Ebook Download Hungochani: The History of a Dissident Sexuality in Southern Africa, by Marc Epprecht
The soft data indicates that you have to visit the web link for downloading then save Hungochani: The History Of A Dissident Sexuality In Southern Africa, By Marc Epprecht You have possessed guide to read, you have actually posed this Hungochani: The History Of A Dissident Sexuality In Southern Africa, By Marc Epprecht It is uncomplicated as visiting the book shops, is it? After getting this brief description, hopefully you could download and install one and also start to read Hungochani: The History Of A Dissident Sexuality In Southern Africa, By Marc Epprecht This book is very simple to read every single time you have the free time.
Hungochani: The History of a Dissident Sexuality in Southern Africa, by Marc Epprecht
Ebook Download Hungochani: The History of a Dissident Sexuality in Southern Africa, by Marc Epprecht
New updated! The Hungochani: The History Of A Dissident Sexuality In Southern Africa, By Marc Epprecht from the best author and also author is currently available below. This is guide Hungochani: The History Of A Dissident Sexuality In Southern Africa, By Marc Epprecht that will certainly make your day reading ends up being completed. When you are looking for the published book Hungochani: The History Of A Dissident Sexuality In Southern Africa, By Marc Epprecht of this title in guide shop, you may not discover it. The troubles can be the limited editions Hungochani: The History Of A Dissident Sexuality In Southern Africa, By Marc Epprecht that are given up guide shop.
When visiting take the experience or ideas kinds others, publication Hungochani: The History Of A Dissident Sexuality In Southern Africa, By Marc Epprecht can be a good source. It holds true. You could read this Hungochani: The History Of A Dissident Sexuality In Southern Africa, By Marc Epprecht as the resource that can be downloaded here. The method to download is likewise simple. You can visit the link web page that we offer then purchase the book making a bargain. Download Hungochani: The History Of A Dissident Sexuality In Southern Africa, By Marc Epprecht and you can put aside in your very own tool.
Downloading and install the book Hungochani: The History Of A Dissident Sexuality In Southern Africa, By Marc Epprecht in this website listings can provide you more benefits. It will certainly reveal you the very best book collections as well as completed collections. So many books can be found in this site. So, this is not only this Hungochani: The History Of A Dissident Sexuality In Southern Africa, By Marc Epprecht However, this book is referred to review since it is a motivating book to provide you a lot more chance to obtain encounters and also ideas. This is simple, review the soft documents of the book Hungochani: The History Of A Dissident Sexuality In Southern Africa, By Marc Epprecht and you get it.
Your perception of this publication Hungochani: The History Of A Dissident Sexuality In Southern Africa, By Marc Epprecht will certainly lead you to acquire exactly what you specifically require. As one of the impressive publications, this book will certainly offer the presence of this leaded Hungochani: The History Of A Dissident Sexuality In Southern Africa, By Marc Epprecht to collect. Also it is juts soft data; it can be your cumulative file in device and other device. The essential is that usage this soft documents publication Hungochani: The History Of A Dissident Sexuality In Southern Africa, By Marc Epprecht to read and take the benefits. It is exactly what we suggest as publication Hungochani: The History Of A Dissident Sexuality In Southern Africa, By Marc Epprecht will certainly boost your ideas and mind. Then, checking out publication will likewise enhance your life top quality a lot better by taking good activity in balanced.
In the vivid tapestry of global queer cultures Africa has long been neglected or stereotyped. In Hungochani, Marc Epprecht seeks to change that by tracing the history and traditions of homosexuality in southern Africa, modern gay and lesbian identities, and the vibrant gay rights movement that has emerged since the 1980s. He explores the diverse ways African cultures traditionally explained same-sex sexuality and follows the emergence of new forms of gender identity and sexuality that evolved with the introduction of capitalism, colonial rule, and Christian education. government enquiries from the eighteenth century to the present, he traces the complex origins of homophobia. By bringing forth a wealth of evidence about once-hidden sexual behaviour, Epprecht contributes to the honest, open discussion that is urgently needed in the battle against HIV/AIDS. Homosexuality - or hungochani as it is known in Zimbabwe - has been denounced by many politicians and church leaders as an example of how Western decadence has corrupted African traditions. However, a bold new gay rights movement has emerged in several of the countries of the region since the 1980s, offering an exciting new dimension in the broad struggle for human rights and democracy unfolding on the continent.
