Queens, historical and imagined, queer and not, pervade Cape Town. Queen Victoria’s name adheres to the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront and to Victoria Road, among a plethora of other Capetonian places. British monarchy is ubiquitous among central city toponyms still—Queen, Princess, Duke, Coronation, Victoria, and more, proliferate. Still figuratively present in the urban landscape, until recently the Queen also possessed a political presence in Cape Town as head of the British Commonwealth. Post-apartheid South Africa rejoined the Commonwealth in April 1994, the very month the first democratic elections were held. The following year Queen Elizabeth arrived in Cape Town for the first of two post-apartheid state visits.

For much of the past two centuries, Britain has been ruled by “the Queen,” first by Victoria (1837–1901), then by Elizabeth II (1952–2022). The “Mother-Queen” ruled over the Empire at its apex; Queen Elizabeth’s reign encompassed the era of national independences and the growth of the Commonwealth.Footnote ¹ As the embodiment of British sovereignty and global union, “the Queen” was a significant figure in the African hinterlands of Empire-and-Commonwealth during the age of high imperialism, as well as in the latter half of the twentieth century. During Victoria’s reign, Africans made claims to equality within the Empire; during Elizabeth’s, Black South Africans called upon and recalled promises of nonracial equality and land ownership.Footnote ² Queenliness proliferates in Cape Town still—appearing not only in street names, but also in colloquialisms, nicknames, beauty pageants,Footnote ³ and a heterogenous cornucopia of texts.

Capetonian queenliness warrants our attention because it can help us to reflect on crucial questions that go far beyond Cape Town and South Africa. What critical political imaginaries have existed beyond the nation-state, the form that became ascendant with formal decolonization? What might the misfitting (queer?) materials of the past—those difficult to classify because they are not easily situated within discourses of identity, nation-statehood, or resistance—teach us about how we narrate the colonial and apartheid pasts?Footnote ⁴ And what alternatives to the colony and its contemporary forms might we imagine now?

To approach these questions, this essay assembles an archive of twentieth-century Capetonian queenliness: the Queen-to-be’s birthday speech of 1947; Richard Rive’s 1979 short story about the self-styled Queen of Table Mountain; popular reportage of the Mau Mau Queen’s 1953 coronation and the Cape Moffie Queen elections of 1970; and Jackie Heyns’s history of the “Hottie Moffie”Footnote ⁵ aristocracy, as rendered in Drum magazine in 1977.Footnote ⁶ By placing the historical 1947 speech in proximity with textual renderings of the queer queens of apartheid Cape Town, the essay invites reflection on the political imagination that has animated African allusions to “the Queen” and to queens. Heyns’s “Moffie Manuscripts” figures as a paradigmatic text of a mid-century popular textual genre—what I call “moffie writing”—and of the sensibility that animated it—what I name “camp royalist”—that should provoke us to reconsider how we write about colonial and apartheid pasts, and how we imagine a postcolonial future.

In thinking about this essay’s discussion of camp royalist sensibility, Raymond Williams’ notion of structures of feeling may be useful. “Structure of feeling” refers to collective social experience that has not taken a formalized, quasi-fixed, form—as, for example, an ideology or institution—and that may find expression in new styles or literary conventions. A structure of feeling is also “in solution,” emergent: with hindsight, one can detect the ideology or institution that subsequently emerged from it.Footnote ⁷ Like a structure of feeling, a camp royalist sensibility was part of shared social experience and found novel aesthetic form (in the genre of moffie writing). In a departure from Williams’ notion, camp royalism was not emergent: it did not become, say, a queer royalist movement. Yet, with its social and inchoate character, and its close connection to aesthetic innovation, structure of feeling alludes to key elements of camp royalism.

This essay invites readers to reconsider how we might write in ways that are deeply attentive to the complexity of the past and the present. It does not aim to uncover how mid-century queer Capetonians truly lived or viewed themselves. To the extent that this essay constitutes a project of recovery, its object is not a category of person nor a “voice,” but rather the camp royalist critical sensibility that Heyns’s tongue-in-cheek history of the “moffie” aristocracy epitomizes. I suggest that attention to non-nation-state nationalist political critiques—and especially to faux historical recoveries of queer aristocracy!—can help us to denaturalize nation-state nationalism. Such attention might also provoke us to further explore forms other than the nation-state—with its constituent majority and minoritiesFootnote ⁸—through which African people have imagined political collectivities and articulated political critique.

