According to the mainstream media, most individuals who engage in sex work—the exchange of sexual services (such as prostitution, dancing, and pornography) for cash or other trade—do so under some measure of force or coercion. And in media stories about sex work in the Global South, the common emphasis on poverty, despair, and criminal networks further diminishes the idea that sex workers have any personal or political agency. However, sex workers have long challenged these characterizations, and To Live Freely in This World offers a rich and nuanced documentation of sex worker activism across seven African countries (Botswana, Kenya, Mauritius, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda). Drawing from participant observation and interviews with over 200 activists, allies, and sex workers, Chi Adanna Mgbako shows how African sex worker-rights activists are blossoming, confronting challenges, and contributing to African feminist debates about sex work, while also resisting the dominant narrative that all sex workers are victims who want and need rescue.

To explain the emergence, goals, and activities of this nascent movement, Chapter 1 opens with a description of an outreach excursion led by the Sex Worker Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) and the Sisonke movement in Cape Town, South Africa. These sex worker–led organizations conduct HIV/AIDS prevention, advocacy, and empowerment work with sex workers in the city, and their work addresses their many immediate needs for health care and safer working conditions. The chapter then explains and illustrates with personal stories how, in the African context of poverty, under a legacy of colonialism, sex work is a rational economic choice that deserves protection.

Chapters 2 and 3 then draw from Mgbako’s interviews and observations to explain the many challenges sex workers face in Africa. Chapter 2 shows that the deepest source of harm is the criminalization of prostitution, which increases sex workers’ vulnerabilities to police abuse, violence from clients, poor working conditions, social stigma, and discrimination from health-care providers. In Chapter 3, Mgbako then explains how these harms intersect with the criminalization of homosexuality (in six of the seven countries studied) and are compounded for sex workers who are also transgender, queer, migrants, and/or HIV positive.

Yet even as criminalization has harmed sex workers, Chapter 4 discusses how this has fostered African sex workers’ political consciousness and illustrates the different stages and forms of sex worker activism. For example, South African sex workers’ organizing is highly developed, encompassing both health service provision and advocacy by sex workers, while in Mauritius, sex worker organizing is only in the beginning stages.

Chapter 5 then describes the intersectional orientation of sex worker organizing in Africa: There is solidarity between sex workers and other similarly marginalized groups, including women, persons with HIV/AIDS, and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community. However, this solidarity is never without tensions and power struggles. In one example that Mgbako provides, sex work has not featured on the African feminist (and feminist-scholarly) agenda because of many African feminist leaders’ religious and moral objections. But when the police began to harass sex workers on the Zimbabwean streets as part of a “no loitering” campaign, and this harassment extended to “ordinary” women, Zimbabwean feminist organizations began to oppose police practices with and on behalf of sex workers.

Even if sex worker organizing has not always been unified or harmonious across Africa, activists have employed a number of strategies documented by Mgbako in Chapter 6. Because many sex workers in Africa desperately need legal assistance and health care, service provision has been essential to advocacy. The movement has also worked to diversify itself beyond cisgender women, and it has additionally engaged in public awareness work to inform the public about sex workers’ struggles. And in South Africa, sex worker activists have gone as far as to wage a campaign to decriminalize prostitution.

Of course, the sex worker–rights movement in Africa has faced resistance. Chapter 7 explores the ways that activists have confronted religious opposition, rehabilitation programs that provide (insufficient) job retraining, and “political whorephobia” (p. 175), and it discusses how they have resisted all of this by, for example, waging court challenges and holding public forums with religious leaders. The book’s Epilogue situates the African sex worker-rights movement in a global perspective to show how it has aligned with other activists in the Global North and South.

Unlike many popular and scholarly works about sex work that provide polarizing stories emphasizing sex workers’ victimization or agency, this book is a thoughtful, nuanced, and engaging intervention. While she does not shy away from discussing the many challenges sex workers face in Africa, the author also does not portray sex workers as victims of their circumstances. Instead, she presents rich descriptions of sex worker–rights organizations and firs- person narratives of sex workers as complex individuals who rationally negotiate—and resist—a complicated and dangerous sociolegal and economic terrain.

In addition to providing a sophisticated and thoughtful characterization of sex workers, Mgbako notably does not treat Africa as a homogenous continent regarding sex workers’ conditions and activism. While her discussion of sex worker activism in different countries was uneven (there was more information about South Africa than many of the other countries, likely because it has the oldest and most developed movement), the reader will learn about the unique challenges and activism strategies for sex workers across the continent. But Mgbako is also clear that the conditions faced by sex workers here are not unique or exceptionally “African.” In fact, sex workers in the United States (and elsewhere) also routinely face police abuse, stigma, and physical violence, among other difficulties.

From a scholarly perspective, the book is not rooted explicitly in a particular theoretical tradition (although Mgbako does note its contribution to African feminist scholarship). However, social movement scholars will find that its content could inform their theorizing about resource mobilization and organizing strategies, particularly within marginalized communities. Additionally, this book highlights the importance of intersectionality theory for the study of social movements by making clear that one cannot look at such movements in isolation.

One shortcoming of Mgbako’s work is that it presumes readers to be familiar with the origins and influence of the current global antiprostitution movement, which has promulgated the notion that sex workers do not choose their work but are instead forced and defrauded into this (i.e., they are sex trafficked); in fact, the most comprehensive discussion of this argument did not come until Chapter 7. Given Mgbako’s position that African sex worker-rights activism directly opposes this conflation of sex work with sex trafficking, it would have been useful to learn more about the power of the contemporary antiprostitution/antitrafficking movement, which is very powerful and led in large part by U.S.-based activists, and how it has worked to influence sex work policy in the various African countries that the author studied more specifically.

Altogether, To Live Freely in this World is an exciting, engaging, and timely book. On August 11, 2015, Amnesty International was another in a growing line of advocacy groups to oppose the criminalization of prostitution, and lawmakers, activists, and many sex workers across the globe responded quickly to express their support. With Mgbako’s work in mind, it will be interesting to see how African sex workers contribute to these discussions going forward.