Diasporic African writing, as illustrated in the discussion of Helen Oyeyemi's White is for Witching (2009) in the previous chapter, is given another twist in earlier South African novels by women – for example, Bessie Head, Sheila Kohler, Shamim Sarif. Significantly, they wrote from a diasporic position outside South Africa about women desiring women. However unwittingly, they forged their own reconstructions of female same-sex desire against not only the canvas of Apartheid law but also the Afrikaner grain of an ‘erotic patriarchy’, after Michiel Heyns's apt phrase, which I extend to South African Englishness. Mark Behr's The Smell of Apples (1993; 1995) and Stephen Gray's Time of Our Darkness (1988) both illustrate the tangibility of this ‘erotic patriarchy’, respectively Afrikaner and English, and the (in) visibility of queerness under the Apartheid regime (1948–1994). These two novels are set, respectively, during two of Apartheid's peaks: in the 1970s and in the mid-1980s, at the onset of the State of Emergency, which also witnessed the creation of the first Lesbian and Gay organizations.

Human rights and homosexuality in Southern Africa were the objects of an unprecedented but little known study by Chris Dunton and Mai Palmberg in 1996, in the year of the new South African Constitution and two years after Nelson Mandela took up the presidency of South Africa. Since then, Apartheid South Africa has been deemed an excellent theoretical testing terrain for queer theory because same-sex bonding and interracial relations were vociferously criminalized and the ANC (African National Congress)’s developments towards democratization and the various gay and lesbian organizations that were to sprout over South Africa as of 1986 had not yet helped create what William Spurlin termed ‘new spaces of queer visibility’ (see Chapter 1).