To respond to questions about colonialism and its aftermath by examining a Capetonian archive allows us to challenge the notions of exceptionalism that still surround scholarly and popular conceptions of South Africa and its oldest city. Cape Town is an African city, and apartheid was in many ways an extension of the colonial form of rule.Footnote ⁹ Critical thinking about colonial pasts and genuinely postcolonial futures can be valuably rooted in the texts and imaginaries of twentieth-century Cape Town; and investigations of South African pasts and texts benefit from the full reinsertion of South African places into the histories and critical imaginaries of the continent.

Cape Town, South Africa’s so-called Mother City, has long been associated not only with “the Queen,” but also with male-bodied gender and sexual variation, of which “the moffie” remains the principal figure.Footnote ¹⁰ The word’s first mention is found in a 1929 dictionary of seamen’s slang.Footnote ¹¹ Today “moffie” is a South African slang term that denotes a male homosexual; the word is particularly associated with male-bodied feminine gender performance and especially evokes Coloured Cape Town.Footnote ¹² For this writer at least, the moniker “Mother City” rings queerly. Despite its parentage—“Mother City” was a coining of Cape Town’s first marketing board, part of the early twentieth century, Union-era, invention of a new white supremacist, Afrikaner-and-English national identityFootnote ¹³—despite those origins, “Mother City” summons queer queens and mothers: the Mother City Queer ProjectFootnote ¹⁴; the Queen Mother and the Mother-Queen; Riva, Rive’s fictional Queen of Table Mountain; and the queens of Cape Town’s historical “moffie pageants.”

A moment in the mid-twentieth century suggests the historically close relationship between Cape Town and queenliness. In early 1947, the Royal Family, including a young Princess Elizabeth, arrived in Cape Town. The Family was to tour Britain’s Southern African possessions: present-day Botswana, Lesotho, South Africa, Eswatini, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. It was the first time a reigning monarch had visited the continent, and it remains the only occasion that the British royal family has made a state visit in Africa. George VI was then “King of Great Britain, Ireland, and the British Dominions” and “Emperor of India.” By the end of the same year, his title would be reduced: the tour took place in a politically precarious moment for both the major European empires—right on the cusp of many independences, at a time when Britain, like France, viewed the retention of its imperial territories as crucial to its continued global power.

The royal itinerary and its media coverage were carefully orchestrated to impress multiple audiences: the crew of the (newly created) BBC television accompanied the family on the ship and the family’s packed program was filmed, photographed, and broadcast on radio and television. Moreover, in the new age of air travel, both the means of travel and the arrival city were chosen not for reasons of efficiency but because they symbolically resurrected the imperial links that were, still, to tie (British) Southern Africa to Britain. On February 17, the family debarked HMS Vanguard in Cape Town’s harbor. (This already archaic arrival scene would be rehearsed almost fifty years later when Queen Elizabeth returned in 1995; she and Prince Philip flew into Cape Town’s airport, only to arrive a second time in Cape Town’s harbor on the Britannia, which had been docked, waiting for them, in nearby Simonstown.)

The Tour’s “culminating moment”Footnote ¹⁵ occurred three days before the royal departure on April 24: the young Elizabeth’s dedication as future queen. Delivered on the occasion of her twenty-first birthday, Princess Elizabeth’s radio address to the British imperial family was broadcast from the garden of Cape Town’s Government House. The event was also filmedFootnote ¹⁶; Elizabeth wears a light-colored silk dress, her hair is swept back from her face, and her only jewelry is a string of pearls. Demure yet forceful, she begins by addressing “all the peoples of the British Commonwealth and Empire, wherever they live, whatever race they come from, and whatever language they speak.”Footnote ¹⁷ The composure is regal and the wealth evident, albeit in a mode distant from the ornate era of Queen and Empress Victoria. The style befits a royal touring the colonies during a time of postwar austerity: Elizabeth is a modern monarch (to-be) heralding a renewed, modern, imperial order. In that order, Cape Town occupies a special rhetorical place:

