UNLEASHED

Notwithstanding the immense achievements in the writing of African histories and the fact that anthropologists, demographers, and historians such as Charles van Onselen, Luise White, Claire Robertson and Martin Klein, John Caldwell, Nancy Rose Hunt, and Jane Parpart were already working on sexuality and reproduction issues by the late 1980s, the 1990s unleashed a fresh and unrelenting momentum in the critique of twentieth-century intellectual and political traditions that marginalized sexuality.Footnote ⁴ This critique intersected with the ‘post’ articulations (postmodernism, postcolonialism, poststructuralism) emerging outside of the field of African history. The spirit of this critique engaged five related developments. First was the increasing discontent with ‘metanarratives’ (Marxist and liberal) in the treatment of nation, class, and sometimes gender. Second was the growing skepticism regarding economic functionalism. A third dimension was dissatisfaction with existing categories, in keeping with the broader theoretical rejection of neat binaries; fourth was an analytical disposition to highlight hybridity, decenteredness, and ambivalence and, lastly, an insistence on the centrality of discourse in historical experience.Footnote ⁵ The upshot was the emergence of new historical perspectives including, as noted by Iris Berger, ‘woman-centered histories organized around sexuality and reproduction’.Footnote ⁶

Additionally, the study of African sexualities was embroiled in successive positive and negative developments on the continent, the latter including African political leaders’ intimidating and unsympathetic utterances with regard to homosexuality and the former including the progressive enactment of a rights-based constitution in South Africa as well as other neoliberal democratization movements on the continent after 1990.Footnote ⁷ The brutal explosion of the HIV/AIDS epidemic was another critical element. Response to these continental developments opened up space for audacious discussion of and organizing around sexuality and gender, making it possible to seriously rethink sex and to ask bold and hitherto unimaginable questions. Hence, transitioning into the new century, the last few decades of the twentieth century witnessed the production of cutting-edge studies that provided analytical frameworks, methodologies, foundational materials, and critiques that signaled a new phase in the historiography of gender and sexuality in Africa. Even though in some ways still ‘fugitive’, standalone manuscripts and articles appeared more frequently in conventional history journals.Footnote ⁸

MATERIALIST AND FUNCTIONALIST FOUNDATIONS

To a large extent, much of the influential work from the mid-1970s through the early 1990s was framed within a materialist and functionalist feminist framework that implicitly treated sexuality as being structured by and in the service of gender. At the core of this approach was a lens that saw gender as a socially constructed product of patriarchal hierarchies and, hence, as fundamental to an analysis of sexuality. Within this framework, sexuality was treated as one aspect of women's oppression and gendered inequality and as a set of social practices that had to be contextualized in relation to other gendered institutions and social and economic processes. Hence, instead of situating sexuality at the core of analysis, scholars focused on gendering institutions and processes such as colonialism, law, marriage, urbanization, agricultural production, courts, and migration as well as class formation and struggle.

Three interconnected strands united this historiography. The first documented anxieties generated by colonialism's intrusive policies that distinguished between ‘normal’ sexuality (heterosexual, monogamous) and ‘perverse’, ‘immoral’, and ‘dangerous’ sexuality (same-sex, extramarital, and prostitution). The second strand considered official attempts to control individuals’ sexual practices through surveillance, modes of governance, and medical, educational, and legal controls. The historiography was also replete with studies documenting the atomizing impact of colonial policies on individuals. This atomization threatened to erode established social boundaries fostering what the colonial establishment deemed ‘abnormal’ sexualities. In summary, the overwhelmingly tendency of much of this historiography was to see a hegemonic colonial superstructure as encoded in particular sexual desires, practices, and forms of encounter. Put differently, the colonial encounter shaped the experience, organization, and understanding of diverse sexual desires and practices.

