Black Bull, Ancestors and Me - Boshadi Semenya

My Life as a Lesbian Sangoma

Tags: South Africa

In Black Bull, Ancestors and Me My Life as a Lesbian Sangoma, Nkunzi Zandile Nkabinde explores
issues around sexual culture and sexual identity from the vantage points of an African
cosmological framework and feminist epistemology. Female same-sexuality is identified as
a site of struggle between the interests and African ways of knowing as embodied through
traditional Zulu culture, and the peculiarities of modern life. She draws tight links between
African spiritual ritual performances as manifested through spirit possession and female
same-sex practices to frame her thesis for analysing and understanding female same-sexuality
and culture. She attempts to uncover the struggles and dangers associated with freely
articulating one’s own same-sex orientation, particularly among African females in currentday
South Africa. To do this, she locates us in the 1970s South African political and cultural
history and places the struggle among same-sex oriented female sangomas to articulate
their sexual selves openly alongside some radical elements of our past - anti-apartheid, civil
rights and feminist movements - depicting the wide spectrum of sometimes threatening but
historically important creative actions to achieve social change.