- Sales Rank: #786615 in Books
- Published on: 2004-10
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .90" w x 6.00" l, 1.08 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 344 pages
Review
"This is an important and ground-breaking work. Epprecht is without doubt the foremost scholar of Southern African homoerotic sexuality."
Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
A superlative piece of historical research
By Stephen O. Murray
Marc Epprecht, who teaches African history at Queen's University (in Kingston, Ontario) and earlier worked in Zimbabwe and Lesotho, has written one of the very best books on homosexualities of a particular geographic area. Epprecht mined the judicial archives in Zimbabwe, examining cases in the early days of the Southern Rhodesia colony involving male-male couples (more than a few of whom brought cases against estranged partners) and revealing what Shona males expected of/from male-male sexual relations. Epprecht also founded an oral history project and trained Zimbabweans to interview elders about (homo)sexuality in mining camps and in home villages during the first half of the twentieth century. He marshals material from ethnographies and memoirs along with the oral history, early-20th-century government commissions investigating conditions in mining camps, and forensic records into a readable and sensitive account of southeastern African homosexualities. Epprecht's archival research shows beyond any reasonable doubt that "that male-male sexual relations were quietly taking place among Africans became obvious to the invaders as soon as they set up their police and court structure.
Epprecht discusses homosexuality recorded or alleged about whites in southeastern Africa, too. He chronicles the concerted efforts by Christian missionaries to demonize "sodomites" as damned and as "un-African"--and to "counter traditional practices that allowed for child spacing" (of which going away and taking a boy wife was only one of many).
The book includes somehistoric photos, a very useful pair of maps, a glossary, and two appendices. The first is an account of setting up the Gay Oral History Project, the second includes some transcripts of oral history interviews. The book is extraordinarily well-researched, well-organized, and well-written. Epprecht actively (and successfully) seeks to explore how Africans involved in same-sex sexual relations felt about their partners.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Strong History, Important Topic
By Jeffery Mingo
In the introduction, the author suggests that he has a background in radical gay rights activism. However, this book is not "propaganda." This is a rigorous and respectable history that even historians (incorrectly!) unsympathetic to lesbians and gay men should respect and support. The author focuses on multifaceted phenomena that affect Southern African gays and the homophobia they faced or face.
Many books that address taboo topics can be scrapbook-ish, an example of gleaning for information. This book, however, is thorough and thoughtful. It starts far into the past and moves to a more recent time. As that region is biracial; the texts focuses upon both Africans and Europeans. Unfortunately, the diverse focus may give ammunition to opponents that consider gay community and activity to be "un-African."
I lost my copy of the book at O'Hare International Airport. I wish I still owned it and hope whoever has it now can benefit from it. This book may do for Southern Africa what John D'Emilio's "Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities" did for the United States.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Amends to Manhood?