The princess’s Cape Town location occasions the assertion of British global unity and positions the monarchy as an institution that transcends specificities of time and place. Distinctions and distance are no obstacle to British imperial sovereignty and unity; the empire and the commonwealth compose a single family and a single home. The future queen goes on to evoke age-old bonds, even as she suggests the modernity of the monarchy and the worldwide polity it rules:

Inventions of science—the radio, specifically—step in where the feminine gender, or perhaps ancestral custom, falls short. The assertion of an ancient-yet-contemporary monarchy precipitates Elizabeth’s famous dedication as a future sovereign. Elizabeth’s reign, although anchored in timeless tradition, is bound to modernity. She will be a monarch for the age of progress: “I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.” The speech concludes with an invitation to her listeners to join her: “God help me to make my vow and God bless all of you who are willing to share in it.”

Interestingly, in his biography of Queen Elizabeth, Robert Hardman reports that the broadcast speech was not actually given live in Cape Town; rather, it was recorded several days earlier at Victoria Falls, in present-day Zimbabwe.Footnote ¹⁸ If true, the insistent misrepresentation of the location of the speech—particularly given the important rhetorical position of Cape Town within the speech itself—emphasizes the symbolic significance of the connection between the Queen and Cape Town, the Empire and the Mother City. It is Cape Town that stands in for all the Empire and Commonwealth, Cape Town, the city that figures as the future queen’s home-in-all-of-Empire.

From her Cape Town “home,” Princess Elizabeth publicly committed herself to the shared imperial family. Five years later, she was visiting colonial Kenya, another member of that “family,” when, upon her father’s death, she succeeded him to the throne. The following year, in 1953, her coronation gown was embroidered with the symbol of each Commonwealth nation. This African-and-imperial geography—from the anticipation of rule in Cape Town to the ascendance to the throne in colonial Kenya—suggests that queenliness, in its twentieth-century imperial iteration, has been not only a British institution but also an African—and perhaps particularly Capetonian—one.

Richard Rive (1930–1989) was a Capetonian writer. He was also gay, although not publicly so, and classified as “Coloured” by the apartheid regime. Riva, Rive’s literary invention, is an apt figure with which to begin this exploration of queer Capetonian queenliness because she is a (fictional) queer queen who bears a definite, if also oblique, relationship both to historical Cape Town and to the anti-apartheid critical impetus of the eponymous short story.Footnote ¹⁹ Riva declares herself the Queen of Table Mountain; the story repeatedly returns to Riva’s (playful) pronouncement and to the narrator/protagonist’s refusal to recognize her as any sort of queen. Why to make of this literary attention to (mock) queenliness?

First published in 1979, and set in 1950s Cape Town, “Riva” is framed as a recollection; an older Rive-like narrator, Paul, recounts his two brief encounters with Riva, which took place some twenty years prior. Paul’s initial, chance, meeting with her occurs when he, then a young college student, hikes with friends—all “so-called coloured,” like himFootnote ²⁰—up Cape Town’s Table Mountain. There, they meet fellow hiker, Riva—white, Jewish, older, a masculine woman—who introduces herself as the Queen of Table Mountain, an epithet that she and Paul’s companions will repeat, but which Paul will ostentatiously—albeit silently—reject: “This was absurd, I could not imagine anything less regal, more incongruous. Riva, queen?”Footnote ²¹ Despite his professed disdain for Riva and the brevity of their meeting on the mountain, three months later Paul goes in search of Riva and accepts her invitation to tea. The story ends before tea is served, with an inexplicably panicked Paul fleeing Riva’s small flat. From their first exchange to his flight from her rooms, Paul is intensely ambivalent about Riva. He seeks her out (and twenty years later puts his memories to paper and gives them her name), but he can only report that he finds her “ridiculous,”Footnote ²² as well as “incongruous” and “unattractive,” her queenliness “absurd.”Footnote ²³

