Emerging Grassroots Organising Among Same-Sex Attracted Men in Dar es Salaam

Abstract

This master thesis deals with same-sex attracted men in Dar es Salaam, and the grassroots activism that such men have increasingly set into motion over the past five years. Drawing on 6.5 months of fieldwork in 2014, but also on fieldwork carried out in 2008/09, the thesis explores established and emerging forms of same-sex subjectivities and relations in the Tanzanian metropolis; describes grassroots activism against HIV and for rights; analyses the role public health has played for and in this mobilisation; and describes the emerging role and influence of western aid and LGBTI organisations. In the thesis, I first engage critically with the multiplication of western discourses that represent the African continent as homophobic through and through, and juxtapose this discursive production with some accounts of everyday, same-sex attracted lives in Dar es Salaam. I thereafter try to localise grassroots activism in the lived city, and to trace the ways in which grassroots organisations are linked to other entities, locally, regionally, and globally. I go on to identify significant discourses and controversies in which same-sex attracted lives and gei activism is entangled, and try to show the role that actors representing the realms of public health and global gayness play in the ongoing mobilisation. Towards the end of the thesis, I also engage with the economy of grassroots organising, and the market-like ways in which it often appears to be organised. The thesis describes a rich and vibrant same-sex sexual culture in Dar es Salaam; shows how grassroots mobilisation among same-sex attracted men is predominantly organised and performed by the poor; demonstrates how this activism was in part helped into being by the field of public health; detects emerging strains in the relation between public health and grassroots actors; and encounters the emerging presence of collaboration partners from western aid and LGBTI entities in Dar es Salaam. In a short final comment, I consider grassroots activism in Dar es Salaam as located betwixt and between ushoga, global gayness, and medicalised same-sex relations.