Towards a Genealogy of MoffieTroubling the Binary Model of Understanding either Homosexuality or Homophobia as Un-AfricanRuth Ramsden-Karelse

Moffie as Wholesome Tradition

As well as the country’s first democratic elections, the year 1994 saw the publication of a landmark collection of essays, histories, memoirs, polemics, and photographs aiming to ‘break[…]’ a ‘path’ for a democratic South African gay and lesbian studies and to bolster ongoing work by gay and lesbian activist groups to claim so-called gay rights, including through what were ultimately successful efforts to ensure constitutional protections on the basis of sexual orientation. Produced as part of these efforts, Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa was co-edited by Mark Gevisser, a journalist and activist, and Edwin Cameron, who was at the time an acting judge of the High Court and credited with designing the litigation strategy being pursued by the aforementioned gay and lesbian activists.88The objectives of ‘Edwin’s laundry list’, as it came to be known, were systematically tackled by the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality (NCGLE). For further information, see Graeme Reid, ‘Fragments from the Archives II’, in Sex and Politics in South Africa, ed. by Neville Hoad, Karen Martin, and Graeme Reid (Cape Town: Double Storey Books, 2005), pp. 174–77 (p. 176); and Anthony Manion, ‘Guide to the Gay and Lesbian Archives of South Africa’, in Sex and Politics in South Africa, ed. by Hoad, Martin, and Reid, pp. 228–52 (p. 244). In their introduction to the collection, co-editors Gevisser and Cameron state that ‘the oldest, most developed and least-explored gay South African subculture’ can be found in ‘Western Cape coloured communities’. ‘Nowhere else in this country’, they write, ‘have homosexuals been so integral to a culture.’99Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron, ‘Defiant Desire: An Introduction’, in Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa, ed. by Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron [1994] (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), pp. 3–13 (pp. 3, 7). In the first chapter, an overview of gay and lesbian political organizing from the 1950s to the 1990s, Gevisser reiterates this sentiment, commenting that ‘the history of “moffie life” in Western Cape coloured culture is perhaps South Africa’s richest and most untold’.1010Mark Gevisser, ‘A Different Fight for Freedom’, in Defiant Desire, ed. by Gevisser and Cameron, pp. 14–86 (p. 28). Building on his and Cameron’s introductory description of ‘Western Cape coloured communities’ as ‘by nature fluid, hybrid, and permeable’, Gevisser suggests that ‘gay life’ may have ‘flourished’ and been ‘tolerated’ because the ‘hybrid[ity]’ of a ‘society like that of the coloureds’ prevented the establishment of any single prohibitiveBeginning of page[p. 327] doctrine.1111Gevisser and Cameron, ‘Defiant Desire’, p. 7; Gevisser, ‘A Different Fight’, pp. 201, 28. The academic telling of the ‘untold history’ referenced by Gevisser is instigated in another chapter in the same edited collection, in which Dhianaraj Chetty similarly asserts that ‘aspects of gay life like cross-dressing and drag seem to have taken root in the coloured working-class communities of the Western Cape’, in which ‘there has always been a highly visible and socially developed moffie subculture’.1212Dhianaraj Chetty, ‘A Drag at Madame Costello’s: Cape Moffie Life and the Popular Press in the 1950s and 1960s’, in Defiant Desire, ed. by Gevisser and Cameron, pp. 115–27 (p. 117).