While socially speaking, Paul’s scorn and skepticism are correct (a working-class Jewish mountaineer, a queen, her dominion, a mountain?), Riva’s queenliness is, in a broader sense, historically apt—and available to be read as (implicit) anti-apartheid critique. Early apartheid South Africa was a self-governing British dominion and a Commonwealth nation (1948–1961)Footnote ²⁴—legislatively independent yet ruled by the British monarch. Faux queenliness suits the time; in the 1950s—as in 1979, the year of the story’s publication—one did not need to reach far for a reference to the English Queen or for the fictional possibility of a queen. In both eras, the nostalgic invocation of English queenliness was available to function as an anti-apartheid gesture: British Empire—not the Afrikaner, apartheid, regime that would withdraw the white-supremacist “Republic” of South Africa from the Commonwealth—appeared as relatively egalitarian and benign.

Riva’s queenliness is also available to be read as queer: Riva is indeed a queen, if by queen we mean a person possessed of a dramatically crafted, performatively epicene, regal persona. She is verbally, if not sartorially, flamboyant. The exchanges between the Queen and the Professor, as Riva coins herself and Paul, are joint performances of linguistic and social artifice. Paul then, with his wry wit, arch tone, and fraught preoccupation with Riva, is equally a queen. In “Riva,” queer queenliness—and a camp sensibility more often associated with Oscar Wilde or Susan Sontag’s seminal textFootnote ²⁵ than with a Capetonian writer—is a significant, if subterranean, critical, anti-apartheid, force. It joins two characters who are, in apartheid state-assigned race and gender, so distant from one another; it enacts similarity and proximity where the apartheid state—white supremacist, Christian, patriarchal, and heteronormative—saw and legislated only difference and the necessity of separation.

In their shared camp queenliness, Riva and Paul also stand in for the queer queens of Cape Town who never appeared explicitly in Rive’s fictional iterations of the city.Footnote ²⁶ Riva’s queenliness, paired with Paul’s own, summons, if obliquely, the gender-bending queen culture which was such a central part of the city that was the setting of the author’s life and much of his literary production.Footnote ²⁷ And, while Rive himself, with his carefully crafted anglophile Oxbridge persona and private penchant for “the boys,” was the very antithesis of a “moffie queen” (what could be more absurd?), given the close resemblance of “Riva” to “Rive,” and the biographical resemblance between the fictional young Paul and the youthful author, the camp queenliness that joins Riva and Paul also evokes their creator.Footnote ²⁸

At times, queens and anti-apartheid critique also slipped together into the mid- and late-twentieth-century popular press for Black readers. In July 1955, the front cover of the short-lived magazine Africa! enticed readers with the promise to reveal “the women of the Mau Mau,” the peasant-led anti-colonial movement in what was then British Kenya. Surprisingly, considering the magazine’s ownership and the context of publication, the cover story presents Mau Mau women—albeit with some vacillation—as impressively powerful. The ultimate evidence of Mau Mau women’s political power in this text—which also functions as implicit proof of the legitimacy of the Mau Mau movement—is the 1953 coronation of the “Queen of Mau Mau.” The event’s timing reinforces the political implication; the coronation of the African queen coincides exactly with the coronation of the queen in England:

The simultaneity of the two coronations, in conjunction with the author’s explanation that the Mau Mau Queen is vested “with every authority she needed,” establishes parity between the two sovereigns and their respective polities, drawing Kenya and Britain into a relationship of equality. The “Queen of Mau Mau” appears as a counterpart to, rather than a mock or inferior version of, the English queen: she too is sovereign of a territory and heads a government possessed of a parliament and courts. Through reference to this African queen, we glimpse an anti-colonial impetus in a text and publication in which overt and unambiguous anti-colonial critique is rare.

