Since the 1990s, political and religious leaders across sub-Saharan Africa have made repeated public pronouncements condemning homosexuality as ‘un-African’. Such statements rely on a notion of ‘African sexuality’ as a coherent set of values and practices about sex – a sexual culture – that presumably prevails throughout the space inhabited by people we call Africans. But what are the territorial boundaries of this space, who is included within it, how did it come to be? And how did this ‘Africa’ become associated with a normative sexual culture that (among other things) regards homosexuality as an alien practice? A number of scholars have sought to counter the myth of a primordial heterosexual Africa by adducing evidence of same-sex sexualities from various historical and geographical settings.Footnote 1 These studies, along with other critical works on sexuality in Africa, largely support the argument put forth in Marc Epprecht's masterful monograph, Heterosexual Africa?, which locates the origins of this concept in European, especially British, colonizers’ obsessions with sex and race.Footnote 2
Recognizing the colonial roots of contemporary African expressions of homophobia has been immensely productive, intellectually and politically, but as Keguro Macharia has argued, the prevailing scholarly consensus does not tell the whole story.Footnote 3 For one thing, colonialism does not account for precolonial sexual norms that may (or may not) have privileged heterosexual coupling for ostensibly endogenous cultural reasons.Footnote 4 Moreover, European colonialism is not the only global historical phenomenon with which Africans have had to contend. Notably missing from the prevailing scholarly consensus on ‘African sexuality’ is any sustained consideration of the relationships that so-called black Africans have historically had with presumptively non-black, non-European peoples. The trans-Saharan trade, for example, brought together peoples variously identified as black, Arab, or Berber; traditionalist, pagan, or Muslim; noble, commoner or slave – engendering discourses of sexuality, race, and culture that were not always or only mediated by Europeans. These discourses continue to reverberate today both north and south of the Sahara, yet they remain largely unexplored in studies of ‘African sexualities’.
Scholars of sexuality periodically seek to overcome what Ziad Bentahar calls the ‘disjunction’ of North and sub-Saharan Africa by including material from the North in works that aspire to continental coverage.Footnote 5 Both Vasu Reddy's survey and Sylvia Tamale's edited volume include one case study from Egypt, while Epprecht calls for ‘a continent-wide assessment of the scholarship on sexuality’, noting ‘the many evident parallels in the empirical data from around the continent, including north of the Sahara’.Footnote 6 But the focus of these and other works with a putatively continental perspective remains overwhelmingly or entirely on the sub-Saharan region.Footnote 7 A corresponding gap is palpable in scholarly treatments of sexuality in North Africa. In his monograph on ‘sexual marginalities’ in the Maghreb, for example, Malek Chebel discusses Arab and Berber practices interchangeably and depicts Maghrebian sexual culture as monolithic and timeless. A single reference to ‘le roi des nègres’ (‘the king of the negroes’) in an Arabic erotic tale indexes the Maghreb's historical relationship with sub-Saharan Africa, but the reference goes unanalyzed.Footnote 8 Joseph Massad and Jarrod Hayes are more attentive to issues of race and ethnicity in their respective analyses of the sexual politics of twentieth-century fiction from Egypt and the Maghreb, but both scholars still focus overwhelmingly on the encounter between national and European discourses.Footnote 9 To the extent that they (or the novels they discuss) engage regional formations, their visions extend eastward or westward, within the Arab world, only rarely venturing south towards the ‘land of the blacks’.