A key figure in this historiography was Charles van Onselen.Footnote ⁹ In his provocative 1976 study of migrant labor in colonial Zimbabwe, he argued that mining companies supported prostitution and homosexuality among African men as partial compensation for the companies’ inhumane and oppressive treatment of their employees. In his 1984 study, The Small Matter of a Horse: The Life of ‘Nongoloza’ Mathebula 1867–1948, set on the Witwatersrand, van Onselen expounded his theory of ‘sex in the service of industry and capital’. In both these studies, he attributed homosexuality to ‘racial capitalism’ (‘deprivations experienced within the confines of a total institution’) as opposed to sexual fondness or desire by some men for other men.Footnote ¹⁰The Small Matter of a Horse, one of the earliest treatises to tackle same-sex sexuality head-on, was in many aspects provocative and groundbreaking in its claims, envisaging homosexuality, for example, as a rational strategy to protect participants from sexually transmitted diseases.Footnote ¹¹ Van Onselen's interpretation of homosexuality was no doubt informed by Marxist analysis and demonstrated the conceptual potential and methodological thoroughness that this approach offered, even in the exploration of hitherto ‘taboo’ topics such as sexuality and homosexuality.

I was formed in the milieu of scholars coming from the materialist/political economy tradition exemplified by van Onselen but not limited to him – a tradition that increasingly took culture seriously. These scholars included, among others, Edna Bay, Steven Feierman, Susan Geiger, Jane Guyer, Margaret Jean Hay, Cheryl Johnson, Kristin Mann, Jane Parpart and Kathleen Staudt, Karen Sacks, Sharon Stichter, and Luise White, whose published and unpublished work, networking, and generous mentorship laid the foundation upon which gender and sexuality studies were articulated beyond the Southern Africa region.Footnote ¹² For example, Margaret Jean Hay's unpublished but much-read dissertation on Luo women shed a great deal of light on the construction of gender and sexuality in the midst of a turbulent economy while Steven Feierman always understood peasants to be gendered.Footnote ¹³ Similarly, Jane Guyer set out to demonstrate the ways in which marriage and family were highly plastic, with the implication that masculinity and femininity were malleable as well.Footnote ¹⁴

Luise White's award-winning study of gender relations, sexuality, and class in colonial Nairobi portrayed that city's prostitutes as dynamic and rational economic actors whose engagement in individual accumulation also contributed to the reproduction of devastated rural economies.Footnote ¹⁵ In numerous ways, White demonstrates how the retailing of sex by Nairobi prostitutes took place in direct relationship to the larger colonial political economy, including wage labor.Footnote ¹⁶ The entanglement of labor migrancy and heterosexuality explored in White's The Comforts of Home found precursors in work by Dunbar Moodie with Vivienne Ndatshe and British Sibuyi, and by Patrick Harries.Footnote ¹⁷ At the most general level, Moodie's work with Ndatshe and Sibuyi considers all sexual activities in the mine compounds as facsimiles of and modeled after generational (gerontocracy) and gender relations (patriarchy) in rural communities. Male-male sexual activity indirectly functioned to maintain these alliances and bonds within the subsistence political economy at home. This approach makes a number of persuasive points. It suggests, for instance, that in spite of the demeaning subordination that some men felt in becoming ‘male wives’, they considered themselves ‘on business’ and they did not remain gendered female throughout their lives. Equally important, it suggests that many non-Tsonga migrant men who ended up as ‘male wives’ in ‘mine marriages’ accepted bridewealth from their male ‘husbands’ that enabled them to return to their rural homes as ‘men’.Footnote ¹⁸

