writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

am with will tell me ‘Your eyes are changing’… Nkunzi doesn’t have a problem with my sex
life, but if he is not happy with my choice of a woman I will end up fighting a lot with that
woman… 21
Sangomas are often examined within studies on LGBT life in Southern Africa because of the cultural
acceptance of their sexual lives.
The taking of ancestral wives is an integral tradition among sangomas, and the taking of these
wives by female sangomas can be, like in Nkunzi’s case, socially permissible. Nkunzi takes an
ancestral wife named Jabulisile. When her ancestor Nkunzi asks this of her, she resists because she
does not want the elderly Jabulisile as a sexual partner. But ancestral marriage is about sharing a
spiritual connection and Nkunzi is assured by her ancestor that it is the right thing to marry Jabulisile.
Nkunzi grows fond of Jabulisile, and she says:
Jabulisile gives me that feminine side and when she is with me [in spirit] I feel kindness
towards people. She makes me want to dance in female clothes and I enjoy that moment
when I feel that part of myself. 22
As a sangoma, Nkunzi is comfortable in her lesbian sexuality. Her girlfriend would watch her
dance in a traditional ceremony, and sit on her lap afterwards, showing affection. Of homosexuality
in Zulu culture, Nkunzi says “No one wants to talk about it but such things were always there… there
was always love between women in my culture but no one wants to talk about it” (124). Nkunzi
breaks this silence. She talks about another of her girlfriends she dated for some months, Sizakele.
Nkunzi also talks about her political activism, which began around the time she developed the idea
for the book. In talking about her activism, she tells of how one night, Sizakele, who was also an
activist, and her girlfriend Salome were raped and murdered. Nkunzi relates this to the systemic
violence of corrective rape against lesbians in South African townships. She says “[Men] think that
they have to teach [lesbians] a lesson by raping them… they think it will change their behaviour.” 23
Nkunzi clearly sees the hypocrisy of how the myth that homosexuality is ‘un‐African’ is produced
as a cultural truth in postcolonial South Africa. And her story is rare but it is not the only one. There
are many lesbian sangomas, and women who love other women in sub‐Saharan Africa because of all
of the colonial and post‐colonial Western constructs, homosexuality itself is not one of them. It is
only that, as Saskia Wieringa puts it:
‘homosexuality’ as it is lived in present‐day western countries is far removed from the
life of the Lovedu rain queen with her hundreds of wives, or that of an early twentieth
century female‐husband among the Nuer in Sudan, Nandi in Kenya, Igbo in Nigeria or Fon
in Dahomey (present‐day Benin). 24
Homosexuality is different in every culture, and there is bound to be hybridity between globalized
Western norms of sexual identity and localized norms and traditions. Nkunzi exemplifies this. She
says she would like to marry her current partner under the new South African law, and talks about
the cultural tradition of dowry (lobola), saying:
Although I don’t believe in lobola, my girlfriend’s parents would want lobola for her
and she herself would want me to pay lobola and because I love her, I will do it. But for me
lobola is not a good system. I would want to do a ceremony of exchanging cows. It is
important for combining the ancestors, so that her ancestors will know me and know that
now I am sharing my life with her… 25
Nkunzi’s lived experiences therefore do not match what is constructed as modern, or what is
constructed as traditional. She lives somewhere in between. It is the in‐between that we overlook in
traditional qualitative research. But if more and more women like Nkunzi share their stories, in their
own voices, a truer picture of contemporary life can be revealed.
88