The disjunction of North and sub-Saharan Africa cannot be addressed simply by juxtaposing ethnographic, historical, or literary examples from the two regions. Rather, just as feminist scholars have progressed from ‘adding women’ to using gender to rethink the theoretical foundations of academic disciplines, so too must the inclusion of North Africa, the Sahara, and other contact zones require us to rethink what ‘African sexuality’ means in particular contexts and how those meanings have been constructed.Footnote 10 Accordingly, the first section of this article summarizes the scholarly consensus about the colonial origins of contemporary African homophobia. The second section analyzes the anti-gay rhetorics of Nigerian clerics, politicians, and intellectuals, and compares these with statements by Nigerian journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens that I collected as an ethnographer in the 1990s and early 2000s. The third section examines discourses of racialized sexuality that emerged from the trans-Saharan trade. Much of the data in the last section derives from the work of historians and literary critics; I also present my own analyses of fictional and nonfictional texts. Despite being authored mostly by and for elite men, the range of textual genres gives some indication of the ways in which historical phenomena like slavery and Arabization entailed forms of intimacy, affect, and knowledge that in turn gave rise to (competing, contradictory) discourses of race, gender, sexuality, and culture.Footnote 11
CONSENSUS: THE COLONIAL ROOTS OF AFRICAN HOMOPHOBIA
Scholarly attention to homosexuality in Africa burgeoned in 1994, when South Africa became the world's first nation to enshrine gay rights in its constitution. Shortly thereafter the rulers of several neighboring African states publicly condemned homosexuality as an immoral, ‘un-African’ practice that had been imported by white colonists.Footnote 12 Neville Hoad suggests that such statements, by Presidents Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Sam Nujoma of Namibia, and others, reflected the political anxieties of formerly ‘Frontline’ leaders who felt threatened by the end of apartheid and South Africa's rise as a regional hegemon.Footnote 13 In recent years, laws recriminalizing homosexuality and same-sex marriage have been passed throughout the continent (especially in anglophone countries), even as Western donor nations, nongovernmental organizations, and United Nations agencies have sought to make the protection of gay rights a condition of international aid.Footnote 14 In response to such efforts, a Ugandan lawmaker complained that ‘practices that are against African cultures are now classified as human rights’, while Senator and former Liberian First Lady Jewel Howard Taylor declared that homosexuality ‘is a criminal offence. It is un-African.’Footnote 15
Gay rights have posed a particular challenge for the global Anglican Communion ever since liberal bishops submitted a proposal in the late 1990s to allow individual dioceses to ordain gay and lesbian bishops and to recognize same-sex marriages. With the exception of six South Africans, the African bishops sided with conservatives from the global North in opposing the measure and criticized their liberal Western colleagues for attempting to impose ‘modern’ notions of morality on ‘traditional’ Christian and African cultures. The controversy resonated loudly in Nigeria, home to the largest Anglican province in the world. Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola complained, ‘You now have on campus [in Anglican seminaries] men and men cohabiting, which is against the African way of life.’Footnote 16 Hoad describes this rhetorical conflation of Christian morality and African tradition as a ‘phantasmatic’ reconstruction that ignores the church's history of repressing longstanding African kinship and sexual practices.Footnote 17
Among scholars and activists with pro-gay sympathies, the colonial origins of African homophobia are widely accepted.Footnote 18 Stephen Murray and Will Roscoe characterize the notion that homosexuality was absent in ‘traditional’ African societies as a ‘myth’ created by Europeans.Footnote 19 Similarly, Epprecht argues that the idea of ‘heterosexual Africa’ grew out of colonial attitudes and policies, especially the Victorian legal and moral code imposed throughout the British Empire.Footnote 20 Sir Richard Burton's notion of the ‘Sotadic zone’ is an iconic example of such colonial logic. Employing pseudo-scientific theories of climate, culture, and race, Burton argued that Arabs, southern Europeans, and peoples at similar latitudes were predisposed to homosexuality, while ‘the negro race is mostly untainted by sodomy and tribadism’.Footnote 21 Although northern Europeans were also supposedly ‘untainted’, Burton regarded Africans as primitive and vulnerable to moral contamination, justifying colonization and the Christian missions.Footnote 22
Most scholars agree that the notion of a monolithic ‘African sexuality’ is both empirically and theoretically untenable, but the concept endures thanks to the many social actors – political, ecclesiastical, and scholarly – who have found it amenable to their social and political goals.Footnote 23 By contrast, Tamale and her collaborators use the plural in African Sexualities to problematize the unity of ‘Africa’ while highlighting the ‘shared historical legacies inscribed in cultures and sexualities within the region’.Footnote 24 In her contribution to that volume, Jane Bennett emphasizes how diverse national and regional histories make the meanings of ‘African sexuality’ highly variable across space and time. By way of example, she reminds us that ‘in many parts of the continent (Saharan Africa, much of North Africa, the Sudan, what is now northern Nigeria, Niger, and Mali), Arab and Islamic influences were woven into African histories for many centuries prior to the disastrous 1884 Berlin Conference’.Footnote 25 If one considers also East Africa and the Western Indian Ocean, the geographic extent of Arab-Islamic influences looms large indeed. Yet those regions and the effects of centuries of social and other intercourse among sub-Saharan Africans, Arabs, Berbers, and other non-Europeans are underrepresented in scholarly critiques of ‘African sexuality’.