By Anne van den Bergh
The second oldest leader in the world, Robert Mugabe’s unabashed and often-controversial political agenda has become inextricably linked to Westerners’ view of contemporary Zimbabwe as highly intolerant and repressive of sexual deviancy. Indeed, Mugabe’s public statements with regards to homosexuality are typically brimming with condemnation, of which the headlines of related online articles are emblematic: “Mugabe threatens to cut gay people’s heads off”, “Mugabe: Homosexuality Destroys Nations”, and “Mugabe says of Obama’s gay rights push, ‘We ask, was he born out of homosexuality?’” constitute a mere handful in a gulf of similar sources (Leach 2013; Keating 2013; Fisher 2013). For Mugabe, along with a stern conviction to promote indigenous black interests goes a rejection of any further Western influence seeping through the cracks of Zimbabwean culture (Bailey & Thompson 2009). One such imported Western phenomenon, Mugabe claims, is homosexuality, ‘only’ having erupted in southern Africa in the aftermath of Western imperialism (Dunton & Palmberg 1996). Ironically, where Western academics and activists today are quick to denunciate the notion of homosexuality as inherently un-African and its immediate implications for southern Africans’ outspoken homo- and transphobic prejudices, a mere half-decade ago it was the European colonialists and preachers themselves who introduced this “dogmatic revulsion against same-sex behaviours” into the region (Epprecht 2004, 225). Marc Epprecht’s meticulously thorough work Hungochani: The History of a Dissident Sexuality in Southern Africa captures the various ways in which same-sex relationships have manifested themselves in the southern part of the continent over the course of recent history, and calls attention to the schizophrenic character of Western understandings of, and attempts at interfering with Africans’ sexuality. The present paper lifts the curtain to provide a brief glimpse into the themes surrounding discursive African construals of sexuality and the consequences of colonial rule (and its waning) for the development of non-normative sexualities and gender identities as they are discussed in Hungochani. Overwhelmed as I find myself by the breadth and depth of Epprecht’s book, in my writing I choose to place particular emphasis on the “ambivalent colonization [and decolonization] process as it relates to sexual mores” – leading Africans and their sexualities to remain the eternal subject of ‘Westocentric’ patronization (Epprecht 2004, 51; Oyéwùmí 1997).
An academic standard for anthropologists (but preferably: all earthlings) to live by is the objective to avoid taking a presentist perspective in evaluating historical events or practices, thereby fending off a distorted understanding of the matter at hand as it existed in its original context (Barber 2014). In his ambitious aim of disentangling “truths” from “claims”, Marc Epprecht stresses the need as a historian to always be aware of the potential of “androcentric, phallocentric, Eurocentric, and heterosexist assumptions or silences” to creep up in one’s analysis (2004, 12). Epprecht moves on to argue that, to that end, "new words may be necessary to make the heterosexism of existing vocabulary transparent”, and illustrates this by pointing at the all-too-simplistic rigidity of the notion of a single homosexuality (2004, 16). Indeed, in the first section of his book the author falsifies the “homosexuality/heterosexuality dichotomy” by tracing the “new types of same-sex sexual relationships, behaviors, and vocabularies” as they developed in times of pre- and post-independence of the southern nation-states (2004, 11; 224). The Shona of pre-modern Zimbabwe, for example, rarely condemned “youthful homosexual experimentation […] provided it remained discreet” (2004, 33). In addition, in his chapter titled ‘Traditions’ Epprecht demonstrates how in a variety of Zimbabwean communities a homosexual orientation was not necessarily considered a transgression “if caused by certain types of spirit possession and manifested in certain ways” (2004, 35). To exemplify this notion he draws on the case of Nomxadana, a Xhosa boy who would dress in female clothes “including underwear and high heels”, and was nonetheless thought to be mentally sane (Epprecht 2004, 35). Other possible – and excusable – causes of homosexual demeanor could be found in consuming too much beer, performing the acts in one’s sleep, bonding intensely with an “intimate male friend (sahwira)”, or in a “shortage of marriageable girls” (2004, 36; 38; 111).
The isolated and demanding character of the male-only mining compounds, too, gave rise to a “new type of male-male sexual relationship”, where one miner would make another man his wife, or nkotshane (now hungochani) (Epprecht 2004, 58). The reasons for miners to engage in this non-normative practice varied from “rational calculations of the risk of disease and economics” to the “belief in the muti [or healing powers/medicine] of transgressive sexuality” (Epprecht 2004, 81). Its widespread prevalence – 70 to 80% of men at the mines have been estimated to take male sexual partners – reflects its obvious appeal to young Africans (Epprecht 2004). A reluctance on the part of colonizers to pursue action against the ‘mine marriages’ could be attributed to the threat of serious shortage of industrial labor at the mines, necessitating that settlers create a workplace environment that would be looked on as highly attractive by possible future employees (Epprecht, 2004).
