Slay queens, sugar babies and blessees: South Africa’s obsession with the urban black Jezebel

Jezebel is a biblical figure who became a cultural and literary symbol representing wicked women. The symbol encompasses vices such power-lust, sexual deviance, low-cunning and seduction.  In the context of racial stereotyping, the Jezebel archetype can be summarized as a hypersexual characterization of black women. This stereotype is invoked whenever black female characters and real black women are reduced to being sex-crazed, cunning and manipulative – as beasts lacking control over their own carnal desire and simultaneously seducing men into disregarding their sexual morals. An obvious contradiction – but it stuck regardless.

The Jezebel archetype was conceptualized centuries ago, the moment white colonists, slavers and missionaries encountered Africans. It was essential to narratives used to justify the sexual violation and degradation of black women during colonialism, slavery, Jim Crow and Apartheid. It prevails in modern media globally. Now we need to question why it’s so prevalent in narratives about black women in South Africa today. It’s time we talk about why this country is obsessed with the mythology of the urban black Jezebel in particular.

If you are someone who is active on social media or engages traditional media, you have already met the Urban Black Jezebel. You’ve met her through TV shows such as Skeem Saam, Generations, Uzalo and The Queen. You’ve met her through discussions on radio, talk shows and investigative journalism shows like check point or 3^rd Degree. She comes packaged in different women, real and fictional but aside from a few minor details her story is the same: The Jezebel is a young black woman, probably between the ages of 16 and 30. She is beautiful and ambitious, comes from a working class or middle-class background and she wants something— anything from alcohol at parties to a car to marriage for socio-economic mobility.

It doesn’t matter what it is that she wants, what matters is that she uses men’s attraction to her to get it. Her body is an economic tool in some capacity. What matters even more is that this pursuit of wealth, success or fame ends in disaster for The Jezebel. This failure and suffering of The Jezebel to obtain what she wants is central to our cultural and societal mythology.

We’ve been obsessed with the elusive lives of sugar babies and daddies since the early 2000s. I recall Hummer Man the urban legend that circulated in the mid to late 2000s. The story went that a wealthy man who drove a hummer went around spreading an STI to young women who were willing to sleep with him for money, he had worm infested genitalia and would infect you if you were so taken by his wealth that you would sleep with him. The young women would be unware of this affliction (worms crawling from his penis) until the morning after. When he would leave them diseased – with worms crawling out of their vaginas. To add to the horror, the infected women would have to wear diapers for the rest of their lives and feed the worms cow liver, so they wouldn’t consume their flesh.

 

As absurd as the story sounds today, many people (including a primary-schooling me) believed that urban legend to be true. The moral panic about the Hummer Man spread to the point where the Department of Health in Limpopo and the Free State had to issue statements denying the existence of the Hummer Man and that there was a genital worm epidemic which was sending young women to clinics and hospitals in droves. In the end it did not matter that the story was a hoax, its cultural impact is on par with the Satanic Panic that took place at around the same time.

 

It remains in our collective memory, you might have shuddered as you read me recounting it, I know I shudder as retold it. This urban legend served as a cautionary tale to young black women to beware sex/promiscuity and to especially beware using their bodies as economic tools – or suffer the most horrific and shameful consequences. This is important because punishment is always part of these stories about slay queens. Fast forward to 2018: The Hummer Man myth has been dispelled but the mythology of the black Jezebel continues to thrive. The machine of moral panic and sexual policing is slightly more sophisticated than an urban legend spread by word of mouth. However, the stories that now reach people via the internet, print, television and radio have only advanced the speed at which sensationalised, sexually moralistic narratives can reach people. The quality of storytelling remains primitive – without nuance or originality – and you can see this in the repetitiveness of the stories. We are consuming the same trite stories through characters that only differ in name. As a result, general discourse on sex, the sex trade, materialism and wealth in South African remain as base as they were a decade ago.

 

‘The danger of the Jezebel mythology is that it has become the primary narrative for discussing young black women and sex’

 

The strong reactions the Hummer Man urban legend provokes to this day gets to the heart of sugar baby mythology and mythology in general. It does not matter if the stories are based in reality. They provoke such a strong emotional response that our suspension of disbelief will allow us to internalise extreme, inaccurate and dangerous messages. Messages that encourage fear and moral panic more than they encourage honest and rational discourse about poverty, sex work, STIs and power dynamics.

 

The danger of the Jezebel mythology is that it has become the primary narrative for discussing young black women and sex. Whether it be when a young woman is falsely accused of being organised sexual entertainment for famous rappers or numerous young women who are accused of being the president’s mistresses in real life and the topic trends nationally for days. Chimamanda Adichie’s ‘Danger of A Single Story’ has never been more evident than in how young black women, as sexual beings, are discussed in South Africa.

 

The stories that a society tells are reflective of its fears, vices, hopes, bigotry and consciousness. This is particularly true of the mythology we construct, which is why mythological stories written thousands of years ago are still being retold and adapted in media today. They live on because they are stories that are thematically relatable but, emotionally provocative and, most importantly, narratively simplistic. From the dawn of humanity myth and folklore have been our way of creating simple explanations for the complex phenomena we see around us.

 

Ultimately, this is why it doesn’t matter whether the Jezebel is a real woman or a fictional character, whether she is truly guilty of sexual subversion or not. Because the story of the urban black Jezebel is not about lustful and materialistic women, it is about South Africans.  It is about what perplexes us and the easy answers we reach to in order to make sense of complex issues.

 

Unfortunately, this mythology leads to us discussing fictional STIs instead of real ones. It leads to society characterizing high school girls as harlots who chase after older men for money instead being angered at the fact that older men prey on poor underage girls in townships, villages and cities. We speak more about Slay Queens than we do about the reality of sexual exploitation in the work place and the reality that in government departments nation-wide the only way for qualified female graduates to get employment is by blood relation or laying on their backs.

 

The state broadcaster claims to use the mediums of TV and radio to tell stories that reflect our society and shed light on social issues. However, on SABC more stories are told about the Urban Black Jezebel than about the rapist – even though a young black woman in South Africa is more likely to experience sexual violence than she is to engage in consensual sex trade. Watching SABC TV shows you would believe there is an epidemic of sugar babies and not one of rape in this country. Every month there is a headline about how a female celebrity slept her way to the top while exposes the issue of sexual exploitation and abuse in the entertainment industry are few and far in between.

 

South Africans are more disgusted when black women use their agency to enter transactional relationships than when we are molested as young girls in our families, raped at educational institutions, sexually harassed and exploited at work. Our reactionary script writers, novelists, talk show hosts and journalists pander to the misogynistic and racist beliefs that already exist about black women and the public consumes these stories uncritically due to confirmation bias – so they sell. It is a harmful feedback loop where neither content producer or consumer is willing to choose what is subversive and though-provoking over what is simply salacious. So, we get the same story told repeatedly with different characters where there was an opportunity to tell tales that hold up a mirror to society and tell us the uncomfortable truths about our society, communities, families and ourselves. That is the moral crisis of our time.

 

South Africa, you incessantly look for social decay and sexual immorality between the legs of black women and ignore it all around you. The problem isn’t slay queens, sugar babies and blesses – the problem is you.