GAPS IN THE ANALYSIS: LESSONS FROM NIGERIA
Scholarly explanations about the colonial origins of the myth of ‘heterosexual Africa’ are largely convincing, but they do not account for all the features of contemporary African leaders’ homophobic discourses. In particular, they do not account for differences between Christian and Muslim rhetorics with respect to ‘African sexuality’. These differences can be difficult to spot because of superficial similarities. After Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan signed the Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act in December 2013, for example, Muslim and Christian representatives alike commended the government for defending the country's ‘traditional’ moral values. Indeed, Nigerian Christian leaders’ condemnations of homosexuality as ‘un-African’ are similar to the statements of Muslim spokesmen, such as Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, head of northern Nigeria's Sharia council, who, a decade prior to the anti-same-sex marriage law's passage, warned that accepting homosexuality ‘will lead to a further erosion of our accepted principles of morality’.Footnote 26 Akinola and Baba-Ahmed both portray the acceptance of homosexuality as culturally alien, but there is one crucial difference: whereas Christian leaders invoke ‘African’ values to reinforce their positions, their Muslim counterparts speak more vaguely of ‘us’ and ‘our accepted principles’ without clearly specifying an ethnic or racial referent. These subtle rhetorical differences index divergent ideological stances with respect to a putative ‘African sexuality’ and have broader implications for Nigerian national politics.Footnote 27
Archbishop Akinola has explained that his vocal opposition to homosexuality was motivated not by anticolonial fervor or other pastoral concerns, but by the competitive threat of Islam.Footnote 28 If the Anglican Church were perceived to condone homosexuality, the archbishop risked losing his flock to other Christian churches or, even worse, to Islam.Footnote 29 Far from renouncing the legacy of colonialism, Akinola and other Nigerian Christians view the acceptance of homosexuality by liberal Western churches as a betrayal of the missionaries’ teachings.Footnote 30 This sense of betrayal is heightened by Christians’ sensitivity to accusations from cultural nationalists, such as Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí, that they have forsaken authentically African traditions.Footnote 31 Islamic reformists are likewise inclined to paint virtually any Nigerian Christian or secularist, or any Muslim who deviates from the orthodox Islamic path, as an ‘imitator’ of the West. This Islamic version of ‘authenticity’ does not promote ostensibly indigenous African traditions, however, for such traditions, like the Hausa practice of spirit-possession known as bori, are typically condemned as ‘pagan’ vestiges of the theological ‘ignorance’ (jahiliya) that preceded Islam.Footnote 32 Accordingly, when Baba-Ahmed condemned the ‘erosion of our accepted principles of morality’, he could be heard as voicing solidarity with his homophobic Christian counterparts without necessarily endorsing their appeal to ‘the African way of life’.
