From time to time, the Western imagination is seized by notions of sexuality in Africa, against which Western progress itself can be constituted. Various colonial writers, of which Richard Francis Burton is probably the best known to English-language readers, compiled provocative details of erotic and intimate life. At the dawn of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, public health research sought to unlock what were described as the unusual practices producing the spread of the disease through heterosexual sex. Most recently, a re-imagination of African sexual “backwardness” follows the turn by influential states on the African continent toward a decidedly homophobic agenda, just as the West turns decidedly in the opposite direction.
In Sexual Diversity in Africa, editors S.N. Nyeck and Marc Epprecht contest such narratives that Orientalize African sexualities and others produced by Africans that are similarly hegemonic and imprecise, arguing that the social and cultural power imbedded in such discourses is undone by detailed study of the “complex, multifaceted nature of sexuality, sexual practices, and gender performance in Africa” (p. 5). An ambitious project for Western readers in terms of the terrains upon which power in and through sexuality is constituted, the volume follows a series of significant interventions from Epprecht, Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS (2008), Nelville Hoad, African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization (2007), and an important collection of African-based scholars and activists edited by Sylvia Tamale, African Sexualities: A Reader(2011), who contributes an afterword to this work. As the editors note, the volume is limited by the inability of a single collection to embrace diverse empirical phenomena across such a broad socio-geographic space. Nevertheless, the chapters provide richly detailed case studies crafted by both African scholars and others conducting research on Africa to refute single-sexuality assumptions, highlighting some key methods and theoretical claims that call attention to the importance of scholarship on sexuality in African contexts. Arguably, the three most important insights for political scientists concern contemporary homophobia and the state, transnational linkages and diaspora, and the complications of gender and sexuality.
The first of these, homophobia and the state, addresses what this volume shares with Meredith Weiss and Michael Bosia’s Global Homophobia (2013) in describing repressive policies and moral indignation directed against sexual minorities as a global wave. These efforts call attention to homophobia as a transnational process of state and of contestation with similar rhetoric—though at the same time deeply local—and to how such state action can be a precursor spurring sexual minority organizing.Such shared insights make sense, since Nyeck was part of the early iterations of Global Homophobia. In Nyeck’s chapter, we see how this global wave is deeply contextualized as a tactic of political contestation, calling political scientists to focus on state homophobia when private actors can contest authoritarian rule, even if, as this chapter demonstrates, the outcomes of moral panic are never clear and unambiguous. Stella Nyanzi’s personal and explanatory chapter on Gambia demonstrates that state homophobia is not dependent on the presence of homosexual activism, arising as it can in a mix of regional statecraft even when sexual minorities have not constituted themselves along a Western sexual binary. Epprecht connects homophobia to neoliberal structural adjustment, though he describes this as a “conservative backlash” against adjustment—I have argued that it is a strategy imbedded in adaptation to structural adjustment (2013). Differently, contributions from Reddy et al and from Hackman contest the dominant view of South Africa, bypassing homoprotectionism to examine forms of homophobic torture and corrective therapy that animated Afrikaner nationalism under apartheid and today draw on the discourse of reconciliation and healing.
The most innovative research in the volume focuses on transnational linkages and diaspora among sexual minorities. These chapters together trouble Western interventions for rights or cultural identities and the West as a “safe harbor” for sexual minorities. Certainly, this is an increasingly travelled terrain, with debates about African communal rights juxtaposed against Western individual ones similar to that outlined by Olajide Akanji and Epprecht here. By providing greater detail about the interpretation of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, these authors outline optimism in the possibility of reconciling the rights of sexual minorities with the collective rights of the polity, by, for example, focusing on the social cost of homophobia in terms of HIV transmission; at the same time, they identify opportunity in the increasing interconnection of LGBT and Human Rights organizing as well as the role of South Africa in institutional development on the continent. In a chapter that evokes feminist approaches to intersectionality and Rahman’s recent book, Homosexualities, Muslim Cultures, and Modernity (2014), on queer Muslims, Notisha Massaquoi notes the ways African refugees are “marked” racially and sexually, marginalized in diaspora communities as queer and in LGBT communities as African. Moving beyond observation, Massaquoi argues that these intersections provide the unique “positionality” of queer Africans, with agency requiring the open negotiation of visibility as sexual and racial beings.
Finally, a set of richly detailed and importantly theoretical chapters takes apart notions of cultural diffusion and the emergence of a global LGBT form, focusing on the complications of gender and sexuality as interconnected modes of understanding. Serena Dankwa and Christophe Broqua look beyond similarities to identify the cultural specificity of gender and sexual expression in Ghana and Mali, respectively. Both chapters reveal the indigenous construction of sexuality: Dankwa examines “relational masculinity” (p. 173) where men’s and women’s social status is structured along a simultaneous hierarchy of seniority, so that her primary informant—Janet—expresses masculinity not in Western form but distinctly Ghanaian; Broqua (in a contribution I translated before it was submitted to this volume) refutes teleological arguments of LGBT identity, finding not Western influences that present an inevitable trajectory, but instead a blend of local and global forms and cultural aspects determinative of a unique formation of sexual difference still indebted to gendered assumptions about sexual behavior. Similarly, O’Mara’s ethnography of LGBTI life in urban Ghana examines practices that indigenize community and, at the same time, embrace—though non-normatively—citizenship within the national imaginary.
Overall, the chapters cover a surprisingly diverse set of topics, contexts, methodologies, and theoretical findings. Sexual Diversity in Africa provides a series of useful introductions to a complex of phenomena that inform sexuality across a broad geography that is typically treated in simplified and homogenized ways. At its best, it draws compelling observations about state and social actions that are of central interest to political scientists.