Such oblique political critiques characterized other writings in Africa and its fellow Jim Bailey-owned publications as well, among them, Cape Town’s Golden City Post and Drum—the longest-running English-language magazine in Africa, founded in 1951 (and today published only online). Employing Black writers and intended for Black readers, Drum and its sibling publications were broadly anti-communist, as was Bailey, son of mining magnate Abe Bailey. The publications largely reproduced patriarchal understandings of gender (each monthly issue of Drum famously sported a cover girl), and nationalist ideas of race and nationhood. News reports and regular columns, as well as advertisements, illustrations, and the Miss Drum beauty contests, participated in internationally legible discourses of Black identity and binary gender. Notable Black figures, from South African intellectuals, such as J. T. Jabavu, to Diasporic musicians, such as Miles Davis, received regular attention in biographical profiles, news reports, and interviews. Yet important exceptions to this anti-racist, nation-state nationalist, and capitalist political vision are found in the heterogenous mixture of writing that these periodicals contained: there was the overtly political beside the ostensibly apolitical, somber reportage alongside works of fiction, sports coverage, and the obviously low-brow. Whereas explicitly political texts tended to condemn racism (and communism) and to celebrate African and Diasporic cultural, sporting, and political figures and achievements, some writing—such as what I will call “moffie writing”—that purported to be informative or merely entertaining posed more complex, if also somewhat opaque, critiques.

Queens—“Moffie Queens” specifically—were a central preoccupation: Cape Town’s flaming royalty was a staple of Drum and the Golden City Post. Moffie queen electoral campaigning and performing of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were widely covered, in image and text, and the exploits of particular local figures were avidly reported. Much space was devoted to the drama surrounding the moffie queen elections: the elegance of the campaign to-dos, the ostensibly fierce rivalries, and the energetically contested election results.

Such writing was not necessarily, as some scholars have asserted, voyeuristic, scornful, or objectifying. While some reportage was indeed denigrating, other pieces—those which I term “moffie writing”—positioned themselves as a part of the culture they purportedly only described. Moffie writing deployed irony, innuendo, melodrama, and hyperbole, and sometimes indulged in what Dhianaraj Chetty calls “the camp horror genre”—as when a “white Cape housewife” alleged that her husband has been kidnapped by the moffies.Footnote ³⁰ Presumptively cis-male heterosexual writers partook of the publicly performed sensibilities of their aristocratic moffie subjects, thereby also obliquely critiquing heteropatriarchal apartheid society. Relayed self-dramatization also allowed reportage to stage explicit critiques of gender- and sexuality-based prejudice: for example, in one 1956 Post interview titled “Moffies cry ‘shame’ at critics,” “Gina,” declares: “I am completely shocked. I am aghast that they should condemn us. Just who do they think they are? Saint with a shotgun? […] These people who condemn us are the thorn bushes in our path; they are the cruel wind ravaging our twilight world; they should be destroyed and not us.”Footnote ³¹ Amidst a sensationalist, sometimes objectifying textual milieu, moffie writing stands out, in tone and politics.

This era’s “moffie writing” constitutes its own, often critical, genre, I suggest. It is moffie writing not because of the identities of its (publicly cis-straight male) authors, nor because it is “about ‘moffies,’” but because it partakes of the camp sensibilities of its subjects. The drama and humor of these texts—melodramatic, knowing, self-parodying—seem, on occasion, inseparable from that of their self-dramatizing protagonists. Furthermore, not only did Drum and Post writers at times collude with (and invent?) the attitudes and exploits of their subjects; the publications themselves were partially responsible for creating the fabulous moffie events that they covered: in the 1950s, and well into the 1960s, the Post organized the annual Moffie Queen competition in AthloneFootnote ³²; and Drum sponsored the private drag party which gives Chetty’s essay its name—Madame Costello’s Drag was then covered (with ample photographs) in both the magazine and the Post. Footnote ³³ Rather than observing people and events from a remove, these publications, and presumably some of their writers, participated in the creation of the social world that they putatively merely documented.

The collaborative character of these public Moffie Queen performances suggests the complexity of the relationship between presumptively heterosexual writers (and the rags they wrote for), and their flagrantly nonheterosexual subject matter. Among these writers was Jackie Heyns: long-time Drum and Golden City Post writer-reporter, the Aunt Sammy behind the Post’s long-running “Aunt Sammy” column and, as we shall see, the self-appointed critic and publicist of the (entirely imaginary) Moffie Manuscripts.

“It’s Moffie election time in the Cape,” Heyns announces in the Post, in early 1970:

The description is striking, in part because the tone, despite the extravagant gathering of adjectives, is difficult to identify. Are the preelection goings-on fantastic in the sense of impressive? And is “exotic, sari-shrouded” an accurate transmission of Farah’s self-styling? Or are the “sex non-conformists” fantastic in the sense of bizarre, and the characterization of Farah, the author’s exoticizing imposition? How, readers might wonder, is Heyns asking us to view the Moffie Queen contestants?