Appeals to cultural traditions about sex are especially problematic for Muslim northern Nigerians, who are widely rumored to have a predilection for homosexuality. A character in Wole Soyinka's 1965 novel The Interpreters refers derisively to northern ‘Emirs and their little boys’, while a southern Nigerian journalist more recently asserted that ‘homosexuality thrives’ in the north, and that ‘it is a common practice among some in the elite classes to make use of the services of male homosexual prostitutes known as “Dan Daudu” in the Hausa language’.Footnote 33 The definitions are flawed (ɗan daudu simply means ‘man who acts like a woman’), but the existence in a Nigerian language of a seemingly indigenous category of feminine men who sometimes engage in sex with other men clearly challenges the myth of a primordial ‘heterosexual Africa’.Footnote 34 Reporters for the Lagos-based newspaper The News offered an alternative historical explanation to sustain that myth: ‘Gay culture was never a tradition in Kano or any part of Nigeria. The belief was that it was introduced into Northern Nigeria by two influences, beginning from the Arabs, who brought Islam and then the British who colonised the country.’Footnote 35
A narrative of precolonial northern Nigerian culture as sexually tainted by contact with Arabs replicates Burton's allegation, consistent with his ‘Sotadic’ thesis, that ‘pederasty’ had been ‘imported by foreigners into such [sub-Saharan] kingdoms as Bornu and Haussa’.Footnote 36 Similar narratives circulate informally among contemporary Hausa Muslims, who occasionally joke and gossip about the sexual excesses of Arab men and their lascivious advances towards African women and ‘dan daudu.Footnote 37 These stories challenge a dominant narrative of northern Nigerian society as ennobled by its historical contacts with Arab-Islamic civilization, indexing cultural contradictions that I have explored elsewhere.Footnote 38 Here it is important to note that while Nigerian Christian and Muslim spokespeople appear largely united in their opposition to homosexuality, their anti-gay rhetorics index divergent ideological stances with respect to ‘African sexuality’. This divergence derives to a great extent from each region's and community's different historical experiences with respect to colonialism, Islam, and the trans-Saharan trade.
THE TRANS-SAHARAN TRAFFIC IN SEX AND RACE
Ethnic and religious competition between Christian and Muslim Nigerians is animated by sexual stereotypes that have their origins not only in the colonial encounter between Europeans and Africans, but also in the historical contacts between so-called black Africans and Arabic- and Berber-speakers from North Africa and the Middle East. The trans-Saharan slave trade was particularly significant in this regard. With homage to Gayle Rubin, who pioneered the political-economic study of sex, this section presents evidence from historical and literary texts that suggest that the trans-Saharan traffic in African bodies incited discourses that associated ethnically and racially distinct peoples with particular sexual attributes and values, and that continue to reverberate today.Footnote 39 Earlier generations of anthropologists and folklorists might have been inclined to analyze such discursive productions as part of a synchronic cultural system, but as Mikhail Bakhtin, Frederic Jameson, and others have noted, discourse does not emerge in a cultural-historical vacuum.Footnote 40 Although causative linkages cannot be specifically identified, implicit references to the trans-Saharan trade and its sociosexual ramifications recur across a range of genres, including fictional literature, journalistic reports, and conversations conducted on social media. The method I use to analyze these texts combines the large-scale perspective of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality with the empirical principles of linguistic anthropology and allied disciplines which trace how discourse is used, entextualized, and recontextualized at particular places and times to construct, reproduce, and resist structures of power and inequality.Footnote 41
Islamic scripture is emphatic about the equality of all races, but as Bernard Lewis and others have noted, the worldly history of Muslim societies – especially the institution of slavery – gave rise to racialized ways of thinking and acting. Slaves were imported into North African and Middle Eastern societies from a variety of locations, but sub-Saharan Africans constituted the largest contingent. The inequities visited on slaves, including concubinage and castration, thus took on a racial dimension. Lewis points out that black slaves were sometimes able to achieve positions of rank and influence, and that codified racism never developed in North Africa and the Middle East as it did in South Africa and the United States.Footnote 42 Nevertheless, his data, including literary allusions to skin color, gender, and sexuality, suggest that racial inequality operated on a cultural level. By contrast, Ali Mazrui claims that contact between Arabs and sub-Saharan Africans did not lead to social stratification on the basis of race: ‘Fairer-skinned Arabs sometimes penetrated the interior of Black Africa, but the Arabs were less segregationist than Europeans and were ready to intermarry with local populations.’Footnote 43 His evocative use of the word ‘penetrated’ notwithstanding, Mazrui fails to acknowledge that Arab-African coupling often took place extra-maritally, in the context of slavery and concubinage.