Across the three decades since, as this ‘untold history’ has been mentioned by scholars sporadically and often in passing, Gevisser and Chetty’s comments have remained authoritative. Referencing Gevisser, William Leap states that ‘the Cape moffies were an important part of the culture of the coloured community’.1313William Leap, ‘Strangers on a Train: Sexual Citizenship and the Politics of Transportation in Apartheid Cape Town’, in Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism, ed. by Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin Manalansan IV (New York: New York University Press, 2002), pp. 219–35 (pp. 224–25) <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.18574/​nyu/​9780814790182.003.0016>. Gustav Visser cites both Gevisser and Chetty to name ‘the history of gay life in the Western Cape’s “coloured culture”’ as ‘perhaps South Africa’s richest’, stating that ‘gay life flourished and was tolerated in this community’ and that ‘being a moffie had some form of acceptance’.1414Gustav Visser, ‘Gay Men, Leisure Space, and South African Cities: The Case of Cape Town’, Geoforum, 34.1 (2003), pp. 123–37 (p. 127) <https://doi.org/10.1016/S0016-7185(02)00079-9>. Francois Rabie and Elmien Lesch reference Chetty to describe ‘a coloured neighbourhood in central Cape Town […] frequented by gay men who were cross-dressers and drag-queens’, and who ‘provid[ed] role-models for successive generations to adopt’.1515Francois Rabie and Elmien Lesch, ‘“I Am Like a Woman”: Constructions of Sexuality Among Gay Men in a Low-Income South African Community’, Culture, Health & Sexuality, 11.7 (2009), pp. 717–29 (p. 725) <https://doi.org/10.1080/13691050902890344>. Two notable examples of the circulation of this understanding are seen in important book-length studies. In her account of how narratives made it possible for South Africa to reimagine gay and lesbian people as fellow citizens, and itself as a modern neoliberal democracy, Brenna M. Munro comments that ‘“impurity” produces shame but at the same time, perhaps, its own kindBeginning of page[p. 328] of freedom, and even a hospitality towards sexual transgressions’.1616Brenna M. Munro, South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come: Queer Sexuality and the Struggle for Freedom (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), p. 113. In his study of ‘queer men’ and visibility in racially segregated Cape Town, Andrew Tucker argues that the ‘unique history of coloured culture’ and possibly the ‘hybridity of coloured life helped foster cross-dressing queer life’, and ‘allowed queer men to flourish’ and freely ‘experiment with a variety of social configurations’.1717Andrew Tucker, Queer Visibilities: Space, Identity, and Interaction in Cape Town (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2009), pp. 77–78 <https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444306187>. More recently, writing with Bryce Lease, Gevisser has suggested that ‘there has always been an openness to sexual and gender diversity within the creole community, assigned the term “coloured” by the apartheid state, particularly in and around Cape Town’.1818Bryce Lease and Mark Gevisser, ‘LGBTQI Rights in South Africa’, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 18.2 (2017), pp. 156–60 (p. 157) <https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2016.1270013>.

Yet these claims of acceptance, if not celebration, are at odds with the marginalization suggested by the extreme scarcity of publicly available instances of self-representation. It is striking that there has been an almost complete and largely uncommented-on absence of representations of this ‘gay’, ‘queer’, or ‘moffie’ life by those who are said to have lived it — the people whom these scholars describe as gay men, queer men, and moffies. A comment made by Shamil Jeppie in 1990, with regards to the 1940s and 1950s, holds true for decades to come: ‘in available documentary and oral evidence […] the voices of “moffies” are never heard; they are always spoken about (derisively), represented, judged, but never allowed the privilege of discourse.’1919Shamil Jeppie, ‘Popular Culture and Carnival in Cape Town’, in The Struggle for District Six: Past and Present, ed. by Shamil Jeppie and Crain Soudien (Cape Town: Buchu Books, 1990), pp. 67–87 (p. 80). Elsewhere, I have looked in detail at the rare accounts that do exist from the perspectives of people described as moffies, and I have shown that, from these accounts, a more complicated picture emerges. This picture troubles claims of acceptance and also troubles these scholars’ use of the descriptor moffie, as well as the descriptor men, neither of which are used, in available records, as terms of self-identification byBeginning of page[p. 329] those to whom they are applied.2020See, for example, Ruth Ramsden-Karelse, ‘“People Can’t Say I’m A Man, They Can’t Say I’m A Woman”: Reality Expansion in the Kewpie Collection’, in The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric, ed. by Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022), pp. 207–14 (p. 213) <https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003144809>; and Ruth Ramsden-Karelse, ‘Moving and Moved: Reading Kewpie’s District Six’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 26.3 (2020), pp. 405–38 (p. 411) <https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-8311772>. So, then, how might we understand the persistence of claims of acceptance, in spite of evidence to the contrary?

