Taking my cue from Eugene Patron’s 1992 interview with Simon Nkoli, the South African “Out in Africa” ongoing film festival (since 1994), and Andrew Holmberg’s 2000 book, I address the much needed criss-crossing of queer theory with postcolonality, as there are still only embryonic attempts at considering the literary representation of same-sex desire in a pan-African context. Despite the growth in the (often academic) acknowledgment of variant sexualities on the African continent, homosexuality is still thought to be not only ‘un-African’ but also a highly suspicious import from the deviant West. However, expressions and phrases to designate homosexuality exist in some fifty (Sub-Saharan) African languages.
Because the new South African context, under the post-Apartheid Constitution, with its debates on Human Rights, sexuality and accountability, has been deemed an excellent testing terrain for entering discussion on queer theory, South African writers (e.g. Bessie Head, K. Sello Duiker, Shamin Sharif, Tatamkhulu Afrika, Anthony Sher, Mark Behr, Sheila Kohler [Stobie 2005, 2007: Zabus 2006, 2007, forthcoming 2008]) have often been critically assessed at the expense of early gesturing, in East and West African fiction. I therefore focus on the fiction of Kenyan Rebeka Njau and Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo, which paved the way for more assertive texts as in Malian Doumbi-Fakoly and Nigerian Promise Okekwe and Unoma Azuah. A growing number of literary texts therefore project what Plutarch used to call charis, which could be translated as ‘obligingness’ or ‘gracious reciprocity,’ and, in a more recent legal discourse imbued with Human Rights vocabulary, as ‘consent.’