To support his optimistic narrative of Arab-African relations, Mazrui relies on Ibn Battuta's positive portrayals of the black peoples he met on his travels in the western Sahel and southern Sahara. But again Mazrui overlooks significant facts. For while Ibn Battuta praises ‘the blacks’ of Mali for their hatred of injustice and their diligent approach to Muslim prayer, he condemns their ‘bad practices’, alleging ‘that the women servants, slave girls and young daughters appear naked before people, exposing their genitals. Women who come before the Sultan are naked and unveiled, and so are his daughters.’Footnote 44 Presaging Mazrui, Ross Dunn maintains that Ibn Battuta's criticisms of Malian gender relations were motivated solely by concerns about Islamic piety and ‘had nothing directly to do with race’.Footnote 45 Regardless of whether Ibn Battuta's notions of ethnic difference could be characterized as ‘racial’, it is nonetheless plausible that his critical depiction of Malian gender relations contributed to the formation of stereotyped images of black women's and men's sexuality for subsequent generations of Arabic-speakers. Manuscripts of his travel writings were circulated for centuries among educated North Africans before European scholars discovered, translated, and published them in the nineteenth century. Chouki El Hamel, for example, claims that representations of black Africans as morally deficient, such as those attributed to Ibn Battuta, contributed to the formation of cultural and racial prejudice, which in turn helped to legitimize the enslavement of free blacks by the Moroccan sultan, Mawlay Isma'il, in 1699. Although it contradicted Quranic injunctions against enslaving Muslims, the sultan's policy was supported by the ulama (Muslim legal scholars).Footnote 46
Ibn Battuta repeatedly referred to three types of people in West Africa: blacks, Berbers, and whites, the last term referring to Arabic-speakers with origins in North Africa or the Middle East. According to Bruce Hall, this typology reflected a North African conception of ‘racial’ difference that was not shared by West Africans at the time of Ibn Battuta's travels.Footnote 47 Over the ensuing centuries, however, that racial typology came to influence – if not determine – the way residents of the southern Sahara conceptualized group differences. Hall's textual sources make intermittent references to gender and sexuality, often in the realm of kinship. For example, the process of cultural Arabization, such as that experienced by Ibn Battuta's own Berber clan, involved a shift from matrilineal to patrilineal forms of genealogical reckoning.Footnote 48 Since most recognized interethnic couplings involved an Arab(ized) man and a non-Arab woman, patrilineality effectively made sex and marriage a means of extending the power and prestige of Arab-Islamic civilization. In much of the southern Sahara, leading clans claimed Arab Muslim patrilines and were often referred to as ‘whites’ (bidān), while nonelites, who formed the majority, were termed ‘blacks’ (sūdān).Footnote 49
Because of their legal capacity to produce Arab children (that is, children belonging to an Arab patriline), non-Arab female slaves were often taken as concubines. By contrast, the procreative capacities of male slaves threatened Arab men's power; some male slaves were therefore made into eunuchs, while those who retained their genitals were kept away from elite Arab women.Footnote 50 The sexual and racial dimensions of the trans-Saharan trade thus gave rise to racialized sexual tropes, such as the alluring black female and the threatening black male, which resemble those found in the slave-owning societies of the Americas. Evidence of such tropes can be found in literary portrayals of master-slave relations. A prominent example is Scheherazade's