Underpinning the academic descriptions found in Defiant Desire of classified-‘coloured’ communities’ unique hospitality to the forms of gender and sexual dissidence signalled by the descriptor moffie was an investment in seeking evidence of historical forms of ‘gay life’ that were, in the terms of contemporaneous gay and lesbian activism, ‘open and out’. This investment might be understood in terms of the second frame described by Neville Hoad, who identifies two ways in which the debate about ‘gay and lesbian human rights’ was being framed at this time, in the 1990s. Hoad writes:

The first opposes African tradition, fairly homophobically and monolithically conceived, to Western modernity, with homosexuality coming to represent a Western decadent import and a disavowable excess of the economic modernisation that the state wishes to achieve. The second argues for human rights as part of an African nationalist tradition.2121Neville Hoad, ‘Between the White Man’s Burden and the White Man’s Disease: Tracking Lesbian and Gay Human Rights in Southern Africa’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 5.4 (1999), pp. 559–84 (p. 566) <https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-5-4-559>.

These frames correlate with each of the misleading terms of the dichotomy entrenched by the ongoing debate about what is ‘un-African’, respectively, homosexuality or homophobia. So, in Defiant Desire, among the work of advocating for gay rights as part of an African nationalist tradition, Gevisser, Cameron, and Chetty attribute to queerness a wholesome and authentic relationship to a racialized condition we might call ‘colouredness’ — a condition that is, at least in this instance, produced discursively.

This attribution has purchase, which I want to suggest has to do with the imbrication of accompanying claims of acceptance with tenaciousBeginning of page[p. 330] logics of race that continue to produce particular ideas attached to the categories ‘coloured’ and ‘African’. This purchase is seen in the formation, since the mid-1990s, of something like what Amanda Lock Swarr has recently termed a citational chain. As seen above, in the instances that make up the links of that chain, rather than turning to first-hand accounts by those they describe as moffies, or considering the implications of the relative lack of available accounts, the ‘references’ made to moffies’ acceptance within formerly classified-‘coloured’ communities ‘build on each other to create truth claims’ and ‘repeated norms’.2222Amanda Lock Swarr, Envisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023), p. 3 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1515/​9781478093763>. On the other hand, however, the attribution to queerness of a wholesome and authentic relationship to ‘colouredness’ that underpins the citational chain is already particularly unstable. This instability is due to the fact that this racialized condition, ‘colouredness’, has not typically been used to signify wholesome tradition (as is the case in the scholarship cited above) but, rather, decadent modernity. This leads me to a second ‘scene’ through and against which moffie has been conceptually constituted, moving backwards in time from 1990s scholarship to mid-twentieth-century print media.

Moffie as Decadent Modernity

The use of understandings of race attached to the category ‘coloured’ to signify decadent modernity, as opposed to wholesome tradition, in relation to queerness, is seen in an issue of Drum magazine published seventeen years prior to Defiant Desire, the 1994 edited collection previously considered. This popular magazine’s importance to contemporary arts, culture, and politics, and to understandings of race and gender, is well established.2323See, for example, R. Neville Choonoo, ‘The Sophiatown Generation: Black Literary Journalism during the 1950s’, in South Africa’s Alternative Press: Voices of Protest and Resistance, 1880s–1960s, ed. by Les Switzer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 252–65. From the early 1950s, Drum was foremost among the white-owned publications aimed at a Black readership to circulate contemporary constructions of African urban modernity. What warrants further attention is that, from the early 1960s, Drum’sBeginning of page[p. 331] celebration of urbanity was increasingly tempered by sensationalist warnings of that urbanity’s degradation by so-called homosexuality. Relatedly, from the mid-1950s until the late 1980s, Drum and its sister publication, the increasingly tabloid-style Golden City Post newspaper, represented Cape Town’s ‘moffies’ or ‘moffees’ to a readership across sub-Saharan Africa and beyond.2424It is worth noting that Chetty’s aforementioned chapter in Defiant Desire considers some of this coverage, though he concludes that ‘the vagaries of the popular press — at least for a time — allowed them [those described as ‘moffies’] the freedom to dream’ (Chetty, ‘A Drag at Madame Costello’s’, p. 127). Together, these articles convey a fear that degeneracy and perversity were attendant on modernity as well as an understanding of this potential danger as a Western import.

