taught
Christian theology at the University of Zimbabwe, defended himself against the allegations
with a vicious homophobic diatribe.23

Revolutionary homophobia
The Banana story points to another intellectual influence on that generation of
Zimbabwean leadership. As the nationalist movement became radicalized in the 1960s,
‘tea-drinkers’ fell by the wayside and firebrands moved to the fore. While still mostly
Christian, these men articulated most of their revolutionary analysis in Marxist-Leninist
and Fanonesque terms. Both these traditions have socially conservative, pro-natalist, and
homophobic tendencies. Zimbabwean graduates of ideological training in Communist
China and the USSR thus returned to the region as ‘puritanical, idealistic, Marxist
‘‘VaShandi’’ [workers]’ who allied themselves with traditionalists to oppose what they
regarded as a sexually loose atmosphere in the Zambian guerrilla camps.24 An internal
ZANU document from July 1979 also concentrated its ire on boy-girl affairs, whose
‘disastrous consequences’ included birth control. Among its proposed remedies was to
‘Intensify orientation on our culture with emphasis on marriage and ‘‘internal discipline’’’
(‘On Marriage’, cited in Lyons 2002: 315–316).
 262 M. Epprecht

The notion that revolutionary Africans could be corrupted by foreign homosexuals does
not appear in the Zimbabwean documents. The Fanonesque view, however, that
homosexuality among Blacks was basically a reflection of Black men’s debasement by
White men (Fanon 1967: 180), had nonetheless gained a great deal of currency in African
literature, and among African intellectuals, by the 1960s and 70s. From vile Arab pederasts
(see the work of Ouologuem 1971 and Armah 1979) to alienated African-Americans
(Soyinka 1974) to diseased Coloureds (Head 1974) to European lesbians (Gordimer 1980,
Aidoo 1977), ‘the homosexual’ was put to use in often crudely didactic ways by prominent
African novelists (Dunton 1989). Similar stigmatization of homosexuality among Blacks
was also popular during the 1970s among ‘Afro-centric’ intellectuals in the United States,
where several Zimbabwean leaders went to school (among their number, Canaan Banana
and Eddison Zvobgo).
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We also know that the Zimbabwean leadership in exile had close relations with other
African liberation movements and the leaders of frontline states such as Tanzania. Some of
these men expressed strongly homophobic views that suggest encouragement to their
Zimbabwean comrades. Oliver Tambo and Julius Nyerere, for example, held a deep moral
conservatism that owed at least as much to Christian upbringing as to African tradition.25
The influential Kenyan academic Ali Mazrui also revealed a startling indebtedness to
European sources and prejudices (Mazrui 1975). To support his apologia for virile African
‘warriors’ like Idi Amin, Mazrui cited missionary and colonial opinion dating from 1929.
These European experts ‘explained’ the misrule of the nineteenth century Zulu leader
Shaka as stemming from his small penis size and repressed homosexuality.
A final influence upon attitudes towards sexuality was the material one of incarceration
and other enforced homosocial environments during the liberation struggle. Anti-apartheid
activist Moses Dlamini vividly describes how warders on Robben Island in the mid-1960s
actively incited criminal gangs to rape the political prisoners as they arrived (Dlamini 1984:
111). No less than 20 of his fellow politicals were subjected to this trauma on their first
night on the island. In the Zimbabwe case, no one has yet to come forward with tales of like
brutality.26 Joshua Nkomo does note, however, that after seven years in Rhodesian prisons,
fellow political prisoners like Robert Mugabe, and their wives ‘hated’ the tense, confusing,
and presumably humiliating conjugal visits that his jailers finally allowed (Nkomo 1984:
132). Given what we know about Rhodesian attitudes towards sexuality, we can easily
imagine the jailers savouring this further opportunity to mock the dignity of ‘respectable’
Africans who opposed settler rule.

Conclusion
Zimbabwean independence in 1980 saw the end of Rhodesian repression, the return of
exiles and an influx of South Africans escaping conscription and intensifying homophobic
repression in that country. A brief ‘golden age’ for gays and lesbians in Zimbabwe ensued.
The incipient homophobia of the new political leadership, however, began to emerge in
explicit terms as early as 1983. One of the first targets was ‘the father of Zimbabwean
nationalism’, Joshua Nkomo, depicted in the state-controlled press wearing a woman’s
dress with ample buttocks exposed to ridicule him. A further crackdown followed in the
wake of police round-ups of suspected female prostitutes. By the mid-1990s, President
Robert Mugabe and other state officials and church leaders were directly inciting violence
against gays and lesbians, whom they straightforwardly associated with Western
imperialism.
 A genealogy of homophobia in Zimbabwe 263