first tale in Arabian Nights, which depicts a sultan who flies into a rage when he suspects his wife has been intimate with a black slave.Footnote 51 Although the sultan's suspicions were false, the story presents a familiar configuration of race, gender, and class whereby the sexual privileges enjoyed by elite light-skinned men are vulnerable to the transgressive desires of ‘their’ womenfolk for men who are poorer and darker. Scheherazade's story works as entertainment – for her fictional captors, and for readers of Arabian Nights – by playing on the illicit appeal of sexual, racial, and class transgressions. Some literary works offer a queer configuration of such transgressions. Khaled El-Rouayheb cites the example of Ḥuṣayn al-Jazarī (d. 1614 CE), an Arab poet from Aleppo who wrote several poems accusing a male contemporary of taking the passive-receptive role in sex with his black male slaves. According to El-Rouayheb, ‘since black African men were stereotypically associated with virility and large sexual organs, Jazarī could easily use the fact to support his accusation’.Footnote 52
The contemporary relevance of such racialized sexual tropes is evidenced in Hayes's analysis of the ‘marginal sexualities’ depicted in postcolonial francophone Maghrebian novels. In Moha le fou, Moha le sage (‘Moha the fool, Moha the wise’), published in 1978 by Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jelloun, the protagonist babbles and rants like a man possessed by spirits. Moha's voices include the Patriarche, an elite Arab man who scandalized his family with a series of sexual transgressions. The most outrageous of these was his passionate love for his slave, Dada, a Sudanese woman who became his second wife and bore him a baby girl. Threatened by the challenge Dada and her dark-skinned daughter pose to their social and economic status, the other family members conspire to expel them. The Patriarche's response is deliriously subversive: ‘let her come back, black, African woman … I am hers, she bought me at the market … I am her slave … let her come so I can obey her …’.Footnote 53 In Hayes's analysis, the Patriarche's love for his black slave appears subversive, but it also recalls the ‘long tradition of racist stereotypes’ in classical Arabic literature, which includes ‘the hypersexualization of black bodies’, ‘the insatiable black African’, and the sexual threat posed by black men as portrayed in Arabian Nights. Footnote 54
Similar stereotypes are deployed in the 1976 novel Waqa'i’ Harat al-Za'farani (‘The Events of Za'farani Street’) by Egyptian author Jamal al-Ghitani. As described by Massad, the novel is set on a street in Cairo and recounts the residents’ sexual and economic travails. In one scene the trope of the ‘insatiable black African’ is invoked rather literally: a family is forced by poverty to marry their daughter off to a rich man from ‘one of the black countries’ who ‘admired his beautiful white wife so much that one night his admiration increased to such a degree that he ate her’.Footnote 55 Another scene depicts the excessive sexual appetites of the Egyptian ruling class. In this case, the protoganist is ‘Uways, a dark-skinned peasant from Upper Egypt who travels to Cairo looking for work. He first lands a job in a bakery, but gets fired after being accused of sexually harassing a female customer. He then finds a job at a men's bathhouse where his work includes sexually penetrating several wealthy clients every night; his first appointment is with a man described as having ‘a light complexion and smooth skin’.Footnote 56 ‘Uways, representing a region of Egypt that is considered both geographically and racially closer to sub-Saharan Africa, is thus ‘hypersexualized’ first as a threat to urban, light-skinned women, then as a stud for hire to elite, light-skinned men.