If the work of White, Moodie with Ndatshe and Sibuyi, and Harris presented heterosexuality and homosexuality as dependent variables of socioeconomic changes, others laid the foundation upon which we began to think about sexuality in a different way. For instance, Diana Jeater saw the most significant transformation of colonization as the planting of a revolutionary seed that enabled men and women to begin thinking about sexuality as a private matter separate from lineage authority and obligations.Footnote ¹⁹ Megan Vaughan and Carol Summers explored the history of sexually transmitted diseases in colonial East and Central Africa and discourses of African sexuality with related practices that arose out of efforts to deal with this biomedical problem, a theme taken up in succeeding studies.Footnote ²⁰ While Vaughan and Summers concentrated on infections and biomedicine, Nancy Rose Hunt coupled analyses of biomedical narratives with stories about airplanes, bicycles, and male initiation to unmask how concerns about strange new objects and procedures brought about different gender relations and the medicalization of childbirth.Footnote ²¹ Together, these studies revealed, in many different ways, how ordinary women and men exploited gendered discourses to guide their practices and make sense of their sexuality. Emerging from these studies was an appreciation for how the meanings of gender and sexuality were constantly in the process of negotiation, resistance, acquiescence, and reconstruction – processes that troubled neat categories and monolithic approaches.

Since the turn of the century, there has been both continuity and expansion in terms of approaches and research topics. As regards approach, the work of Lisa A. Lindsay and Stephen F. Miescher, Ruth Morgan and Saskia Wieringa, and the individually-authored work of Miescher have built on earlier studies.Footnote ²² In terms of topics, Dorothy L. Hodgson and Sheryl McCurdy, Henriette Gunkel, Lorelle D. Semley, and Wairimu Ngaruya Njambi have all demonstrated considerable continuity with prior scholarship.Footnote ²³ Expansion of previous approaches and topics is seen in the rigorous work by Epprecht who, for example, has exposed the detrimental ramifications of the historical denial of what he terms ‘bisexuality’ in sub-Saharan Africa and debunked historical representations of Africa as singularly sexualized and as a place of static, ‘barbaric’ heterosexuality. Examining the broad themes of homophobia, intolerance, silence, and secrecy, Morgan and Wieringa's volume draws our attention to the tensions and complications existing between sexual behaviors and identity labels. And by investigating the context specific meanings of both ‘Africa’ and ‘homosexuality’, scholars such as Neville Wallace Hoad draw our attention to other local and national understandings of these concepts, destabilizing the seemingly natural given definitions that are often in use.Footnote ²⁴ Yet, in spite of the emergence of these impressive strides in the study of gender and sexuality in African history, challenges and gaps in the field remain. Reflecting on some of my published studies and to a small extent on my teaching experience, in the remainder of this article I discuss these challenges and gaps and propose some future directions.

CHALLENGES, GAPS, AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Retrospectively, I see that almost all my work while anchored in feminist analysis skirted around the subject of sexuality in Buganda's history. For instance, my article on women and Buganda state formation, showed how marriage, which I termed ‘elite polygyny’, was central to the evolution of the sophisticated sociopolitical state of Buganda.Footnote ²⁵ In researching this topic, it became evident to me that Buganda female sexuality was at the core of this evolving system but, in that article, I was only able to demonstrate that women's sexuality was defined in relation to their class position and was not a simple function of gender. I omitted asking some key questions that remain pertinent for historians of precolonial Africa: what constituted sexuality? what was its nature? how did it evolve and how was it lived, enforced, or contested? That piece also touched on the issue of ‘obscenity’ but only as a methodological issue. I remember being amused and frustrated at the same time, erasing my tapes several times and asking my interviewees to start afresh each time they uttered obscenities. Yet there was a pattern and consistency in these utterances. Could this form of ‘talk’ teach us something about Buganda's (or any precolonial polity's) attitudes towards the body, sexuality, and the nature of male and female desires? In what direct or circuitous way was such talk about sex crucially tied to power, in the past or present? These are questions that have not been answered by scholars of Buganda's history including those who examine motherhood.Footnote ²⁶ To a certain extent, my current revisions of the Buganda Queen Mother's ‘sex scandal’ manuscript address the centrality of women's libido to state constitutionalism.