The general tone of the coverage is well expressed by a speculative genealogy offered by Drum itself, albeit a genealogy of the forms of gender and sexual deviance signalled by the word moffie as opposed to a genealogy of the word itself, and a tongue-in-cheek one at that. In July 1977, Drum published ‘The Moffie Manuscripts’: ‘Cape Town’s moffies trace their ancestry — right back to the days of Van Riebeeck.’2525Jackie Heyns, ‘The Moffie Manuscripts’, Drum, July 1977. ‘The Moffie Manuscripts’ bursts with such quips as ‘having seen illustrations of Van Riebeeck, someone had to put curlers in his flowing locks’. Framed by the illustrated edges of a roll of parchment and the invented authorship of ‘Carmen’, the faux-academic report conclusively establishes that it was ‘the perfumed society of the genteel whites’ that ‘establish[ed] the Hottie moffie fraternity in the Cape’: ‘awestricken Hottentots discarded their loincloths’ and ‘took to velvet knickers and lace-collared shirts[,] thus establish[ing] the moffie dress code for posterity’.

‘The Moffie Manuscripts’ was in fact written by celebrated journalist Jackie Heyns, whose prolific reporting for Drum and the Golden City Post sometimes featured his actual contemporaries, whom the publication (like many of the scholars cited above) called ‘moffies’ and ‘gay men’, and who called themselves gays and girls. And Heyns’s ‘report’ explicitly references the gays and girls’ practice of adopting the names of women celebrities, with which Heyns’s other articles evidence his familiarity.2626See Ramsden-Karelse, ‘Moving and Moved’, p. 414. ‘The queer’s quirk for adopting famous names was instilledBeginning of page[p. 332] by the arrival of Lord Charles Henry Somerset as Governor of the Cape’, Carmen/Heyns explains; ‘from that day they discarded the names given at birth and glorified their personality with names of their heroes and heroines.’ Thus, the report continues, ‘the die was set and the cult complete. Moffiedom was placed in the annals of history and entrenched as a definable group in the Cape society.’ Thus, in this instance, the types of gender and sexual deviance signalled by the word moffie are cast as a decadent Western import, and ‘Cape moffiedom’ construed as a racialized form of cultural hybridity.

Processes of Descent and Emergence

Considering together the two scenes thus sketched, in which moffie is differentially conceptually constituted, it becomes apparent that there are traceable processes of descent as well as emergence. In both scenes, the word moffie is used in the discursive construction of formerly classified-‘coloured’ communities as inherently hospitable to sexual and gender transgression. I want to suggest that this discursive construction hinges on a particular conception of ‘colouredness’ as a kind of always-and-already sexualized deviance that necessarily allows for other forms of sexual deviance. This conception of ‘colouredness’ has to do with the sexualization inherent in racialization generally and in the conceptualization and signification of race mixedness in particular. As one might imagine, the understanding of colouredness as always-already sexualized gained purchase in the Cape Colony and flourished during apartheid. What I am interested in highlighting is that it emerged in a new, celebratory form in mid-1990s scholarship, during South Africa’s ‘transition’ from legal apartheid to democracy. As noted, during this period, gay and lesbian activists, archivists, and scholars sought historic forms of open and out queerness as models for inclusive futures. Looking back, we might say that, in doing so, they took a previously pejorative narrative about ‘miscegenation’ and recast it in the positive terms of the new, post-1994 ‘rainbow nation’.