A more recent, nonfictional recontextualization of sexual and racial tropes deriving from the trans-Saharan trade involved Muammar Gaddafi's reported infatuation with Condoleezza Rice. Shortly after the Libyan leader was deposed in 2011, the former US secretary of state published a memoir in which she recounted a dinner at Gaddafi's residence, where he addressed her affectionately as ‘African princess’, showed her a video compilation of photographs of her with various world leaders, and sang her a song he had composed in her honor.Footnote 57 Rice described the experience as ‘weird’ and the story reverberated in the US media, along with reports of a photo album dedicated to Rice that was discovered in Gaddafi's compound after his demise. One oft-repeated quotation came from an interview Gaddafi had given to Al-Jazeera:
I support my darling black African woman. I admire and am very proud of the way she leans back and gives orders to the Arab leaders … She beckons to the Arab foreign ministers, and they come to her, either in groups or individually … Leezza, Leezza, Leezza … I love her very much. I admire her, and I'm proud of her, because she's a black woman of African origin.Footnote 58
Gaddafi's proclamation of love recalls the Patriarche's homage to his slave in Tahar Ben Jelloun's novel. Both texts depict a black woman in a dominant position over Arab men, and this perceived subversion of normative race and gender roles heightens her erotic appeal. At the same time, much as the Patriarche's longings are framed as the rantings of a man possessed, Gaddafi's fascination with Rice was largely mocked in the US media as the obsession of a madman.
Nigerian public opinion was more divided. While many Nigerians echoed the derisive sentiments of US commentators, others celebrated Gaddafi's affection for Rice as a sign of pan-African solidarity. A participant identified as ‘IG’ posted this laudatory comment on Nairaland, a popular Nigerian website.
I don't know how true or false the story is, but I like how he emphasized his pride in black Africans. I was made to understand that Ghaddafi's tribe has more Blacks than light skinned people. Maybe they are one of those Berber tribes that only recently start losing their black color. I think the Arabs dislike him so much because he is not as Arabized as they want him to be.Footnote 59
IG's comment reflects an awareness of Gaddafi's positive relationship with Libya's black citizens and sub-Saharan immigrants, many of whom were targeted for persecution after he was overthrown. IG is also aware of the historical process whereby some Berber tribes became culturally and racially Arabized, and she/he views this process in terms of Arab political and cultural domination over Berbers and black Africans.
Gaddafi's ‘pride in black Africans’ was notable because it was perceived as an exception to the stories Nigerians have heard of the racism and sexual harassment experienced by dark-skinned Africans in North Africa and the Middle East. Anita Fábos, for example, reports that Muslim Arab Sudanese women in Egypt are regularly harassed by Egyptian men yelling racial and gendered epithets like ‘ya shokolata, ya caramella’ (‘oh chocolate, oh caramel’).Footnote 60 Yet as noted in the previous section, positive accounts of Arab-African relations circulate as well. Consider Shaihu Umar, widely regarded as the first Hausa-language novel, written by Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, who subsequently became Nigeria's first prime minister. The novel recounts the experiences of Umar, a boy from eastern Hausaland who is captured, enslaved, and shipped across the Sahara, where a benevolent owner encourages him to get an Islamic education and eventually frees him. Umar's scholarly prowess earns him the title of sheikh (Hausa: shaihu) and leads many people to seek his guidance. The novel ends after Umar's mother finds him in Egypt after a long, harrowing journey during which she was captured and sold into slavery herself. Several passages describe the brutal treatment she endures at the hands of her Arab captors – bondage, beatings, starvation, hard labor. She ultimately dies in Umar's company on the journey back to Hausaland. Although an attractive female slave would undoubtedly have been subject to unwanted sexual advances or worse, the novel only comes close to alluding to that topic with a reference to the mother's having ‘lost her good looks’ because of her travails.Footnote 61 Shaihu Umar, meanwhile, is depicted as saintly and asexual; he never marries.
In contrast to the ‘hypersexualization’ that pervades Western and Arab representations of black Africans, Shaihu Umar downplays the sexuality of its black heroes. Balewa's protagonist suffers, but his faith, genius, and success as a shaihu allow him to redeem himself and his race, and mitigate the legacy of the trans-Saharan slave trade. Much as Mazrui fails to mention the concubinage or castration that black African slaves were forced to endure, the desexualization of Shaihu Umar and his mother is no coincidence. To portray the sexual contacts, consensual or forced, that both characters would likely have experienced if they were historical rather than fictional figures would remind readers of one of the more complicated legacies of the trans-Saharan trade: the sexual use and abuse of black African women and men by (usually) lighter-skinned Arabic-speakers, and the hierarchies of race, ethnicity, gender, and class that emerged therefrom.
