Sexualities in Africa

Human sexuality is a highly complex phenomenon that involves the ways we feel, think, and act (or not) sexually, all subject to change over time in relation to our physical bodies as they age, and to the political economy and culture in which we live and relate to others. Nature (genetics, hormones, physical endowments) interacts with nurture (childhood socialization, culture, law) in ways that are not predictable and indeed often only rudimentarily understood. Scholars thus often prefer the term “sexualities” to reflect the contingent and changeable plurality of human sexual behavior, and the ways in which sex is conceived in relation to the wider worlds, seen and unseen. Yet in Africa, political and religious leaders frequently assert or imply that “African sexuality,” as distinct from “Western sexuality” or “Arab sexuality,” exists as a distinctive, timeless, and singular phenomenon, often in ways that promote harmful stereotypes. “Homosexuality is un-African,” to give one notorious example, is a widely made claim that has been made to justify vigilantism and state repression against sexual minorities throughout the continent. Certain features of Africa’s modern political economy, in conjunction with inherited gender, ethnic, and other aspects of culture and identity, have meanwhile facilitated the emergence of seemingly distinctive expressions of sexuality on the continent, or among specific peoples from regions within. For instance, high levels of male migration together with low levels of male circumcision and a long-standing culture of having multiple concurrent sexual partners have combined to abet the spread of HIV in southern Africa to a far greater extent than elsewhere, particularly in contrast to Muslim-majority regions. Such distinctions bear important social, health, and human rights implications. The study of how local or regional sexual cultures within Africa arose can thus potentially address harms, like HIV transmission, that are linked to stigma, stereotypes, secrecy, and shame around sexuality. This essay introduces some of the key issues as revealed through a range of literatures primarily in the social sciences and humanities. The various headings chosen for this article are for convenience only—the works cited in most cases transcend easy categorization, much as sexuality itself transcends neat heuristic borders. Note as well that the number of studies devoted to the topic has exploded since the late 1990s to shed light on an ever-widening circle of factors pertinent to understanding sexualities (alcohol and drug use, pornography, asexuality, cults, and social media, for example). I have included a small number of references to material in French but there are bound to be further rich sources in Arabic, in indigenous African languages, and in other former colonial languages like Portuguese that await future research projects.