In other words, the discourse emergent in mid-1990s scholarship engages the same racialized tropes of ‘colouredness’ seen in the Drum magazine article, even as it seeks to recast them in the celebratory, non-racial terms of democratic rainbowism. For instance, Gevisser’s understandingBeginning of page[p. 333] of ‘coloured communities’ as inherently open — ‘by nature fluid, hybrid, and permeable’ — relies on a conception of ‘colouredness’ in terms of race mixedness, as a kind of deviance that necessarily allows for other forms of deviance.2727Gevisser, ‘A Different Fight’, p. 7. Certainly, vastly heterogenous experiences, cultures, and identities intersect with the category ‘coloured’.2828See Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town, ed. by Zimitri Erasmus (Cape Town and Maroelana, SA: Kwela Books and South African History Online, 2001); Grant Farred, Midfielder’s Moment: Coloured Literature and Culture in Contemporary South Africa [2000] (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018) <https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429040351>; Mohamed Adhikari, Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005); and Tessa Dooms and Lynsey Ebony Chutel, Coloured: How Classification Became Culture (Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 2023). Yet this does not fully explain the understanding of ‘coloured’ communities as ‘by nature’ (and in contrast to other South African communities) ‘fluid, hybrid, and permeable’.

For one thing, very similar forms of diversity — linguistic, religious, cultural, ethnic — could be said to exist within South Africa’s white communities, which include, for example, English and Afrikaans speakers; Calvinists, Catholics, and Jews; Italians, Huguenots, and those of Dutch, Portuguese, and Russian descent. The emphasis on the particular hybridity of ‘colouredness’ arguably makes more sense only if we adopt an essentialist understanding of race as tied to culture. Although Gevisser ostensibly discusses formerly classified-‘coloured’ communities in terms of culture, his discussion does seem to be underwritten by a racial essentialism, coded by descriptors such as by nature. Historically, this ties in with common-sense understandings of colouredness.

In our perceived hybridity as a ‘subject race’ — colonized and defined as non-Indigenous — those of us who were classified ‘coloured’ under apartheid were, unlike other Black communities, defined in terms of race as opposed to ethnicity.2929Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, pp. 27–28. Apartheid logic rendered those it classified ‘coloured’ ‘completely grounded’, as Grant Farred puts it, and yet without a symbolic claim to pre-colonial existence in South Africa — though such claims have since been made.3030Farred, Midfielder’s Moment, p. 7. On the Khoisan revivalist movement, see Adhikari, Not White Enough, Not Black Enough, p. 183. Zoë Wicomb has criticized ethno-nationalist claims to authenticity as denying history and preventing ‘multiple belongings’ from being seen as ‘an alternative way of viewing culture’, while Erasmus has argued that such claims are not always based in notions of ‘authenticity and “purity”’, but can represent an acknowledgement of ‘the fragments which make up the history of being coloured’ and ‘the violence of the colonial encounter’. See Zoë Wicomb, ‘Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa’, in Writing South Africa, ed. by Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 91–107 (p. 105) <https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511586286.009>; and Zimitri Erasmus, ‘Introduction: Re-imagining Coloured Identities in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, in Coloured by History, Shaped by Place, ed. by Erasmus, pp. 13–28 (p. 28). At the same time,Beginning of page[p. 334] however, the recasting of the racially essentialist narrative endogenous to the Cape Colony by researchers in the 1990s might be said to hinge on the emergent non-racial ideology of rainbow nationalism: ‘colouredness’ was still constituted as inherently mixed, but therefore as an inherently non-racial, authentically South African race.