CONCLUSION
Historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars have unearthed ample evidence of the colonial origins of the myth of ‘heterosexual Africa’ and have made considerable progress in explaining why it has become such a potent and virulent feature of public discourse in many African nations. But the scholarly consensus on its colonial roots leaves certain questions unanswered. For example, although Nigeria's Muslim and Christian leaders all promote anti-gay policies, it is mainly Christian spokespeople who have justified their opinions by appealing to ‘African traditions’. The country's Muslim leaders emphasize religious arguments against homosexuality; if they also appeal to culture or tradition, they rarely affix the adjective ‘African’ to these terms. A similar discrepancy is evident continent-wide.Footnote 62 One apparent exception is a Somali Islamic leader who, commenting on South Africa's approval of same-sex marriage, reportedly declared, ‘This is not something that is indigenous to Africa.’Footnote 63 Likewise, Babacar M'Baye critiques the efforts of Muslim Senegalese leaders to portray homosexuality as ‘un-African’, but he cites no specific examples of Senegalese leaders using such language. The myth of ‘heterosexual Africa’ thus seems rhetorically productive primarily in Christian, and especially anglophone, communities south of the Sahara. Colonialism alone does not explain this geo-discursive boundary. A complete history would also consider: the different sexual-political legacies of different colonial empires; the sexual politics within and between sub-Saharan African polities and the ways these interacted with regional and global forces in different historical periods; and the historical and ongoing relations between peoples in and across the Sahara and other contact zones.
Colonial images of a ‘Sotadic’ Orient and a primordial heterosexual ‘Negro’ Africa certainly underlie many contemporary discourses, but why have these tropes been taken to heart by African speakers and writers? This article's argument is that certain features of what Rudi Bleys calls the colonial ‘geography of perversion’ converge and contend with discourses of race and sexuality that emerged in the course of the trans-Saharan trade.Footnote 64 One could maintain, following Mazrui, that Arab stereotypes of black Africans’ sexuality, and black Africans’ sexual attitudes towards Arabs, are the result of European colonial influence.Footnote 65 But the recent experience of colonial rule could not nullify the longer history of contacts between Arabs, Berbers, and sub-Saharan Africans (or the sociosexual histories that predated Islam), and none of these peoples were passive objects of European rule in any event. As we have seen, rhetorical traces of the trans-Saharan traffic in sex and race continue to appear in both fictional and nonfictional texts: a dark-skinned peasant is forced into male prostitution in Cairo; an Arab patriarch/dictator enjoys the illicit fantasy of a dominant black woman; rumors abound of northern Nigerian rulers with a penchant for boys. More disturbing is the testimony, found by Alaine S. Hutson in the archival records of the British legation in early twentieth-century Arabia, of escaped African female slaves who had endured sexual abuse and forced abortion at the hands of their Arab masters.Footnote 66
Based on the evidence presented here, it thus seems reasonable to hypothesize that: (1) the trans-Saharan slave trade gave rise to racialized sexual tropes of blacks and Arabs that circulated, with local variations, on both sides of the Sahara; and (2) these tropes have persisted over time, albeit with changes induced by subsequent developments such as European colonization, modern telecommunications, and the spread of global religious fundamentalisms. In Nigeria and perhaps elsewhere, it seems that stereotypes of Arabs and black Africans derived from both the trans-Saharan trade and European colonial rule have been respectively, if unevenly, mapped onto Muslims and Christians, in a way that hinders national integration. This is so even when the leaders of both groups seem to be in agreement, as when they join forces to condemn homosexuality. To ignore such religious, racial, and sexual contradictions is to ignore some of the major cultural faultlines within contemporary African nation-states and the continent overall.
