Father Antonio Cavazzi’s reaction to the Ganga-Ya-Chibanda, the presiding priest of the Giagues (Imbangala), a group in the Congo region, typifies the European response to African sexual diversity. In his 1687 Istorica de scrizione de’ tre’ regni Congo, Matamba, et Angola. Cavazzi described the Ganga-Ya- Chibanda as “a bare-faced, insolent, obscene, extremely villainous, disreputable scoundrel,” who “committed the foulest crimes” with impunity. The funeral rites held for him were so indecent “that the paper dirtied with its description would blush.” According to Cavazzi, the Ganga-Ya-Chibanda routinely cross-dressed and was addressed as “grandmother.” The element chibanda in his title is certainly related to other terms used by Bantu speakers in the region for nonmasculine males who are often shamans and have sex with other men (for example, chibadi, chibado, jimbandaa, hibamba, and quimbanda— see Part III). In Cavazzi’s account, however, the sexuality of the Ganga-Ya-Chibandais ambiguous. Because he freely entered the precincts of secluded women, Cavazzi assumed that he indulged his “brutal passions” with them. But in most cases where males in alternative gender roles have been observed associating with women, the situation is the opposite of what Labat assumed: they enjoyed such access precisely because they lacked (or were assumed to lack) heterosexual desire (for example, the Omani khanith, the mashoga of Mombasa, and the Ila mwaami described in this volume). In any case, Cavazzi’s denunciation did not hinge on the sexual object choice of the Ganga-YaChibanda. Phrases like “foulest crimes” were part of what Guy Poirier has termed a Western “rhetoric of abomination” directed not at particular forms of sexuality but at sexuality in general (1993a: 223). Even so, the influence of moral discourse remained— and remains— strong. Indeed, nearly all the texts that we might use to document and understand African same-sex patterns employ moral rhetoric— from late sixteenth-century Portuguese reports of “unnatural damnation” in Angola (Purchas 1625: 1558), to John Burckhardt’s 1882 report of “detestable vices” in Nubia (64), an 1893 report of copulation contre nature in French Senegal (X 1893: 155-56), and the 1906 report of a German missionary who observed Herrero men forsaking the “natural use of women” (Irle 1906: 58-59).