Issues of sexuality could have come up in my 1992 contribution to Karen Tranberg Hansen's edited volume on domesticity, but then again, while the investigative framework was gender sensitive, it was too narrow to capture the nuances of sexuality in the educational sphere.Footnote ²⁷ Currently in Uganda, same-sex schools are being reproached as being seedbeds of homosexuality. It is perhaps needless to mention that more recent studies are documenting female same-sex intimacies in these spaces, particularly in the South African context.Footnote ²⁸ Were same-sex relationships practiced at Gayaza, Namagunga, or in any of the first boarding schools that I looked at or for that matter in early twentieth-century African boarding school settings? And if so, were they carried out with the knowledge of the dormitory matrons and missionaries? What form or forms of sexuality was entailed in these same-sex relationships and how might they relate to the volume's central argument regarding domesticity?

Beyond schools, is it possible, for example, to document the environment within which children were socialized into sexualities and whether they were given chances to observe and enjoy the continuing changes in their bodies? How were issues of sexual knowledge and bodies addressed differently in households and schools? How did spatial arrangements, discourses, and oral literature communicate or miscommunicate sexual knowledge to children? Silences surrounding the topic of children and sexuality that assume childhood innocence take away children's agency as historical actors. On the other hand, Marxist anthropologists’ old argument that children are a form of lineage wealth ignores the fact that African cultures controlled fertility even before the advent of biomedicine. In many African societies, this control usually preceded marriage, and was operationalized indirectly and, at times, directly through communal hegemonic influence over courtship and cohabitation, and surveillance of all forms of sexual expression. Is it possible to uncover a new understanding of polygamous sexuality that goes beyond men's desire to have sexual access to multiple partners, family interests in producing children for labor needs, or communities’ valuation of children as forms of wealth and status? How about uncovering the historical development of sexual technologies including indigenous enhancers such as herbs, jellies, and objects?

The publication of my 1996 essay on researching and writing about Buganda's Queen Mother Irene Drusilla Namaganda (1896–1957) was prompted by the need to share the triumphs and difficulties many scholars seem to encounter in the field when their research projects raise concerns about sex.Footnote ²⁹ Among the shocks I encountered was the revelation that some information had been purposely hidden from me by two key sources who I had interviewed for my PhD thesis. I discovered that my age and social standing in Buganda as well as close proximity to these individuals accounted for this. Fortunately, because one of the sources had given some important clues to Luise White, who later passed them on to me, I was able to return to the field with pointed questions that my interviewee could not deflect. One of a number of lessons I learned during this fieldwork that may seem obvious but is worth repeating is that researching sexuality, or other topics that communities consider ‘taboo’, is indeed very tricky and no single modus operandi can be prescribed. A researcher has to be constantly alert, sensitive to social networks, and methodologically flexible to get people to open up and talk about that which they perceive to be very private and taboo topics. Perhaps more than any other type of research, sexuality research raises a number of special methodological questions. Is it easier for elders to talk about their own and others’ sexuality to strangers than it is for them to talk to younger individuals who share their ethnicity? Who should do research on whose sexuality? We cannot assume that cultural affinity or same sexual orientation inevitability yields the desired effect, nor the converse. How do we circumnavigate the unanticipated barriers, especially in face of the centrality of oral sources to African history?

At another level, a key challenge in writing the history of sexuality in Africa remains the quality (nature and reliability) and quantity (availability) of documentary sources. Numerous scholars have highlighted the racist, Eurocentric biases in many of the archival documents used for historical reconstruction. This is complicated by the fact that most African people do/did not write down information about their intimate lives. For the most part, historians have had little alternative but to go again to problematic archives to surmise individual or group actions, restricting their exploration to the level of discourse analysis. Given the undeniable advances made so far, the deeply engrained assumptions that still surround the study of sexuality in Africa must be further challenged. For instance, one such supposition views sexuality as something that cannot be measured because it involves behavior that is private and often out of sight as well as proscribed and taboo. One might ask, for instance, is there room for a more rigorous use by labor and environmental historians of historical demography or demographic data where it exists?