From Epprecht’s writings it thus appears that regional tolerance (i.e. a consensus to ‘look away’ from sexual eccentricities) on behalf of Western rulers was a straightforward product of economic or political opportunism, with a fading of such leniency to take off as the nexus of Western rule – and with that, of Calvinism – expanded. The “religious prejudices and the ferocious application of the law” that natives were increasingly met by as “colonial rule/apartheid, Christian missionary propaganda, and the structures of the racial capitalist economy” expanded, over time would have as their result an “internalization of hostility towards same-sex sexuality” in indigenous Africans (Epprecht 2004, 133; 135). Epprecht accordingly points out that “homophobia, not homosexuality, is the real ‘white man’s disease’ in the region” (2004, 133). He also suggests that an upsurge in manifestations of homophobia was directly conflated with an increased adoption of ‘familialism’, or “the idealization or naturalization of male-dominated, nuclear family units with women largely confined to unpaid labour in the household” (Epprecht 2004, 136). This revival of virility, in turn, strengthened an understanding of homosexuality as transgressive in nature. Existing “European discourses around sexual morality, economic progress, and science” worked to further reinforce this conviction (2004, 154). Cleanliness and attire, for example, formed subtle yet important vehicles for transmission of Western messages about sexuality (Epprecht 2004). Increasing emphasis came to be placed on the use of soap as a means to stop smelling “so badly as to be physically repulsive to civilized persons” (implying: to stop smelling so ‘African’) (157). Epprecht here alludes to the implicit “[homo]erotic subtext” of these new norms for intimate personal hygiene: “[f]reshly scrubbed genitals, when constructed as a signifier of modernity and thence conflated with sexual/marital fitness and material success, certainly implied the possibility of same-sex desire to a much greater extent than older rituals of cleansing” (2004, 157-158).
It becomes clear once more that in the context of colonialists imposing Western standards for morally correct behavior on African men and women, many traditional practices became harshly subjected to uncompromising amendments, leading Africans to be pulled back and forth in between shifting Western unanimities concerning what constitutes ‘proper conduct’ (Epprecht 2004, 183). It should be said, however, that Africans were not mere passive, obedient sheep in the face of Western rule. Epprecht explains that “rapid changes in gender relations; […] economic collapse; and […] the demoralizing breakdown in health and extended family obligations” were important internal factors contributing to a rise in homophobic sentiments (2004, 183). However, and despite the fluctuating degree of condemnation with which homosexuality was generally regarded, “African traditions of discretion and tolerance” for eccentric sexual behaviors (as long as they took place behind closed doors and could be “explained in non-threatening terms”) were more robust than one would expect (Epprecht 2004, 183; 48). It is even suggested that in its sole reliance on gloomy news items reporting on homophobic attacks in southern Africa, the international community has drawn a considerably inaccurate assessment of the actual state of affairs in this part of the continent, which, the author claims, “rarely approaches the level of violence often encountered in the West” (2004, 183). “Traditional culture […]”, writes Epprecht, “was de facto more tolerant of sexual diversity than modern literalists recognize. The danger of some sexual transgressions was contained in the sense that the community tacitly agreed not to see them” (2004, 39).
