Imagining Gay Life in Africa: Contributions and Challenges of African Cinema

In this presentation, I turn to three African queer-affirming films – Inxeba (John Trengove 2017), Walking with Shadows (Aoife O’Kelly 2019), and The Blue Caftan (Maryam Touzani 2022) – to investigate how they imagine gay life and love in Africa (specifically, in South Africa, Nigeria and Morocco), and what role religion plays in these visions. Drawing especially on African film studies, African queer theories and theologies, I argue that with their stories, the films challenge both African and western social and theoretical discourses on gay identities and relationships in several significant ways, contributing thus both to a new imagination of gay individuals as a part of African societies, and to the development of theories of sexual and gender identities that attend to the particularities of the African context.

The films are part of a relatively recent development in African cinema of representing queer relationships in a positive light, countering thus social stereotypes and prejudices of LGBTQ+ individuals as depraved, demonic, and criminal (Green-Simms, Queer African Cinemas, 2022). As they tell their stories of men desiring and loving other men and coming to terms with their gay identity, the films engage with prominent arguments in African social homophobic discourses, specifically the arguments that same-sex relationships are un-African, un-Christian and un-Islamic. The films register the presence of gay men in both rural-traditional and modern-urban contexts, thus offering images to Phoebe Kisubi Mbasalaki’s observation that “strategies popularizing the fiction that homosexuality is a ‘white thing’ deny the very (contemporary and historical) existence of African people in same-sex intimacies” (“Women Who Love Women: Negotiation of African Tradition and Kinship”, 2020, 37). In addition, with characters for whom their religious identity is firmly integrated with their sexual identity, they undermine the argument that same-sex relationships are opposed to Christianity or Islam, condemning instead the use of religious arguments and practices as part and legitimation of homophobic oppression. Most importantly, as they open up an affective and discursive space in which to encounter the hopes, desires and struggles of gay men in their specific cultural context, the films envision “otherwise possibilities” (Ashon Crawley, Blackpenetcostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, 2017) and realize their power of “worlding” differently (John Nguyet Erni, “The Antiecstasy of Human Rights: A Foray into Queer Cinema on ‘Homophobic Africa’”, 2019), addressing the imagination of their viewers and inviting them to participate in this different reality and, perhaps, emerge from it after the viewing with a new understanding of gay men’s lives.

As the films challenge homophobic discourses and affirm the struggles of LGBTQ+ activists for recognition and justice on the continent, they also contribute to the development of theories of sexualities in Africa and for Africa (Stella Nyanzi, “Queering Queer Africa”, 2014). The films challenge some of the (implicit) norms of western queer theory and studies of sexuality satirized in Zethu Matebeni’s “How Not to Write about Queer Africa” (2014), such as the reduction of the real diversity of sexual identities to the categories recognized in the west, the victimization of queer individuals, and the focus on the urban context. With characters who struggle with coming out, they question the western ideals of gay life as out and visible, and investigate the different reality of the closet in African societies. This is also underlined by their aesthetic which visualizes the desire and sexual experiences of gay men through ellipses and allusions, and the visual address of the sense of touch (not least because of censorship concerns). They also ask about the role of essentialism vis-à-vis the western focus on identity as constructed. Not least, by including religious references and themes into their stories and the characterizations of their protagonists as a matter of course, they not only challenge African condemnations of homosexuality as un-Christian or un-Islamic, but also western discourses and theories that often see religion as a separate social sphere which impedes the realization of LGBTQ+ rights, and thus miss the way in which it is inextricably a part of African cultures and socieites, and as such can also serve as a resource, both for individual dignity and self-worth, and for social change (Adriaan van Klinken/Ezra Chitando, Reimagining Christianity and Sexual Diversity in Africa, 2021). Thus the films contribute to changed perceptions both in the African context and in their interaction with international audiences.

My presentation will focus on a close reading of the films in conversation with African and western discourses and theories of sexuality, drawing also on viewer comments and film reviews in order to substantiate my claims about their reception by African and international audiences.