Granted, such data has inbuilt biases, but historical demography and other statistical approaches promise to offer historians new possibilities for understanding the history of sexuality. Examination of subjective (qualitative) data gathered from other primary sources such as oral literature, letters, aural and visual media, missionary archives, court records, and diaries in conjunction with measureable forms of evidence has potential to cast light on changing sexualities. One area where history and demography have already come together is in the study of slavery and the slave trades.Footnote ³⁰ Granted very few scholars of Africa have been as excoriated as demographer John Caldwell, but this should not discourage us from applying demographic approaches to topics beyond slavery. To face the challenges of linking demographic data to sexuality, historians will have to be vigilant and innovative. This will entail an even closer relationship between the disciplines of history and demography, a relationship akin to that currently enjoyed between history and anthropology. The fact that utilizing statistical sources for historical reconstruction will not be easy should not hinder those with novel questions from trying. Already some of the work done at these disciplinary crossroads, particularly by Jennifer Johnson-Hanks and Caroline Bledsoe, provides models.Footnote ³¹

In my research published in the early 2000s, discourses of sexuality were everywhere but, as in my previous works, ‘sex’ did not make it to the center of my analysis.Footnote ³² Those pieces are useful to consider because they suggest more general challenges and gaps in existing studies of sexuality in Africa. Current research generally focuses on narrow temporal periods and on the colonial and postcolonial eras; studies focusing on precolonial experience are for the most part missing and there is an analogous thinness with respect to themes and geographic range. Currently, Southern Africa predominates with respect to the production of knowledge about sexual identities/sexualities and, within that geographic region, the focus is frequently directed towards textual and cultural representations of male same-sex desire with research on female same-sex intimacies remaining very underdeveloped. Again, in the Southern African context, the history of sexuality in mine compounds or prisons takes precedence over the history of other social settings. Sexual activity in a range of other occupations such as teaching, the clergy (including nuns), farming, and the medical profession surely also deserve attention. Extensive research at South African mining sites reveals that desire has no fixed object; it gravitates between circumstantial heterosexuality and homosexuality. There is a need to explore whether desire and practice in one locale impacted desire and practice in another locale (urban vis-à-vis rural) outside the Southern African region. For example, what does the discourse about the size of men's penises by the ‘wicked women’ of Kampala-Kibuga tell us about desires and sexual practices between urban and rural areas?

This brings me to a thornier issue regarding the type of students, and new learning environments, that I found upon returning to teaching in 2009. By then, not only African historiography had shifted, but there were substantive changes in students as a category and substantive transformations in university's classrooms. At the most general level, my pre-1999 classes tended to attract an assortment of students, most of whom had little or no background training in either African history or feminist theory. A number were children of recent African immigrants to Canada. Those who were Canadian-born often expressed an interest in travelling to or pursuing a career related to Africa. Ideologically, they frequently subscribed to radical or progressive ideas or showed keen interest in subscribing to them. Generally students were thirsty for content and it was easy to sustain their undivided attention for a two-hour lecture. The information technology revolution was just beginning; the library, professor, and print media remained central to student learning.

When I returned to teaching in 2009, information technology had become central to student culture and there were substantive changes in students’ attributes and orientations. Content is still important to students, but now they get it from multiple sources and sites. Moreover, a sizeable number of my students had already been introduced to key theories in gender, women, masculinity, and African studies. While a number refer to their sexual orientation in class from time to time, so far, in contrast to my first generation of students, I have encountered only two who consider themselves feminists. In addition, while several of my pre-1999 students were ‘returning’ or ‘mature’ students, my current students are relatively young – most have 12 years of pre-university education. In comparison to my twentieth-century students’ concern with ‘equality’, the orientation of these twenty-first-century students to personal and sexual issues is largely influenced by ‘rights’ based discourse. This is all magnificent, but it also comes with challenges. How do we train this generation to become good historians of gender and sexuality in Africa without exoticising or eroticising the study of African gender and sexualities or continuing to approach these topics only in relation to colonialism (reacting to or impacting upon)? Facing these challenges has meant that as a teacher I have had to navigate a shift in the selection of pedagogical materials as well as in my instructional approach.

