“There Is Nothing Wrong With Being A Hermaphrodite.”
–Winnie Mandela

In a couple of recent posts, Tambay and others took issue with the way the upcoming film “Invictus” — about the 1995 rugby world cup and Nelson Mandela’s use of it as a political tool — is being marketed to international audiences, both in the way the trailer is edited, and how the movie posters are designed. There is, upon cursory examination, a replay of the familiar trope wherein a story that should focus primarily on Black agency is turned into a liberal interventionist feel-good film, one intended to assuage guilt and make people feel good about themselves, and consequently, increase ticket sales.

I personally am somewhat agnostic about the film’s marketing, as I don’t see any other way for things to be under Capitalist economic systems. Decisions will always be made based on the bottom line of what will get the most paying customers into the seats, and unless you’re prepared to interrogate and challenge that basic assumption, complaining about it is like lamenting that serial killers murder too many people. It’s what they do. We can only hope that the movie itself turns out to be much more interesting than the marketing.

However, what does fascinate me are the connections between the film, and issues that were highlighted both by respondents to Tambay’s posts, and via the global controversy surrounding the sex (biological, chemical, hormonal) and gender (sociological, philosophical, mental) of the South African world champion runner Mokgadi Caster Semenya.

In a recent article in the New Yorker, titled “Either/Or: Sports, Sex, and the Case of Caster Semenya“, Ariel Levy notes the following:

‘Sports have played an important role in modern South African history. A crucial part of the African National Congress’s strategy to end apartheid during “the struggle,” as everyone calls it, was to secure international condemnation of South Africa’s government through boycotts and the banning of South African athletes from all international competitions. Conversely, during the 1995 rugby World Cup Nelson Mandela managed to unite the entire country behind the Springboks, the South African team, which had been a hated symbol of Afrikaner white supremacism. It was pivotal to his success in avoiding civil war and in establishing a new sense of national solidarity. Sports are “more powerful than governments in breaking down racial barriers,” Mandela said. “Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire, the power to unite people that little else has.”’

Then, turning specifically to Semenya’s situation and the connection with South African history, Levy notes:

‘South Africans have been appalled by the idea of a person who thinks she is one thing suddenly being told that she is something else. The classification and reclassification of human beings has a haunted history in this country. Starting with the Population Registration Act of 1950, teams of white people were engaged as census-takers. They usually had no training, but they had the power to decide a person’s race, and race determined where and with whom you could live, whether you could get a decent education, whether you had political representation, whether you were even free to walk in certain areas at certain hours. The categories were fickle. In 1985, according to the census, more than a thousand people somehow changed race: nineteen whites turned Colored (as South Africans call people of mixed heritage); seven hundred and two Coloreds turned white, fifty Indians turned Colored, eleven Colored turned Chinese, and so on. (No blacks turned white, or vice versa.)

‘Taxonomy is an acutely sensitive subject, and its history is probably one of the reasons that South Africans—particularly black South Africans—have rallied behind their runner with such fervor. The government has decreed that Semenya can continue running with women in her own country, regardless of what the I.A.A.F. decides.

‘South Africans have compared the worldwide fascination with Semenya’s gender to the dubious fame of another South African woman whose body captivated Europeans: Saartjie Baartman, the Hottentot Venus. Baartman, an orphan born on the rural Eastern Cape, was the servant of Dutch farmers near Cape Town. In 1810, they sent her to Europe to be exhibited in front of painters, naturalists, and oglers, who were fascinated by her unusually large buttocks and had heard rumors of her long labia. She supposedly became a prostitute and an alcoholic, and she died in France in her mid-twenties. Until 1974, her skeleton and preserved genitals were displayed at the Musée de l’Homme, in Paris. Many South Africans feel that white foreigners are yet again scrutinizing a black female body as though it did not contain a human being.’

The article is a must read, as it goes on to highlight a number of themes (and it includes Winnie’s quote that I used as this post’s title), but one that resonated strongly for me was the fact that despite Semenya’s “difference” as you might call it, many South Africans have been steadfast supporters of her, no matter what, which is in direct contrast to the media images and stories that tend to portray Africans as intolerant. The irony of the fact that she comes from a poor and rural area, where you would assume she would have been an automatic outcast, and yet you see this evidence of love, nurturing, and a fierce desire to protect her, is a testament to the real-life complexity of Africans that rarely if ever makes it’s way to mainstream movie screens. These are the kinds of cinematic characters and narratives we should be fighting for, instead of wasting so much time debating Precious (OK, I added the Precious part on purpose, just to be a smart-aleck).

Lastly, and most importantly, is the lesson to be learned from South Africans by my Black American sisters and brothers. Let their defence of Caster Semenya serve as an example of the kind of solidarity we should be exhibiting towards Black women and Black gays, lesbians, and others. Feminism is not owned by white women, and not every Black person is straight. If you really believe in Black Liberation, then you have to believe in the liberation of all.