Regardless, one effect of the 1990s recasting of the narrative of race mixedness has been the reinscription of the categorical sexualization of the category ‘coloured’. The spectre of so-called interracial sex between ‘a European male’ and ‘a native female’ continues to haunt discussions of this category that was first legally defined one year after the British colonial government first criminalized sexual intercourse between white and ‘native’ people — a category that was famously defined, for posterity, in terms of a lack, as neither black nor white.3131The relevant laws are Pensions Act 22 of 1928 and Immorality Act 5 of 1927. So a popular joke goes: ‘God made the black man […] the Indian, the Chinese and the Jew — but Jan van Riebeeck, he made the Coloured Man.’ (Discussing this joke at length, Mohamed Adhikari explains that it ‘hinges on the audience’s awareness of the status of Jan van Riebeeck, the commander of the first Dutch settlement established at the Cape in 1652, as the “founding father” of white South Africa’.3232Mohamed Adhikari, ‘“God Made the White Man, God Made the Black Man…”: Popular Racial Stereotyping of Coloured People in Apartheid South Africa’, South African Historical Journal, 55.1 (2006), pp. 142–64 (p. 147).)

This sentiment continues to be circulated in scholarship, cloaked in the language of academia. ‘On a purely etymological level’, Tucker explains in Queer Visibilities, his book quoted above, ‘coloureds are the product of interracial sex.’3333Tucker, Queer Visibilities, p. 71. Such understandings have, of course, been persuasively critiqued by many other scholars, with the SouthBeginning of page[p. 335] African feminist Zimitri Erasmus, for example, pointing to their roots in pseudo-scientific assumptions that there exist unmixed or pure race groups.3434See Erasmus, ‘Introduction,’ pp. 17–23. In descriptions such as Tucker’s, we can track a recognizable sexualized and racialized narrative about ‘colouredness’, even as we see that narrative being recast in celebratory terms. In this way, while there emerges a newly celebratory narrative, there is also a traceable process of descent, though this process does not consist of an easily recognizable evolution or continuity. On the contrary, it illustrates Foucault’s reminder that ‘the search for descent is not the erecting of foundations’: that such a search ‘disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself’.3535Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, p. 147.

A second, related process of descent is signalled by the availability in both scenes of moffie, as a category of identification, for the projection of socio-political anxieties. In Drum and the Golden City Post, from the 1950s to the 1980s, ‘Cape Moffees’ were constituted as a distinct social class onto which political anxieties were projected, in a process indicative of contemporary shifts in the perception of homosexuality evident in medical and legal discourse.3636These shifts are traced in medical and legal discourse in B Camminga, Transgender Refugees and the Imagined South Africa: Bodies Over Borders and Borders Over Bodies (Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 44–59 <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92669-8>. A ‘moffie drag’ was the subject of an exposé in the first edition of the Golden City Post, published 12 August 1956, and ‘moffies’ were thereafter regularly represented by the Post and Drum as inhabitants of the abject and liminal social and temporal sphere allegorized as a ‘twilight world’. Interspersed among the usual scandalized or pitying coverage were reports of proposed ‘moffie republics’ and ‘moffie elections’. Like the term moffie, the political descriptors republics and elections were chosen by the newspaper and magazine staff themselves. The ‘moffie elections’ referred to were, in actuality, competitions rather like the many drag pageants that continue to take place across the greater Cape Town area — and many of the competitions reported by Drum and the Golden City Post were sponsored by the publications themselves. The political rhetoric foundBeginning of page[p. 336] in many of the articles about ‘moffies’ thus seems to have been used to enact a thinly veiled critique of actual developments — including referendums and elections — taking place within a national political regime in which progressive commentary was increasingly harshly sanctioned.

I understand this as suggestive of a process of descent because a comparable kind of projection seems to happen in the mid-1990s, when the previously abject category ‘moffie’ was invested with the anxious hopes of a minority gay and lesbian group angling for political enfranchisement and protections. This investment resulted in the perpetuation of a reductive narrative about acceptance of gender and sexual transgression within classified-‘coloured’ communities that was seemingly not primarily concerned with mapping onto the actual lived experience of those being described as ‘moffies’ by the scholars who perpetuated it. Thus, in both scenes, there is an availability of the category ‘moffie’ for the projection of political anxieties — an availability that seems to have to do with the category being one that has customarily been applied as opposed to adopted.

