It’s Not Natural
The developing world’s homophobia is a legacy of
colonial rule
The
Guardian, July 3, 2004
By Jeremy Seabrook
The cancellation of Jamaican reggae artist Beenie Man’s
concert at east London’s Ocean Club because of “concerns for public
safety”, in view of lyrics inciting attacks on gay men, raises once more the
tangled relationship between homophobia and the legacy of colonialism.
In Jamaica, the offences of buggery and gross indecency
were framed in the Offences Against the Person Act of 1864, derived from the
English Act of 1861. The wording is chilling: “Whoever shall be convicted of
the abominable crime of buggery, committed either with mankind or an animal,
shall be liable to be imprisoned and kept to hard labour for a term not
exceeding 10 years.”
When the constitution for the newly independent
territories of Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados was drawn up in 1962,
its architects honoured their former rulers by preserving colonial values
which would themselves be abolished in Britain within five years. These laws
had their roots in Victorian morality, but they were embraced enthusiastically
by the black nationalist middle class; and, like many illiberal attitudes in
the world, these filtered through society, and were transmuted into a virulent
machismo among the poor; a consequence, perhaps, of people having been
stripped of everything else, including the promises of a better life after
independence. It is out of this culture, fortified by contemporary evangelical
Christianity, that the culture of music-driven homophobia has grown.
Jamaica, of course, is far from the only country coming
to terms with the imperial bequest of hatred of same-sex relationships. The
Naz Foundation, which works on Aids prevention in India, recently challenged
the constitutionality of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. This forbids
“sexual acts against the order of nature”. The response of the central
government was that homosexuality cannot be legalised in India as the society
disapproves of such behaviour. “The purpose of Section 377 is to provide a
healthy environment in the society by criminalising unnatural sexual
activities against the order of nature.”
In fact, such laws were often inspired by imperial
anxieties about homosocial cultures among their subordinate peoples. Even
today, it is common for westerners, observing young men holding hands, and
mistaking the meaning of this non-sexualised touching, to marvel at the
“openness” of gay relationships in India.
Colonial laws still stand in many other countries, too.
Indeed, it is clear the British had an off-the-peg penal code, since in
Malaysia the same law is also called Section 377. The only difference is that
in India it is almost never used, whereas in Malaysia it was employed
recently, and to great effect, against the former deputy premier, Anwar
Ibrahim.
In Africa, the number of the article varies, but the
wording of the offence is virtually identical. In Zambia “carnal knowledge
of any person against the order of nature” is punishable; in Uganda “any
person who has carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature is
guilty of an offence and is liable to life imprisonment”. The Nigerian Penal
Code states that “any person who has carnal knowledge of any person against
the order of nature ... is liable to imprisonment for 14 years”. So, too, in
Botswana, in Zimbabwe, in Tanzania; but not in South Africa, which has one of
the most progressive records in the world in legitimating homosexual
relationships.
“Carnal knowledge” evokes missionaries shocked by
bare breasts as they strove to bring decency to the wayward children of
empire. The colonial legislation first named something which, although
familiar in all societies, had not previously been cast in the terms in which
the Victorians framed their own experience. “Carnal knowledge” sounds so
much more portentous than the enjoyment of sexual relations.
Swahili has no equivalent for “homosexual”—although
a word for feminised man exists, and the word basha indicates a male
penetrative partner. Boy-wives were recognised in Zande, Arab/Bantu and Siwi
cultures, often with family approval. The boy would later be married to a
woman, the former “husband” paying the bride price. The anthropologist EE
Evans-Pritchard’s informants among the Zande of central Africa in the 1930s
stated that men had sex with boys “because they liked them”. Sometimes
such relationships were said to occur “by accident”, when people were
sleeping; but as long as social fictions and propriety were maintained, these
remained unspoken. “Carnal knowledge” and “the order of nature”
sharply redefined customary, unnamed or marginal behaviours, and brought to
bear upon them the blinding knowledge of their inherent sinfulness.
Same-sex love has had a highly significant place in
Indian tradition, too. In most Indian languages there are words for feminised
men ( kothis ) and for their partners ( giriyas or panthis ); they describe
behaviour, not identity—what people do, not who they are. To label customary
and complex relationships as “homosexuality”, as colonial officials did,
was the work of characteristic and arrogant reductionism; while the subsequent
essentialising of identity by their enlightened descendants in the form of
lesbian or gay man strikes even more violently against the multiple competing
aspects of the human person in traditional societies.
The violent homophobia in Jamaica, which saw 16 men
killed in prison in August 1997, because it was believed they were homosexual,
the murder of the gay activist Brian Williamson last month, and the emergence
of a popular culture whose principal characteristic seems to be to rid the
world of “battyboys”, is simply a more extreme example of a familiar
cultural oddity, whereby colonised peoples often internalise and perpetuate
values which pass away in the countries which originally imposed them; just as
mid-Victorian leg-of-mutton sleeves still cover the bare shoulders of many
African women, and as red tape is still used to bind up documents in Indian
government offices. When the west revisits Africa or India, declaring that
gays—not homosexuals—raise questions of human rights, who is to wonder if
what they hear is the fundamentalist preachings from the mouths of local
bishops fulminating in the frozen blood-curdling rhetoric of the early
missionaries, or the urge, through pop culture, of distorted—and largely
powerless—masculinity to kill “chi-chi men”?
The penitent imperialists have, by and large, revised
their earlier repressive sexual attitudes. (Not exclusively so, as the case
this week shows, of the guest house in Scotland which refused a double bed to
two gay men.) We are confronted by voices from the grave, the far from still
tongues of our long-deceased predecessors. And we do not know how to respond
to them.
Work against oppression and violence has to rely to some
degree on notions of “universal human rights”, although these are as much
a matter of faith to this age as the divine prohibitions on illicit carnal
knowledge were to the age of empire. But even more important than this, there
has to be a collaborative and equal labour between activists of both north and
south. Since both our past colonialism and our present globalisation are
inextricably bound up together, so the work of emancipation can only be
achieved jointly.
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