The final sentence suggests an answer: “[Moffie Queen elections] are carried through with a crash programme of champagne parties and election manoeuvres that are the envy of the local political world.” By implying that the politicians of apartheid South Africa have reason to be jealous of both the elegance and the strategy of their aristocratic moffie counterparts, this concluding sentence valorizes the fantastic world of moffie queen campaigns, and dismisses apartheid’s drab technicians on what seem to be both aesthetic and substantive grounds.

Anti-apartheid critique has arrived obliquely, in the guise of light-hearted, entertaining, local news. While poor style appears to be the principal sin of South Africa’s politicians—whether they be of the ruling National party or of the nominal legal (white) opposition—we are to understand that a dearth of fabulousness in South African national politics in fact signals a less visible, but more fundamental, flaw. This notion takes a more pointed form in the caption to the adjacent photograph:

The General Elections of 1970 were the first South African national elections in which no Black people had any political representation, and the 1970s were the heyday of forced removal for people classified as “Coloured” and “Indian” in Cape Town; many neighborhoods, most famously District Six, were declared white in the 1960s and, through the 1970s and beyond, their occupants forcibly removed to segregated peripheral townships.

The final statement is therefore ridiculously redundant and touching at once, as it goes without saying that there are few “verkramptes”—particularly rigid, far right, proponents of apartheid—among the campaigning queens of color. The two elections cannot be compared—yet Heyns makes the comparison, suggesting the importance of the moffie queens and the absurdity of the apartheid republic’s façade of democracy.

A review for a multiauthored work of historical scholarship that did not exist, Heyns’s “Moffie Manuscripts” critiques apartheid and its historical narratives. For contemporary readers, the piece still poses a pleasurable challenge to accounts of Capetonian (and South African, and African) past and present:

From the faux-somber inception through the series of playful references to gender and sexual non-conformity (twilight world of undecided sex, gay scene on the shores of Table Bay, extremely unusual, extraordinary, queer), Heyns displays the camp sensibility so associated with his (moffie) subjects: euphemism, hyperbole, and, finally, in relaying Carmen’s words, sexual innuendo. Heyns not only positions himself beside the Cape’s moffies via sensibility and verbal dexterity, but he also becomes, by way of imaginative implication, a variety of moffie author himself, one more among the Manuscripts’ many (imaginary) coauthors. After all, in relaying the findings of (faux) moffie historical research, as he will go on to do, Heyns is himself writing that (fictional) history; it is Heyns who embodies and ventriloquizes all eleven moffie authors.

Curious readers are invited into the debates dividing this twilight world’s denizens. (Who else, after all, would harbor a “longstanding difference of opinion as to how and who pioneered” the southernmost cradle of queerdom?) What is more, we are obliquely promised, via Carmen’s relayed words, the same pleasure that awaits diligent researchers and patient lovers. And, contrary to Carmen’s modest disclaimers, the Moffie Manuscripts—as Heyns relays their contents—appears thoroughly researched, compellingly written, as well as packed with innuendo.

Although the (fictional) research team began by investigating life in the Company’s fort during Van Riebeeck’s tenure, it did not take long for the researchers to turn to an earlier historical moment and cast of characters: to the return of Khore, a “Hottentot leader,” whom the British East India Company had kidnapped and taken to England.Footnote ³⁷ Having observed local customs, Khore returns home with information about European gentility which was quickly assimilated: “[His listeners] were mesmerised by his tales of the lah-de-dah to assume such character and thus establish the Hottie moffie fraternity in the Cape.”Footnote ³⁸ Khore’s compatriots, especially the newly formed “Hottie moffies,” began trading with, and entertaining, the Company’s soldiers, and the Hottie moffies’ signature trait—a marked penchant for aristocratic titles and dress—rapidly developed. A local penchant for sartorial elegance and prominent names, developed through a series of historical encounters—the final one, with English nobility, play the key, culminating, role—leading to the full establishment of Cape moffiedom. Yet only with the advent of titles and royal drag would the moffie be “near-complete.”Footnote ³⁹