It follows that the notions of an “exclusive heterosexuality among black Africans” and of an ever-present homophobia in the continent are mythical – to say the least –, and can be largely explained by looking at Terence Ranger’s writings on the invention of tradition in colonial Africa (Epprecht 2004, 8; Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983). Ranger argues that with the advent of colonial rule in Africa, Europeans began to impose upon Africans a plethora of traditions imported from home, which “not only provided whites with models of command but also offered many Africans models of ‘modern’ behavior” (1983, 212). “European invented traditions offered Africans a series of clearly defined points of entry into the colonial world, though in almost all cases it was entry into the subordinate part of a man/master relationship” (Ranger 1983, 227). Indeed, appalled as they found themselves by “Africans’ relative casualness about sexuality”, European missionaries took advantage of the situation to “infantilize[…] [and] pathologize[…] African men and their sexuality” in order to strengthen their own position of power as ‘masters’ of decent, modern behavior regarding “hygiene, progress, body image, attire, and sexuality” (Epprecht 2004, 153; 159; 172). Race, here, was considered a valid enough classificatory notion to allow for the grouping together of all black Africans under the cloak of a single ‘African identity’, which, as early Pan-Africanist scholars would have it, constituted a unifying force so powerful that it worked to subvert the African diaspora (Barber 2014). Kwame Anthony Appiah strongly rejects this belief in a common African destiny. He writes:
The notion of Pan-Africanism was founded on the notion of the African, which was, in turn, founded not on any genuine cultural commonality but . . . on the very European concept of the Negro. . . . The very category of the Negro is at root a European product: for the 'whites' invented the Negroes in order to dominate them. (Appiah 1992, 62).
Appiah’s words reverberate the important message that discussions of African identities and traditions must not be confined to simplistic dichotomies like “true/false” or “genuine/faked”, since these categories themselves often have roots in colonialist discourses, and hence do not reflect an appropriate means by which to assess said issues (Mayer, 2002, 2). For Epprecht, this observation is key in his analysis of same-sex sexual behaviors and the ways in which these were looked upon. He writes: “it appears that black African men and women in earlier times made a wide range of sexual decisions in response to the full gamut of human emotions”, and notes that with regard to sexuality, Africans “were as confused, needy, hopeful, shy, bold, sordid, wonderful, awful, charming, frustrating, fickle, scared, ribald, and interesting as people anywhere else one might care to look” (Epprecht 2004, 223).
From both Epprecht’s and Ferguson’s writings it thus becomes evident that in order for outsiders to fully appreciate the plurality of African identity, they must move to an understanding of “African ways of life not as an ahistorical ‘tradition’, but as part and parcel of the modern world” (2006, 32). And there lies the problem: the Africa that Ferguson writes about in his book titled Global Shadows – an Africa that is the epitome of economic failure, societal instability, and political defection – is a continent of which the inhabitants are denied competent agency even today, so that Western discourses around African failure continue to feed into a notion of black men as inferior to white men (Ferguson 2006). Where messages of Africans’ physical filthiness, poor mothering skills, and improper sexual norms (to name just a few) once kept this inferiority paradigm alive, in our ‘modern’ times it is “Western discourses around [gay] rights and identity” that resonate a view of contemporary Africa as ‘backwards’ and a “twenty-first century ‘dark continent’” for not having supportive LGBT legislation in place and for denouncing same-sex relations as a ‘Western vice’ (Epprecht 2004; Ferguson 2006, 29).
Drawing on evidence for historic homosexuality from oral interviews, linguistic dissections, early cave drawings, Foucauldian analyses, and court records, Marc Epprecht’s Hungochani is as resourceful in its approaches as it is extensive in thematic scope. Epprecht demonstrates that homophobic tendencies in southern Africa only crystallized with the advent of Christian missionaries, and points at their rarity in earlier times, when “private sexuality and public gender identity” were still considered two separate entities (Gibson 2006, x). To this end Epprecht takes recourse to the 1907 enquiry on ‘unnatural vice’ by historians Glenn Leary and Henry Taberer, who in their research ruled out evidence for Africans’ accommodating stance towards homosexuality out of concern of “complicating their understanding of African primitiveness/simplicity” (2004, 70). More than once does Epprecht negatively scrutinize earlier anthropological accounts of same-sex courtship: he accuses Diana Jeater (1993) of having barely covered male-male sex in her study of marriage and ‘perversion’ in colonial Gweru, he calls out McCulloch (2002) for not having included incidents of male-male indecent assault in his monograph on sexual crimes in Southern Rhodesia, he criticizes Oppong and Kaliperi’s (1996) dismissal of African bisexuality as a myth, and the list goes on as the book progresses (2004, 10). The author furthermore points at potential caveats in any anthropologist’s reporting on African cultures and societies, of which he believes an inadvertent denial of African agency to be most problematic (Epprecht 2004, 183, 226). With regard to gay rights movements in the southern part of the continent he writes:
Superceding white or Coloured dominated gay and lesbian social clubs or associations, often employing Western-sounding language or Western-looking imagery, and often directly supported by international donors, the gay rights movement in southern Africa is understandably perceived by many people to be a straightforward product of Western cultural imperialism. This is a mistake. (Epprecht 2004, 226).