Suffice it to say that with my twenty-first-century as compared to my twentieth-century students, more time is spent reflecting on the different orientations they bring to the study of African history, particularly in the areas of gender, sexualities, and race. Many are excited by theories of deconstruction and are generally attracted to Michel Foucault's analytical framework. This is not surprising since scholarship on sexuality and, specifically in African history, has overwhelmingly been influenced by Foucault.Footnote ³³ Nonetheless, while Foucault's influence is laudable and has led to some outstanding and informative analytical studies to date, my classes struggle to see how the field might move beyond the research agendas his work provides, especially in regards to examining the relationships between institutions and individuals. The Foucauldian legacy tends to over-emphasize the link between ‘illegality’ and ‘identity’ that, I believe, needs to be revisited and transcended. While the argument that discourse defines deviant behavior and, hence, deviant identity is attractive, such analysis masks or suffocates the voices of the subaltern – the so-called deviants – whose intentions have to be conjured up from the dominant discourse itself.

This brings me to a related issue that is closely related to my decade's experience in Uganda, particularly what I saw, heard, and read leading to the acrimonious homosexuality debate. In class, I have found it more productive to begin discussion by looking at a contemporary manifestation than to plunge into history. With this approach, I call upon my students to reflect not only on the frameworks, but also to be alert to the language and terms employed in popular debates. In the study of gender and sexuality in Africa, as is in the current situation in many African countries, nothing has been more controversial than the prefixes ‘homo-’, ‘bi-’, and ‘hetero-’ and identities such as ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’.Footnote ³⁴ ‘Heterosexuality’, for one, has received little attention in the current scholarship but is a construct that demands closer scrutiny. Sexuality in Africa, as elsewhere, was and is a very complex phenomenon. ‘Heterosexuality’ needs to be historicized with the same rigor as efforts to historicize ‘homosexuality’. The current totalizing approach to opposite-sex-sexuality that analyses heterosexuality exclusively in Foucauldian terms of power limits the questions that can be asked about changing sexualities in Africa. The danger in not historicizing the term is that we presuppose what heterosexuality was and what practices it entailed. Terms such as ‘lesbian’ and ‘homosexual’ have increasingly been shown to be problematic when used to refer to historical same-sex relationships in Africa.Footnote ³⁵ The term ‘heterosexual’ should be viewed as equally troubling and in need of problematization. Even if the dominant culture/form in many African contexts was ‘heterosexual’ (opposite-sex sexuality), questions exist over whether room remained for marginal and alternative sexualities to trigger or affect sexual change. Did changes in opposite-sex sexual culture (for example, detaching reproductive sexuality from kinship control) generate shifts in sexuality?

The experiential and existential dimensions of sexuality, which are often oddly lacking in existing studies, point to a big gap in our knowledge. Marxist approaches for example that have investigated prostitution mainly from economic perspectives and sidestepped examining sex work in terms of identity and desire need to be transcended. Is it possible to belatedly recover White's prostitutes’ desires, likes and dislikes, expectations, techniques, and practices, for example? Did these change over time? Besides, what happened beyond the streets or verandas – what happened on/in the bed, between the sheets, or wherever? Might future research areas include male prostitution, or was this profession female gender-specific?

Similarly, anthropologist Harriet Lyons's stimulating recent work on the debates surrounding female genital cutting provokes us as historians to think about the value of studying coitus and clitoris as aspects of the history of sexuality in Africa.Footnote ³⁶ This move could be of great consequence for understanding sexual change in Africa, especially from the mid-twentieth century onward. Pornography, ‘obscenities’, sexuality within African traditional religions, and the experiences of children are all promising areas for future research.