On the (African) national question: sexuality and tradition

This paper attempts to interrogate the discursive strategies employed by certain nationalist and anti-colonialist discourses to refute citizenship claims made by gays and lesbians in the Southern African region. In their paradoxical strategy of imitation (of Western models) and rejection (of those self-same models), paper attempts to clarified both certain aspects of nationalist thought in general, and delineated the peculiarities of anti-colonial, but specifically African nationalisms.

Paper asserts that the centrality of 'the nation' to the African nation-state and the consequential duality of citizenship, must have important consequences for any strategy that aims at achieving gay and lesbian equality. Although a right-based discourse would seem appropriate to achieving those ends, the contradictory, and often antagonistic, relationship between the discourses of democracy and that of the nation, makes for a more complex situation.

Paper concludes that addressing the political rights of gays and lesbians, and the social issue of homosexuality would demand a strategy developing simultaneously on two fronts: one directed to the acquisition of individual rights, as part of the human rights agenda; and the other aimed at developing and defining a sexuality that is specifically African - in much the same way as the most progressive of nationalisms.