Suggestive suggestions—(homo)sexual, political, relentlessly playful—jostle against one another. Word plays and pleasurable sound patterns multiply: the already gay Table Bay; the double-entendre of trade, bolstered by alliteration—“tricks of the trade under the tricolor flag”; Papandorp is home to pansies who wear scent-soaked underwear with pride. And there is—even at this early date!—a “moffie movement.” Like moffie movements, moffie queens, Heyns takes pains to emphasize, are made, not born. His playful and absurd account of origins suggests the absurdity of naturalizing accounts of collective identities and origins.

Heyns’s fictive review of a nonexistent manuscript is not only a celebration of the Mother City’s “twilight world of undecided sex,” it is also a work of revisionist South African history—albeit a parodic one, grounded firmly in hearsay and fantasy, that situates aristocratically inclined “Hottie” moffies at the very dawn of the interactions that would lead to the establishment of Cape Town. Yet Heyns does not simply make Hottie moffies crucial to the historical world he invents, he also gives them historiographical significance; their queer penchant for royal outfits suggests (at the least sartorial) continuities with the imperial regime that preceded and overlapped with apartheid. Like the tracing of the inception of Cape Moffiedom to Khore’s return—rather than to Jan van Riebeeck’s arrival, which was the conventional (colonial and apartheid) starting point of local and national history—the seemingly whimsical attention to moffie queenliness is also a historiographical intervention.

Moreover, Heyns’s text intervenes in its (and our own) present, by centrally positioning “Hottie moffies” in the time and place of its publication. In matter-of-factly referencing a longstanding difference of opinion regarding the origins of local moffie society, Heyns presents Cape moffie life as a historical and contemporary social fact that readers should take for granted. The queer world is not, or not only, situated on the titillating twilight outskirts: it is the central starting point of a research project, and a place of intense historical debate, as well as of carnal pleasures. In this way, Heyns’s “Moffie Manuscripts” evokes a contemporary world that, in the Cape Town of 1977, assuredly did not (yet) exist—one where a multivolume work on local moffie history, authored by no fewer than eleven committed Cape non-conformists, would come to fruition, and find a publisher, a distributor, and a review in the pages of Drum.

Nor does that world exist in 2024. Moreover, it is impossible to imagine something akin to Heyns’s text appearing today in the South African popular press. Thus, “The Moffie Manuscripts,” in the context of this essay, pushes up against still-commonplace notions about apartheid and its post: against the idea that the present is a time of freedom, that the freeing of the nation has meant an—albeit perhaps slow and partial—freeing of the queers, and that we in the present have little to learn from oppositional political imaginaries that never took form in national movements.

National (and proto-national) resistance remains central to many popular and scholarly discourses about African pasts, including queer South African pasts; resistant lives, movements, and creative production are recovered, examined, and sometimes celebrated. Political and cultural projects that did not advocate for nation-state independence have received comparatively attention.Footnote ⁴¹ (Camp commentary, like historical royalism—however strategic or codedly critical—is often passed over.)

Given this, it would be easy to think that other apartheid-era critical political imaginaries had not existed at all. The still-small body of scholarship on Cape Town’s lavender history draws on mid-century print media representations of gender and sexual diversity, yet insists on the limitations of those representations as sources of authentic knowledge about Cape Town’s historical gay community. The moffie writing of Drum and the Post do not, it seems, show queer life as it truly was, in the voices of its (resistant) participants and, for that reason, are, for some scholars, less than ideal additions to a gay Capetonian historical archive. In his pioneering essay on Cape Town’s New Year’s carnival, Shamil Jeppie writes, “In available documentary for the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties the voices of the ‘moffies’ are never heard; they are always spoken about (derisively), represented, judged, but never allowed the privilege of discourse.”Footnote ⁴² Chetty, in his previously cited essay, “A Drag at Madame Costello’s,” frames the archival presence of moffie queens as an inadvertent and ironic outcome of tabloid-like papers seeking only to present the scandalously salacious to a homophobic readership.Footnote ⁴³ He describes the Drum and Post coverage as universally prejudiced, if also varied in tone—“writing registers a range of attitudes-from poorly concealed voyeurism and vitriol to paternalistic empathy”—and explains that “the freakishness of homosexuality was set against an image of what men and women really should be.”Footnote ⁴⁴ (Indeed, Drum and its sibling publications exhibit a deep investment in normative Euro-American understanding of gender and sexuality; Lindsay Clowes’s workFootnote ⁴⁵ is especially interesting in this regard.)