The campaigns against loose women and homosexuals were undoubtedly motivated to
some degree by political opportunism, possibly including a desire to block Banana’s
re-entry into presidential politics, to grandstand against Nelson Mandela, and to distract
attention from economic mismanagement and corruption. Yet regardless of where the line
is drawn between politics and sincerely-held ‘moral’ beliefs, the bottom line remains the
same. Homophobic rhetoric, which also serves as a vicarious attack on African feminisms,
has indisputably impeded efforts to develop the kind of honest sexuality and gender
awareness necessary to address an HIV/AIDS pandemic. At the most basic level, it abets
the stereotype that HIV/AIDS is a White gay disease of worry only to ‘clear drinkers’ (that
is, African men who prostitute themselves for European-style beer). It also precludes
education about widespread risky practices among the majority population such as anal
intercourse and heterosexual-identified men who occasionally have sex with males.
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Dismaying as this homophobic turn of events strikes may be to human rights and health
care activists, I none the less want to conclude on an optimistic note. The above history
makes clear that politicised homophobia in Zimbabwe (and likely elsewhere that it has
emerged in Africa) does indeed have some roots in traditional African culture. But it is also
enormously indebted to Christian missionary propaganda, Western pseudo-science, and
the demonstration effect of White Rhodesian ‘cowboy’ culture. This therefore suggests a
hopeful conclusion. An African nationalism that is less directly beholden to Western
spiritual, social and intellectual traditions than that of the first and second generations of
Zimbabwean nationalists, and that no longer licks the wounds of long-passed politicised
sexual slights, holds promise to reinvent itself. Given the discretion and ambiguities around
sexuality and gender identities in traditional culture, the possibility is actually fairly strong
that this re-invention could embrace sexual rights and be more open to women’s
empowerment and effective approaches to sexual health than is so evidently the case at
present.

Notes
1. Human Rights Watch (2003), for example, also discussed in Zinanga (1996) and Epprecht (1998a), in which
some of the following discussion has previously been published.
2. See, for example, Cope and Darke (2002), available online at http://www.transalliancesociety.org/education/
documents/02womenpolicy.pdf. Other expositions of queer and pro-feminist theory pertinent to research on
masculine sexuality in Africa include Besnier (1997), Morrell (1998) and Hoad (1999).
3. Border Gezi in Zimbabwe, Zimbabwean Parliamentary Debates vol. 22/38 (6 Sept, 1996: 2517). See Epprecht
(1998a, 2004), Donham (1998) and Aarmo (1999).
4. Natal archives, AGO I/1/31, case 58 of 20 February 1868.
5. Moodie with Ndatshe (1994), Gevisser and Cameron (1994) and Epprecht (1998b, 2004), among others.
6. See also Bederman (1995) on virility on the US frontier, plus Jeater (1993), Summers (1994) and McCulloch
(2000) early colonial Southern Rhodesia.
7. For example, Hoare (1934: 143–145) and Kennedy (1987) for comparisons to another settler society (Kenya).
8. Government of Zimbabwe, Immigration Act Chapter 4:02 revised edition 1996, section 14 (1) (f).
9. Gevisser and Cameron (1994). An important comparative study of how the war abetted the emergence of gay
and lesbian identities is Bérubé (1990).
10. See, in particular, Terry (1999). Actual Communists meanwhile offered a mirror-image stigma of
homosexuality as a function of capitalist decadence (Kon 1995).
11. For example, the novels of Davis (1967, in particular).
12. See GALZ (2002) for memoirs of growing up gay in Rhodesia and Godwin (1996) on White boyhood in the
rural areas. On the ‘buccaneering romanticism’ among Whites in this period see Caute (1983) and Godwin
and Hancock (1993). Shamuyarira (1966) also uses the word ‘cowboy’ in his observations of Rhodesian
culture, astutely captured in cartoon form by Bolze and Martin (1978).
13. Government of Zimbabwe, Immigration Act Chapter 4:02 Revised Edition 1996 section 14 (1) (f).
 264 M. Epprecht

14. Zimbabwe National Archives (ZNA) RG 3/BRI 41, BSAP, Departmental Report (May 1973: 6–8).
15. Ethnographies of the Shona and Ndebele, who together comprise about 90% of the population of Zimbabwe,
include Gelfand (1979) and Bozongwana (1983).
16. Transvaal Archive Bureau [Pretoria] NTS 10203, 1/422.
17. Light on the Sex Life of the Bantu People. Unpublished Speech or article (no name, no date), Gay and
Lesbian Archives of South Africa file AM 2909.
18. Jeater (1993), Barnes (1999) and Jackson (2002).
19. See Veit-Wild (1993) and Burke (1996).
20. Commission of Enquiry into Native Strike ‘Report’, September 1948 ZNA, 482/114/8/48).
21. See Veit-Wild (1993), Summers (1999) and West (2001) on Christian acculturation.
22. Cited by Kriger (1992: 192).
23. Banana breaks silence (1997) Zimbabwe Independent, 20–26 June: 1.
24. Cited by Bhebe and Ranger (1995: 10).
25. See, for example, Schiller (1998) and Dunton (in press).
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26. Although Caute (1983: 59) does note a case where African fighters killed by the Rhodesian security forces
were displayed to school children with their genitals exposed to heighten the humiliation. Heterosexual
violence was meanwhile widespread during the war, from all sides—see, notably, Nhongo-Simbanegavi
(2000), and fictionalized accounts in Marechera (1978) and Sinclair (1996).

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