This important and well-timed book appears as one African country after the other tightens antigay laws: 38 out of 54 countries in Africa currently criminalize homosexuality. Sexual diversity is deeply rooted in Africa, but homophobia seems to fit well into populist politics of undemocratic regimes. Even in South Africa, the first state to constitutionalize sexual minority rights, more than 80 per cent of the population over sixteen believes sex between two men or two women to be ‘always wrong’ (p. 113). Growing homophobia in Africa seems to coincide with growing acceptance of queer sexualities in Western countries; recognition of same-sex relationships is on the agenda of major Western donor agencies and sexual rights have been included in human rights and UN declarations.

Yet only half a century ago, homosexuality was firmly closeted in Western societies, criminalization of homosexuality was a stable ingredient of European legal systems, and the transference of laws condemning ‘carnal knowledge … against the order of nature’ (p. 42) was part of colonialism's civilizing mission. Paradoxically in most (if not all) African countries now criticized by the West for condemning homosexuality, the very laws doing so were introduced by colonial powers. In the meantime, positions have shifted; homophobia is now seen as African culture, while NGO and donor mobilization in favor of sexual minority rights are perceived as neocolonial onslaughts, undermining the coherence of Africa states.

The book sets out to investigate non-normative sexualities and gender variance in the African context, the authors representing a new generation of African scholars engaged in this topic. Studying queer history in Africa calls for rethinking concepts and questioning categories. Four chapters, based on interviews with people in same-sex relationships in Accra, Bamako, and Toronto, along with a chapter on the Caster Semenya controversy in South Africa are core chapters in this regard. Serena Dankwa notes in her study from urban Ghana, that a woman, seeing herself as being on the ‘man side’ in a relationship, does not need to pretend to be in a man's body: ‘Janet combines form-fitting jeans with sturdy shoes and a man's wristwatch … and drawn to the power and prosperity associated with motherhood, makes no attempt to disguise her ample bosom.’ (p. 180) In her analysis – building on African feminist scholarship by Ifi Amadiume and Oyeronke Oyewumi – preset categories of masculinity/femininity are destabilized.

Silence, or nonverbalization, is another key point in these chapters. Dankwa focuses on discretion, while Kathleen O'Mara highlights the importance of ambiguities: linguistic tactics, which conceal to the general public, but reveal to those who know. These kinds of tactics have made it possible for same-sex people to build communities under the radar. O'Mara's essay traces the lives of several such communities in urban Ghana, to insiders based on tacit understandings of alternative sexual practices, but to outsiders looking like typical NGOs.

Christophe Broqua makes similar observations about Bamako, noting that ‘there is a long distance between this model of experience in Africa and the politics of homosexuality in the West, where a revelation or public disclosure is the key moment in the course of socialization and mobilization’ (p. 220). He also notes that ‘homosexual behavior … is not considered to be opposed to the dominant conception of parenthood and reproduction … This logic of a so-called double life is not only the product of a will to camouflage same-sex sexuality under the cover of conjugal heterosexuality, but also corresponds to a cultural model characterized by a strong dissociation between reproductive conjugality and recreational sex.’ (p. 221)

The bottom-up studies based on interviews express concern regarding inevitable tensions ‘between quietly building community versus publicly demanding human rights’ (p. 192). In the case of immigrant Africans in Toronto this tension reaches to the individuals who in order to immigrate were constrained to identify explicitly as queer, even if they had never before labeled themselves as gay. But ‘if they don't fit the Western stereotype, they also don't fit immigration law’ (p. 48). The Caster Semenya essay highlights ways in which sex/gender binaries are reproduced in sport, pointing to ‘the need for sporting organizations to reorganize and redefine sex/gender differentiations and inequalities’ (p. 146).

Such redefinitions to some extent have taken place in legal systems, albeit with limitations; tensions between law and life remain. Tensions are, however, absent in the chapter on ‘Human Rights Challenge in Africa’ dealing with developments in international legal frameworks. Another chapter provides an historical overview of the idea of a specific ‘African sexuality’, and two chapters deal with homophobia as political strategies, in the Gambia on the part of the President against homosexuals and in Cameroon by popular media against the elite. Three excellent chapters on South Africa offer analyses on a violent programme by which gay recruits were ‘treated’ for homosexuality in the armed forces of apartheid South Africa, on the ways in which Christian antigay conversion programs fit into the general postapartheid and TRC ethos of trauma and healing, and on gold medal runner Caster Semenya being reinvented as a ‘100% female woman’ (p. 137) in defense of South African nationalism and heteronormativity. The editors’ decision to group the South African essays in their own section can, however, be questioned. Why support the usual South African exceptionalism when the mindset of the South African population at large may not differ that much from mindsets elsewhere on the continent and when issues analyzed and points raised in these essays speak to issues raised in essays from other parts of Africa?