This essay has, however, taken a different approach to this archival presence, viewing its texts as necessarily mediated and crafted—and as at times enacting implicit or oblique political critique—rather than seeing them as offering us inauthentic representations, or flawed or incomplete historical evidence. Some texts, those that I have considered “moffie writing,” we might understand to constitute important artifacts of (queenly) queer political sensibility and critique.

Moffie writing invites us to contemplate the possibility that queer lives, and camp royalist critique, might have thrived under apartheid. In constituting, for readers today, an artifact of apartheid, moffie writing provides a stimulating counterpoint to our neglect of the complexity of life under apartheid and colonial rule, and to the continued emphasis on the spectacular, rather than on the everyday, legal, and structural character of apartheid and colonial violence.Footnote ⁴⁶ Apartheid, like colonial rule, was neither (only) a temporally bounded regime nor (always) spectacular in its violence. Heterogeneous, unequal, South Africans lived varied lives—and articulated a multiplicity of, sometimes, oblique—political critiques within a violent structure.

What might a new historical narrative of apartheid-era political critique be? In its evocation of alternative pre-apartheid pasts, Heyns’s “Moffie Manuscripts” offers one model of what such a (Capetonian, South African, African) history might do: propose an alternative origin moment, while poking fun at the notion of ahistorical identities and collective origin stories; insist on the historical importance of Coloured queer (“Hottie Moffie”) experience and on the continuities between ostensibly discreet political regimes; ventriloquize, relay, fib flagrantly and relish in the tongue-in-cheek and in the spaces between author, subject, and readers.

If we attend to the presence of evoked and imagined queens, historical British royals and the “Hottie Moffie” aristocracy in Cape Town, the present appears less national, and more imperial than it habitually does, and the current world of nation-states does not seem to be the inevitable telos of history. After all, the British royal family visited Cape Town in 1947 because they recognized competing possible political futures; among them, the complete independence of their territories, full retention of those territories, or some intermediary form of hierarchical association, such as the “commonwealth of nations.”

This history usefully reminds us that there are, today, political possibilities beyond the nation-state, just as there are multiple ways of articulating political critique and of narrating the past. I suggest it is fruitful to recall empire and monarchy because such recollection can denaturalize the present of nation-states and prompt us to investigate historical, non-nation-state-oriented, forms of political critique—not because empire and monarchy should be emulated or resuscitated, far from it. By looking back at historical failures and at works of what may at first seem to be anachronistic or irrelevant imagination, we can resist the temptation to see the present as the telos of the past, to see the nation-state as the best or only political form in which to live, and to tell histories in which proto/national resistance figures as the primary protagonist. Attention to non-nation-state nationalist political critiques, and perhaps especially to faux historical recoveries of queer aristocracy, can help us to denaturalize nation-state nationalism, and to explore other ways—ways other than the nation-state, with its constituent majority and minorities—that African people have created political community and articulated political critique.Footnote ⁴⁷

The enduring presence of the Queen and queens in Cape Town—like the Hottie Moffie history that Heyns invents—might serve as an antidote to nation-state nationalism and to historical narratives that naturalize the contemporary order, and position it as in all ways better and freer than a uniformly oppressive past.Footnote ⁴⁸ Rather than make the present appear inevitable and the past self-evident, Cape Town’s queer royals offer us a window onto the complexity—political and intellectual, raced, gendered, and sexed—of the colonial and apartheid past. These glimpses of mid- and late-twentieth-century Cape Town do not, as is commonplace, produce the apartheid-era city as an exceptional place in an exceptional country bound to an exceptional political regime. Cape Town appears as African, imperial, and queer; life under apartheid is characterized not only by spectacular violence and collective resistance, but also by difficult-to-classify critiques and pleasures.