Conclusion

Proposing an alternate genealogy of moffie, which I have just begun to sketch here, I aim to participate in the crucial work that Amia Srinivasan has described as ‘diagnosing our representations’, as a step towards ‘mak[ing] our representations, and thus our world, anew’.3737Amia Srinivasan, ‘Genealogy, Epistemology and Worldmaking’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 119.2 (2019), pp. 127–56 (p. 145) <https://doi.org/10.1093/arisoc/aoz009>. Though to very distinct ends, this work of remaking our representations and our world might also be said to have been engaged in by the scholars who, in search of historical precedent, described coloured communities’ unique acceptance of moffies, as well as by the various political and religious leaders making well-publicized remarks about the un-Africanness of homosexuality, to whom the scholars were often in part responding.3838See, for example, Thabo Msibi, ‘The Lies We Have Been Told: On (Homo) Sexuality in Africa’, Africa Today, 58.1 (2011), pp. 55–77 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.2979/​africatoday.58.1.55>. In the wake of these statements and in light of the violence whose direction at queer bodies they sanction, any defencesBeginning of page[p. 337] of homosexuality’s Africanness that point to homophobia as the true Western import may well be read or heard as not only understandable but urgent. Yet we must consider what risks are involved in reproducing the terms of the debate in which those responses engage.

Since moffie speaks to the racialization of perceived degenerate femininity, a critical genealogy promises to enrich understandings of shifts in (post)colonial perceptions of sex, gender, and sexuality, and their imbrication with race. Given moffie’s likely descent from the Afrikaans hermafrodiet (hermaphrodite), and various reimaginings since, such a genealogy would offer one means of interrogating the complex relationship between Southern African articulations of sexuality and the medicalized vocabularies of Global North sexology, eugenics’ fellow pseudo-scientific twin. (Indeed, Swarr’s aforementioned work on the centuries-long positioning of ‘“hermaphroditism” and intersex’ as ‘always already connected to blackness’ speaks to such a genealogy’s potential reach and import.3939Swarr, Envisioning African Intersex, p. 3.) Interrogating that complex relationship while closely considering the various ways in which moffie has been reimagined and reinhabited across time and place would contribute to a growing, transnational body of scholarship attuned to minoritized knowledges that challenge understandings of embodiment and desire attendant on those vocabularies. In addition to print media’s mid-twentieth-century constitution of ‘Cape Moffees’ as a distinct social class onto which political anxieties were projected, and in addition to moffie’s 1990s use to symbolize both nostalgia and nonracialism in a ‘transitional’ political conjuncture, the genealogy merely alluded to in this chapter will account for moffie’s nineteenth-century use as a category of abnormality for livestock and formerly enslaved people; the constitution of the moffie as backward or a ‘drag’ on the new, democratic South Africa; and moffie’s 2000s appearance in writing by white gay men participating in the term’s reappropriation.

Though merely sketched, the genealogy embarked upon here does reveal processes of descent and emergence that importantly underscore the misleading nature of the binary model of understanding homosexuality and homophobia in relation to ‘un-Africanness’ that has occupied much scholarship on gender and sexual diversity in SouthBeginning of page[p. 338] Africa since the mid-1990s. These processes suggest the limits of an approach to research that adheres to the dichotomy that preoccupation has entrenched, by recasting in celebratory terms a narrative that is, inherently, racialized — an approach that is perhaps taken by some of the South African gay and lesbian scholarship discussed. The project to produce a critical genealogy of moffie, instigated in this chapter, therefore offers a fresh response to calls that have since been made, in the growing field of queer African studies, to reject the misleading terms of this long-running debate about what is ‘un-African’, terms which limit the possible answers to ‘homosexuality’ or ‘homophobia’. The instability of this dichotomy is revealed, I have suggested, by moffie’s various uses in evidencing the ‘un-Africanness’ of both. At a time of increased divide with regards to this issue across the African continent, when successful campaigns for decriminalization in certain countries continue to coincide with pushes for further criminalization in others, calls to reject these misleading terms are urgent, and increasingly so.Beginning of page[p. 339]