There is an implicit irony in a public event that addresses the theme of secrecy. This was the experience of the Sex and Secrecy Conference where secrets, in this case sexual secrets, were brought into the public domain and subject to academic scrutiny.
A point made succinctly by Professor Achille Mbembe: ”After all, we have come to assume that it is in the nature of the sexual act to be a secret act. That is what we expect. These are the norms we are socialised in and we are educated to expect this. But what is striking in the place we live today and in the world in general is how sex has become public.”
What secrets were made public at the conference?
When Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and Namibian President Sam Nujoma condemn homosexuality from the podiums of public office, they also deny its ”authentic” existence in Africa. Homosexuality is cast as ”un-African”, a perversion imported from the West. Yet research consistently shows the prevalence of same-sex practices on the continent. At Sex and Secrecy the African Women’s Life History Project broke new ground in documenting the experiences of lesbian women on the continent. The Gay and Lesbian Archives provide training in oral life histories to women from several African countries, some of these were presented at Sex and Secrecy. A new network to facilitate ongoing communication between lesbians in Africa was established.
Plenary speaker Professor Eleanor Preston-Whyte highlighted the intimate and abusive secrets in the realm of the family. Often imagined as a haven of safety and trust, she spoke instead of the family as a site of violation, maltreatment and cruelty.
Research presented at the conference elaborated on the difficulty and horror of making public the concealed violations that exist between generations and within families.
International delegate Professor Rosemary Jolly sees the 400% increase in reported cases of sexual violence against children partly as a consequence of extreme social deprivation and thwarted aspirations. ”The infant rapes speak a certain truth about the value of life in conditions of abject poverty and hopelessness. This truth is that, to the rapists, the human being who is the baby is not to be treated as a human being, but is to be rendered not only as an object, but as an instrument for self-gratification, much like drugs or alcohol.”
Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research director Professor Deborah Posel focused on the publicness of sexuality in contemporary South Africa.
Arguing that far from being a new phenomenon, the ”lid” has now been lifted on sexual violence. The forces that previously concealed it from public scrutiny were cultural and economic. The importance of girls’ respectability and marriageability made it necessary to hide ”sexual pollution” and sexual ”damage”. Moreover, poverty-stricken families could ill afford to jeopardise a bread-winner’s financial contribution.
Posel also suggested that child abuse and sexual violence have scandalised fathers and families: ”The most brutal threats to women and children had come from the men closest to them: no longer protectors, fathers, husbands, relatives and friends had been exposed as predators.”
The conference contributed to the ongoing public exposé of sexual violence in the most intimate and secret domains.
Inevitably, the heady mix of race, sexuality and representation caused a public stir at Sex and Secrecy. Controversy surrounded an exhibition of young gay men in Maputo, a vignette of visual ”coming out” narratives composed by Mozambican artist Ditte Haarlov-Johnsen. It was an exhibition that captured a recent wave of political assertiveness among lesbians and gay men in Africa, where public visibility is central to their campaign.
These bodies, some literally naked in their quest for public exposure, were at the centre of a disagreement at the conference.
A delegate compared the exhibition to the humiliation of Saartjie Baartman and was concerned that once again black bodies were being exploited. If black bodies have been the subject of pain and violation in the long history of racism and colonialism on this continent, so too have black gay men been subject to the insidious silence of invisibility and oppression.
After the conference the exhibition travelled to Maputo where it was received as a celebration of a new-found gay identity and became the launch pad for a new gay organisation in Mozambique — the first of its kind in the country.
Aids is shrouded in silence. Stigma ensures silence, secrecy and denial. It is ironic that Aids is very much in the public domain and yet at the same time so secret and stigmatised. The frank and explicit discussions about sexuality in the public sphere are a product of sexual health awareness campaigns. Yet, it is alarming that two decades into the epidemic, Aids stigma was the focus of papers presented at Sex and Secrecy.
Jonathan Stadler, a delegate at the conference, presented the findings of his research on Aids-related death in Limpopo province. He showed that while there may be a private acknowledgement of Aids-related death, in public, explicit denial remains. HI is a virus that is surrounded by conjecture, denial, secrecy and whispered accusations.
Delegate John Lwanda explained how musicians in Malawi tackled the silence and secrecy around HIV/Aids through cultural innovations. Double entendre and innuendo were used to convey important sexual health messages in Malawi, where public discussions of sexuality were outlawed together with short dresses and long hair.
If unmasking sexual secrets and making sexuality public was one of the aims of the conference, the bringing together of different publics facilitated that. Academic researchers, practitioners and activists from around the world exchanged ideas and experiences emerging from their work in the sphere of sexuality. For example, the experiences of lesbians and gays in Bangalore and Peru were compared with those in Malawi and Zambia. And women’s experiences of gender-based violence were situated internationally.
Given the pressing social concerns related to sexuality in South Africa there is a danger of focusing on the horrors of violence, abuse and sexual discrimination.
Closing the conference, Mbembe reminded participants that sex must also be seen as a gift. ”After all how can we imagine life without such a gift? The gift of sex. It is impossible to imagine ourselves living in a sexless society. Let us just imagine where we would be. It would be quite a nightmare.
”It is time to think of sex as a gift and to recover, therefore, the potential of joy and happiness embedded in it.”
Graeme Reid and Liz Walker were the convenors of the Sex and Secrecy Conference. They are researchers based at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research