On May 29th of this year, Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika caved in to international pressure and pardoned Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza, who had been found guilty of “violating the order of nature” for having celebrated their same-sex engagement. He made it clear that he was acting “on humanitarian grounds only” (my italics) and they had committed “a crime against our culture, against our religion, and against our laws.”

Judge Nyakwawa Usiwa-Usiwa had sentenced the men to 14 years hard labor, the maximum under Malawian law. He did so, he said, as a deterrent: “I will give you a scaring sentence so that the public be protected from people like you, so that we are not tempted to emulate this horrendous example.”

His assumption that harsh punishment acts as a deterrent is naïve. States that impose the death penalty do not have lower murder rates than those that don’t, and once upon a time London pickpockets had a field day at the public executions of their fellow pickpockets. Fear of reprisals can force same-sex relations to go underground, but no amount of societal pressure can change which gender a person is attracted to. As the evidence mounts that homosexual orientation has a genetic basis, it becomes apparent that to suggest that any measures, no matter how horrendous, will remove the temptation is idiotic. And the statements of African clergymen and politicians and the laws they propose are truly horrendous.

Still, the laws of approximately 80 nations, half of them in Africa, make homosexual relations between consenting adults a crime. African homophobes take the position that the practice is an importation from the decadent West, unknown on their continent before Europeans arrived to colonize them. Had Asians, Pacific Islanders or Native Americans got there first, presumably the blame would fall on them. (The Arabs did get there before us, but what of it? The peoples of the Levant are a special case, and I shall leave them for a future rant.)

Before the Christian West brought morality to the Indian subcontinent, East Asia, Polynesia, and the Americas, the cultures in those parts of the globe did not demonize homosexual relationships, and same-sex couples often held a special place in their societies. By the time those populations spread into the Dark Continent, our missionaries had largely stamped out such abominations or at least forced them underground, so it fell to us to contaminate it.

It follows that Edenic, prelapsarian Africa was once the only exclusively heterosexual part of the world and would still be so today were it not for our intervention. I conclude the offending gene must have arisen by mutation after homo sapiens left Africa some 60 or 70 thousand years ago. Either that, or our propensity to get it on with other members of our sex (pun intended) entered the gene pool through crossbreeding with Neanderthals, already on the brink of extinction as a result of that vicious practice. (I rather like the second hypothesis. While it would not induce the fundamentalist loonies to alter their views on homosexuality, it would at least compel them to recognize the fact of evolution.) On the other hand, our closest living relative, the bonobo, merrily enjoys same-sex relations in the very heart of that historically and homogeneously heterosexual continent.

We and the bonobos are not alone. According to Bruce Bagemihl’s Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, some 1500 animal species indulge in homosexual behavior, though not all of them have been observed to go all the way. So now the living creatures that creep upon the ground have come out of the closet, along with the birds and the fishes. Their carryings-on were not officially documented until the 1990s, presumably because cultural bias prevented those who witnessed them from grasping the nature of their unnatural acts. True, some of these species are in danger of extinction, but it does not appear that sexual preferences is a contributing factor. A man may lie with another man as with a woman (I have) and yet be fruitful and multiply. (I’ve done that, too.)

In other words, there is nothing unnatural in what these animals do; they simply have not read the Bible. Similarly, no one has asked them to fill in a Kinsey survey nor can they tell us about their fantasies, so we cannot determine whether the human (male) proportion of 50% exclusively heterosexual, 37% some homosexual experience and 8% almost exclusively homosexual applies to other species as well. It appears, however, that giraffes, dolphins and penguins are especially prone to the unspeakable vice.

But I digress. The fact remains that there is not a single fact to support the view that the West has exported any of its sexual practices or attitudes to Africa other than homophobia, nor do we need to turn to giraffes and penguins for confirmation. The Ancient Egyptians did not think that gay was bad. While they were not pure Africans – by the pre-dynastic period the indigenous population had already comingled with Southern European and Southwest Asian strains – this was well before they were supposedly contaminated by the decadent West. Moreover, it seems they found willing partners among the Nubians.

Moving further south, an article by Stephen O. Murray in the GLBTQ Encyclopedia (2004) provides information on the prevalence of homosexuality in colonial sub-Saharan Africa as documented by ethnographers working in what are now Benin, Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Congo, Angola, Namibia, Lesotho, Botswana, and so forth. What’s more, they found no status differential between the insertive and receptive partners. Murray concludes: “With reports from hundreds of sub-Saharan African locales of male-male sexual relations and from about fifty of female-female sexual relations, it is clear that same-sex sexual relations existed in traditional African societies.” Until the Christian missionaries got hold of them, there was no danger in coming out in Africa. Cold comfort indeed for Steven Monjeza and his friend Tiwonge Chimbalanga.

Stanley Ridge, a native New Yorker, has for over 30 years made his home in the Midwest, where he teaches in a small liberal arts college.  He also works as a literary translator.  His life as a professor and scholar, father of two wayward sons, owner of a large, friendly dog, and for over five years partner of a beautiful man, keep him very very busy.  He devotes much of the little spare time he has to writing and somewhat less of it to his duties on the editorial team of two m2m on-line literary magazines.  He likes to travel and has spent nearly a quarter of his life abroad, mostly in French-speaking countries.

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