ABSTRACT
The first censure of local sexual practices by European morality took place not through the law but through the salvatory mission of Christianity. But the arrival of pioneer settlements, with the bureaucratic apparatus of civil and criminal regulation, meant that Christian morality soon had the backing of a nascent infrastructure. Attempts by missionaries to 'civilize' through the construction of sin and the regulation of individual bodily practices were supplemented by the developmental requirements of colonial capital – the bureaucratic regulation of the social body. There is no doubt that some black Zimbabwean men do have sex with each other, and, as with anyone else, this is carried out with varying degrees of furtiveness and openness by men occupying a wide variety of social positions. The end result of substantive disparity in convictions is that it contributes to a discourse of discrimination which produces homosexuality as 'a white man's disease'.