Indeed, whether taking a tolerant attitude towards non-normative sexuality or asserting their condemnation of any such phenomenon, Africans today still seem unable to escape from the “long tradition that exoticized, otherized, or pathologized African sexuality” (Epprecht 2004, 68). Epprecht makes a strong case that, fueled by “fairly subtle discourses, clothing, and the reorganization of living spaces that combined to fetishize certain parts of the body and to imply the need for defence [sic] against sexual temptations that were hitherto unimagined as sexual”, it seems only natural that Africans would eventually come to “equate homophobic constructions of sexuality, sensuality, and gender with civilization or progress” (2004, 225). Assisted by a rich volume of first-hand insider stories (appendix 2), the author paints a diverse and reliable picture of African same-sex behaviors, relationships, and constructs, thereby “tearing down Western constructions of uniform, act-based sexualities” (Gibson 2006, x).
Meticulous as he is in effecting a great variety of disciplinary approaches and in laying out the possible sources of error in anthropological analysis, Epprecht’s work itself, however, is not perfect, primarily in that it fails to provide a more comprehensive account of female same-sex relationships. His depiction of some women’s decision to “break decisively with cultural expectations around their sexuality” by becoming nuns covers a mere half page, where men’s resort to ‘eccentric’ sexual behaviors in mines and prisons is considered in two entire chapters (204). In addition, where Epprecht provides a detailed description of the nkotshane and the practice of mine marriage (chapter 2. ‘Cities’), his discussion of the female ‘mummy-baby’ relationship, or amachicken, is limited to a single paragraph, and is immediately placed in direct comparison with its male counterpart, as if only useful in illustrating a male case (2004, 204-205). The literature reveals that for a large part, female same-sex sexuality in Africa is conflated with status acquisition (Fraser 1989). Epprecht, too, reinforces this notion (2004, 204):
The mummy-baby relationship […] helped African girls learn to be heterosexually attractive and appropriately responsive women in a context where heterosexual courtship had become much more dangerous and individualized than had traditionally been the case.
However, one must take into account that historical and contemporary understandings of female sexuality are greatly shaped by limited resources, reflecting a male-oriented bias in anthropologists’ research concentrations.
Notwithstanding this considerable limitation, Hungochani is an invaluable and insightful work in its accomplishment of conveying the multidimensionality of same-sex sexualities in southern Africa. Uncovering the complex course of colonial history and its implications for the development of a pervasive homophobia, Epprecht has proven how restrictive our fixed assumptions concerning African (assessments of) homosexuality can be to our understanding of African identity. That discourses around homosexuality are directly interconnected with struggles over power relations and race constitutes, to me, the most important message to draw from Hungochani.
Hungochani: The History of a Dissident Sexuality in Southern Africa, by Marc Epprecht PDF
Hungochani: The History of a Dissident Sexuality in Southern Africa, by Marc Epprecht EPub
Hungochani: The History of a Dissident Sexuality in Southern Africa, by Marc Epprecht Doc
Hungochani: The History of a Dissident Sexuality in Southern Africa, by Marc Epprecht iBooks
Hungochani: The History of a Dissident Sexuality in Southern Africa, by Marc Epprecht rtf
Hungochani: The History of a Dissident Sexuality in Southern Africa, by Marc Epprecht Mobipocket
Hungochani: The History of a Dissident Sexuality in Southern Africa, by Marc Epprecht Kindle
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar