Marc Epprecht
Broad claims about sexuality played a role in the formation of an identity of Africanness which continues to have important policy implications in diverse fields including public health and human rights. The “Scientific Statement … on Homosexuality” prepared by the Ministry of Health of Uganda in February 2014 is a recent important example. Commissioned by President Yoweri Museveni, the statement offers a succinct précis of scientific knowledge primarily focused on the nature versus nurture debates over the causes of homosexuality. The statement quickly became notorious internationally. Two sentences were particularly problematic for giving credence to stereotypes of African culture and homosexuality that have historically been used to justify discriminatory laws and vigilante violence: “African cultures had contained sexual vices. Maybe we need to revisit them to contain the present explosion of overt and coercive homosexual activity with the exploitation of our young children” (Republic of Uganda, Ministry of Health 2014: 8). This was exactly the justification Museveni needed to sign the egregious Anti‐Homosexuality Bill into law.1
Colleagues have elsewhere vigorously challenged the “Scientific Statement” with comprehensive overviews of global sexuality research and reflection upon the likely negative health outcomes of the new law (Academy of Science of South Africa 2015; Bailey et al. 2016).2 In this chapter, I want to concentrate on the historical aspects of its findings. I shall not attempt a historical reconstruction of how actual sexual practices changed over time, although studies that do so provide critical context. Rather, I ask how the idea that exclusive heterosexuality was a defining and admirable aspect of African cultures became so strongly commonsensical and entrenched in scientific discourse that authors do not feel the need to cite any sources to back their assertions. How do these authors, among many others, know what they claim to know about sexuality in Africa? Is there something in that history of knowledge production that, if made visible, can help us move the public debates beyond the current impasses that so evidently exacerbate injustices, ill health, poverty, and human suffering related to sexuality?
In the first section, I introduce four notes of caution about our ability to know about sexuality anywhere, but particularly under the conditions that prevail in much of Africa. I then summarize key findings from my own research into the intellectual and cultural construction of “heterosexual Africa” (Epprecht 2008, 2013), with new insights drawn from an emerging literature on sexualities in Africa by African scholars, artists, and activists. I conclude that careful historical research can contribute to the promotion of human rights and sexual health.
The “Scientific Statement … on Homosexuality” does not cite any historians or historical documents from Africa to support its main claims about history and culture, namely, that homosexuality has existed in Africa since time immemorial, but that African cultures strictly controlled it along with all other forms of “sexual exhibitionism” and “vice.” “Almost universally,” the authors assert without naming their sources of information, “they contained homosexual practice to such a point that overt homosexuality was almost unheard of” (Republic of Uganda 2014: 3–4). The “Scientific Statement” acknowledges the influence of Christianity and Islam in Africa and that social attitudes change over time, but it does not see these religions as having had any particular effect on traditional values in relation to this topic. The stability of the heterosexual norm has come undone only in very recent times (“present fad,” “present explosion”), primarily, the “Scientific Statement” implies, as a result of the “increasing influence of Western culture,” which presents homosexuality as a socially acceptable choice (Republic of Uganda 2014: 5).
The one work cited that refers to African evidence in fact explicitly contradicts these claims. Colonizing African Values is a hard‐hitting exposé of the contemporary role of the US Christian right in aggressively promoting its homophobic and Islamophobic ideology in Africa. The author of that study is also the only African among all the authorities cited by the “Scientific Statement”, albeit, strangely, he is not identified by name. To correct that omission, Kapya Kaoma is a Zambian theologian who cites my work (Kaoma 2012: 1; Epprecht 2004) to support his argument that traditional African societies were more diverse and tolerant of sexual and gender diversity than contemporary homophobes allow. This point is also made abundantly elsewhere (e.g., Murray and Roscoe 1998; Morgan and Wieringa 2005; Nkabinde 2009; Gaudio 2009; Tamale 2011; and many of the entries focused on Africa in Chiang, forthcoming). My first note of caution is thus that commonsense claims or assumptions about sexualities in Africa remain highly disputed, and that we as researchers need to be alert to the political contests that are deeply, often implicitly, embedded even in the most assured‐sounding scientific language.
A second note of caution hinges on the level of abstraction that we can safely, and should strategically, aim for in the interpretation and presentation of our research. This chapter, indeed this book, abstracts from often isolated case studies over long stretches of time and across diverse intellectual traditions to an entire continent. There is a long and ignoble history of such abstraction feeding into “Dark Continent” stereotypes and their almost equally unhelpful inversions. To appear to follow in that tradition is thus a big risk, especially in such a condensed format. I have chosen to take it in the belief that the risk can be partially mitigated by attention to complexity and with cautionary statements and footnotes like this one.3 The risks of narrow specificity or of overstating local exceptionalism are at least as great, in my view. Those are apparent as well in the abstractions implied by choice of vocabulary. Local terminologies for non‐normative sexualities, in an important example, do not translate well over either distance or time. Indeed, they often carry meanings that are inimical to human dignity and sexual health (such as derogatory ethnic identities or hints of violence, the occult, or exploitation). Similarly, terms developed in the West do not resonate in many African contexts, creating new tensions (e.g., Africans performing sexual orientation and gender identity to Western expectations in order to meet immigration officials’ or donor requirements). While some African intellectuals and activists are embracing the word “queer” as a strategic way to build unity and extend networks, that word also sits uncomfortably with an ostensible imperative of queer theory. How can anyone who claims to respect feminist and postcolonial critiques of knowledge production (as queer theory does) impose a term that is understood by and useful to well‐educated, globally connected actors (like queer theorists) but that is alien and alienating to people in the village or on the street? No consensus has yet been reached, notwithstanding eloquent attempts (e.g., Massaquoi 2013; Ekine and Abbas 2013; Matebeni 2014).
A third note of caution: in all the literature discussed here nothing remotely approaches what we today would consider ethical and rigorous scientific research until (generously) Pierre Hanry’s survey of Guinean high school students (Hanry 1970). Prior to that, salacious hearsay, erotic fiction lifted from Arabic sources, pure speculation, and/or sexual fantasy (real in the author or imputed to the audience) appear to be the main sources of information. As one notable example from an era where one might have expected better, the psychologist Carl Jung generated a theory about African women’s emotional and sexual stability after a safari from Mombasa to Egypt under military escort, during which, by his own admission, he spoke to only a single African woman (Jung 1963: 245). Well into the age of AIDS, massive surveys of Africans’ knowledge, attitudes, practices, and beliefs did not even ask about masturbation, anal sex, or oral sex, whether homosexual or heterosexual (Caldwell, Caldwell, and Quiggin 1989). And while there has unquestionably been an explosion of bold, high‐quality, high‐integrity research since the 1990s, we still know remarkably little about actually existing sexualities. In short, we cannot take the following accounts as reliable descriptions of how Africans really expressed their sexuality behind closed doors. These documents should be seen as building blocks of a stereotype that many people over a long period of time came to believe was true, erotic, necessary to their identity and health, and even patriotic. That stereotype probably still affects many people’s understanding of their sexuality, and certainly affects the legal and policy parameters within which sexual choices can be made.4
Were it not challenging enough to sift through the inherited racist and heteropatriarchal ideologies for evidence, deeper epistemological and ontological issues bedevil sexuality studies even in the most densely theorized (best‐funded, technologically advanced) research milieux like North America. A persuasive case can be made, for example, that cybersex is better for public health, the environment, and the economy than “real sex,” but what does that do to our understanding of human nature? Do we all agree what real sex is? Can we tell with certainty whether an erection or vaginal moistness indicates physical lust, emotional need, financial calculation, or pharmaceutical intervention? Does that affect our categorizations of sexual orientation? Do new words and technologies designed to hive off “pure” scientific meaning observed in hormonal reactions, genetic codes, and such really avoid the political or cultural baggage that adheres to pre‐existing vocabularies and silences? Sexologists often claim that they can and do address such questions. Others remain skeptical, however, and we may legitimately wonder how politically helpful it is to be raising such concerns when even the most basic research has yet to be done in much of Africa, and people’s lives are at stake in an immediate way and by way of a wide range of crises.
This then brings me to my final note of caution: current conflicts over sexual rights, citizenship and/or belonging, and cultural integrity are extremely important to resolve. But they still need to be understood in the context of several other quite enormous existential questions arising from changing, and often deteriorating, material conditions of life. Can we really talk about sexualities without referencing the expanding gap between rich and poor, global climate change, emergent diseases, rapid demographic transitions, and the “limits to growth” debates? The dramatic rise of technologies like genetic engineering, surveillance, social media, and artificial intelligence are meanwhile shifting the consensus on some fundamental concepts about humanness and human needs. And does the proliferation of pornography affect the ways in which we relate to each other as teachers or students, as scholars, as citizens, and as human beings?
I concede that these discussions need to be left for another time. These cautions nonetheless should be kept in mind when we ask where the “Scientific Statement’s” certainties (and anxieties) about heterosexuality in Africa come from.
The first written accounts of African societies south of the Sahara come from Muslim travelers or observers of African slaves in the Middle East from as long ago as the ninth century CE (255 AH). Scholarly assessments in English are scarce, and run the gamut from respectful meditations upon cultural difference (as Muhammad (1985) saw them) to exoticizing claims of Africans’ “immense potency and unbridled sexuality” (Lewis 1990: 94). Documents from Timbuktu interpreting the Qur’an to adjudicate domestic disputes or “Advising Men on Sexual Engagement with their Women” from the eighteenth century or earlier are certainly suggestive of a more robust sexual and romantic culture than subsequent puritanical movements would approve – including how to give one’s wife an orgasm “to the point of madness in intensity” (Farouk‐Alli and Mathee 2008: 183–187). On the east coast, a long tradition of Somali and Swahili literature in Arabic script, plus Sufi jurisprudence making reference to Omani and Persian precedents, is also suggestive of a grain of truth in the stereotype that Islam on the coast was in practice more relaxed about discreet sexual transgressions than pastoralist cultures of the interior (Murray and Roscoe 1997; Haberlandt [1899] 1998). “Hebephilic” relationships (men with pubescent boys) in the Maghreb, Egypt, and Sudan were contained, to use the language of the “Scientific Statement,” often by legalistic distinctions around slave status (see also Gadelrab 2016, specifically on Egypt and with reference to sex with male slaves).
European travelers began publishing their observations as they ventured southwards along the west coast and established trading relationships with Africans along the way. Accounts were frequently exaggerated, sensationalized, moralistic, and self‐serving. They nonetheless documented a basic truth: African societies tended to place an extremely high value on heterosexual marriage and reproduction. People acquired status in the community largely through marital ties and children. But marriage came in many forms. Perhaps making the biggest impression on Europeans were polygynous households with wives of varying status, some of whom husbands made available to visitors as a gesture to smooth trade relations. Such practices gave rise to a cultured and commercially influential caste of mixed‐race women along the West African coast (the signares), whose erotic mystique lingers to today.5 Elsewhere in Africa public nudity, highly sexualized music and dancing, and gender bending or other “lewd” rituals were commonplace practices that were observed to stand, sometimes uneasily, beside stern patriarchal or state controls over young people’s sexuality.6
Exceptions to heterosexual norms, including ritual celibacy and incest, did not go unnoticed. Sir Richard Burton’s grand overview of world sexuality, for example, refers to a Portuguese document from 1558 that claimed “unnatural damnation” (meaning, male–male sex) to be esteemed among the Kongo people, as well as a “prostitute corps” used by the male‐identified female warriors of Dahomey, the Amazons (Burton 1885: 10. 246–247). Andrew Battell, who lived among the Imbangala (in modern‐day Angola) in the 1590s, was similarly disapproving, both of the male cross‐dressers and of “women witches … [who] use unlawfull lusts betweene themselves in mutuall filthinesse” (cited in Purchas 1613: 513). On the other side of the continent, Jesuits took note of homosexual relationships among Abyssinian elites as well as princesses who indulged their carnal desires irrespective of their marital status (Belcher 2013). Images of African polymorphous perversity and flexible gender systems then found their way into European middlebrow culture in the eighteenth century, including in ostensibly realistic novels like Sade’s Aline et Valcour. Sade ([1795] 1990) is notable in part because he drew upon an extensive library of firsthand accounts from Africa, and for the way in which he contrasts the lusty bisexuality of his African and Africanized characters with the prudish sensibilities of the bourgeois European traveler (Epprecht 2007).
Europeans and Arabs, I should stress, were not the only people pondering African cultures in the precolonial era – a sophisticated literature existed in Ge’ez, the written language of the Amharic people of the Habesha (Abyssinian, Christian) empire. While the Ethiopian Orthodox Church today is one of the strongest homophobic voices on the continent, Wendy Belcher (2015) has discovered a thoughtful meditation on female–female sensual desire written in Ge’ez in 1672 by a pious African woman for an African audience. Could this document be interpreted as an expression of African intellectual and spiritual independence from the Portuguese Jesuits then asserting their influence over the Amharic elites? A similar argument might be made in the case of Kimpa Vita (Beatrice of Kongo) in the early eighteenth century. Under the image of a black‐skinned Jesus and saints, and sporting a beard in at least one depiction, Kimpa Vita advocated Christian chastity and personal moral responsibility in order to cleanse the nation of the pernicious influence of the Portuguese Catholics and their slave‐trading allies. She was burned at the stake for her efforts (Thornton 1998; Brockman, n.d.).
Recognition of shared humanity with Africans, and of cultural diversity including a wide array of different sexual and gender arrangements within Africa, gave way in European accounts over the course of the nineteenth century to racist stereotypes. These tended to be expressed in two main ways: overt contempt in social Darwinist or Hegelian terms, or “noble savage” lyricism. At both extremes, the consensus hardened that blacks needed whites to protect or nurture them through the challenges of modernity. Indeed, as bad as morals could be as a consequence of an excess of natural virility and concupiscence under primitive conditions, they invariably grew worse as Africans became “demoralized” or “detribalized” by the expanding cash economy and the influence of ill‐behaved foreigners. This recommended more and better (scientific) colonial administration.7
The apparent rarity of overt homosexual relationships among African subjects not only confirmed the “close to nature” theory, but further justified colonial interventions against corrupting external influences. The governor of Uganda Harry H. Johnston made this point when he claimed that the “vicious propensities” of the king of Buganda (said to have been learned from Muslim traders) “disgusted even his negro people” (Johnston 1904: 685). The need to protect naive African men from predatory Chinese mine workers sparked a minor political crisis in South Africa in 1906 (Harris 2004). Sir Frederick Jackson (1930: 326), a colonial official in Kenya and Uganda, also praised “the good sense of the natives and their disgust” at the bestial vices practiced by “orientals.” And so on. Africans’ natural heterosexuality, according to the emerging scientific homophobia, was one of the few unambiguously positive things to be said about African morals and character. As Sir Richard Burton put it: “the negro and negroid races to the South ignore the erotic perversion” (1885: 10. 205; 2. 56).
Burton’s opus, like the work of his equally phantasmagoric French contemporary “Jacobus X” (1893, 1937), was an important contribution to the emerging science of “sexology.” In that paradigm, sexuality was like any other phenomenon. It could be categorized and explained in relation to knowable and predictable natural laws, from which universal lessons could be learned and transferred across cultural barriers. Sexology, and subsequently anthropology and ethnopsychiatry, thus offered a means to apply knowledge about non‐European peoples back home in Europe (Lyons and Lyons 2004). That goal for some researchers was quite clear. They were not so much interested in non‐Europeans per se, and certainly not in titillation (so they claimed); rather, they wondered how knowledge of other cultures could be used to fix problems related to sexual or gender dysfunction either in Europe itself or among Europeans charged with administering the empire. Particularly after World War I, doubts about the solidity of Western civilization fed the anxiety. What could Africans teach a Europe threatened by moral decline from mass warfare, industrial capitalism, atheism, communism, alcohol abuse, and feminism? To missionaries like Henri Junod ([1915] 1962), Africans’ sterling but fragile heteronormativity provided a rhetorical inspiration. The emergence of male–male relationships among Tsonga migrant laborers in the South African mines was, to Junod, a shameful blot not on Tsonga men so much as on whites who had created the corrupting conditions.
Female sexuality was another area of anxiety in interwar Europe on which African patriarchy offered edifying lessons, notably, what to do about women’s orgasms. Marie Bonaparte was an influential French psychiatrist in the 1930s who, apparently influenced by the up‐and‐coming Kenyan anthropologist Jomo Kenyatta, argued that African women were emotionally more balanced than European women because they practiced clitoridectomy. This operation supposedly reduced the destabilizing effect of selfish female desire emanating from the clitoris, hence allowing mature African women to be sexually satisfied through penetration by their husbands (no other stimulation being necessary or presumably possible). European women – and Bonaparte volunteered herself – could emulate Africans to their and their husbands’ mutual benefit (Frederiksen 2008). In other cases, same‐sex practices among Africans came to the rescue of anxious Europeans. German scholars in the 1920s found evidence among so‐called primitive people in Namibia and Angola that they published to disprove the belief that homosexuality was caused by cultural decadence, especially, as the Nazis claimed, among Jews and communists. For opponents of fascism like Kurt Falk ([1923] 1998), Bushmen who masturbated each other offered a proof, of sorts, that Hitler was wrong.
Africans were not passive bystanders to the emerging scientific paradigm but actively contributed to it as they came into the public sphere as scholars, artists, and polemicists. A high percentage of Africans who did so were men like Kenyatta who were educated in Christian mission schools. Their assertions of sexual propriety in traditional African culture thus reflected a complex mix of their personal understanding of cultural norms (sometimes learned from elders, sometimes through European ethnographies), their socialization as Christians (who must abhor sexuality outside a very narrow band of respectability), their education in pseudoscience (as outlined earlier), and their political incentives to demonstrate Africans’ humanity to a skeptical or even hostile European audience. To persuade or shame the colonialists into respecting Africans, African dignity had to be demonstrated and measurable according to standards that the colonialists could understand. Innumerable examples illustrate this striving by African male authors to be acknowledged as men in terms that even racists could admire: as heterosexually virile, able to control and to provide for women, and able to exercise wise restraint when called upon. Many of the most heroic, and tragic, protagonists of the first generations of African novelists published in English exhibit these characteristics. In the social sciences, meanwhile, customs and practices formerly denounced by European missionaries as immoral were valorized for their functionality in creating stable, harmonious cultures. Kenyatta was a pioneer of that genre ([1938] 1961), emphasizing the very strict etiquette governing adolescent thigh sex and the role of female circumcision in ensuring girls’ transition to adulthood. Evidence of exceptions to the norms appears in some cases to have been consciously repressed by African scholars or research assistants desiring to preserve respectability. Matory (2005), among numerous other examples, discusses ritual male–male anal sex that was deliberately hushed up by Yoruba colleagues.
But why would scholars continue to ignore or suppress evidence that contradicted the pseudoscientific arguments about race and sexuality long after these had been refuted? Here too we see a complex interplay of motives. Some did in fact note nonheterosexual practices and customs in traditional settings without “explaining” them by reference to foreigners or the corrupting effects of urbanization (the aforementioned Falk, for example). In most cases, however, such mentions came in passing, and in euphemistic or speculative language that was easily overlooked (Kirby 1942 revealed male–male sexual orientation among the Ovambo under the title “A Secret Musical Instrument,” for example). Rarely did the analysis in such cases challenge the heteronormative paradigm. On the contrary, authors tended to explain exceptions to the norm as occult, as the result of women’s frustration in polygynous households, as holding relationships to preserve kinship claims over inheritance, or as youthful preparation for heterosexual marriage. This is not to suggest that these scholars were wrong in stressing the heteronormativity of African cultures, only that they may have lacked sufficient skepticism of the potential discrepancy between what informants said and what people actually did.
European researchers may also have been trying to protect “their” people or their colonial administrations from scandal by suppressing embarrassing evidence. I find it remarkable, for example, that a widespread culture of male–male sexuality among Tutsi elites that sparked a major political event in 1920s Burundi (the deposition of the king by the Belgians) is scarcely alluded to in the ethnography prior to Jacques Maquet’s study (Maquet 1961; Des Forges 2011). Or were researchers guarding their own reputations as serious and patriotic scholars? During the Cold War homosexuality was widely thought of as frivolous at best, and possibly as evidence of either the researchers’ own homosexuality or (and?) their communistic sympathies. And let us not underestimate the lingering appeal of a romanticized Africa for theorists aiming to critique aspects of modern life in Europe or America. Carl Jung scored points against anxious, “homosexualized” Europeans with a rosy description of African women’s untroubled heterosexuality (Jung 1963). A similar unspoken agenda may have been a factor in the rise of “heterosexual African AIDS,” which disregarded men who have sex with men and downplayed homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia as factors in the transmission of HIV in Africa. Heterosexual African AIDS was a powerful metaphor in the anti‐homophobia struggle in North America and Europe, a whole continent of innocent victims to offset the stigma of “the gay plague” (Patton 1999). As I shall discuss in the next section, this sometimes resulted in self‐censorship but also, probably more commonly, a lack of interest in questioning inherited heterosexist assumptions about African identity.
To what extent did scientific discourse impact the ways in which people lived their sexuality in Africa? Directly, probably zero. Indirectly, however, it contributed to an ideological framework for the growing power of colonial regimes. As such it helped to justify a whole raft of laws, native administration systems, health policy, educational initiatives, wage scales, consumer product marketing, and urban planning that over time shifted the political, economic, social, and material grounds upon which Africans made sexual decisions. Some doors were opened (cash was good for that), others closed (land shortage, poverty); some old ways of doing things became impossible or shameful, while new ways came into being; some body parts or partners gained erotic qualities, while others lost them. Thus, while few Africans will have ever read or even heard of Richard Burton or Sigmund Freud et al., colonial regimes were to a significant extent influenced by those men’s presumptions and claims. Heterosexual Africa may not have been real, empirically, but it had sufficient heft as an idea to drive alternative sexual arrangements deep into the shadows.
The partial unravelling of the “cultural intimacy” (Herzfeld 1997) of heterosexual Africa is generally thought to have started in South Africa. White South Africans were the first gay rights activists in the Western sense, and they have produced by far the most scholarship on non‐normative sexuality on the continent. Secrets such as lesbian‐like mummy–baby relationships among African girls and women and male–male “marriages” among criminal gangs and migrant mine workers began to be revealed from the 1950s (e.g., Lanham and Mopeli‐Paulus 1953; Blacking 1959; van Onselen 1976; Gay 1985; Mathabane 1986; Moodie 1988). By the 1990s this had become a veritable flood of fiction, memoirs, academic research, documentary film, plays, and other representations of black Africans expressing their sexual agency and gender identities in diverse and autonomous ways (notably, Achmat 1993; Gevisser and Cameron 1994; Nkoli 1994; Nkabinde 2009). This literature, plus the urgent public health imperative of HIV/AIDS, stimulated a smaller but noteworthy coming out elsewhere on the continent, including my own work in Zimbabwe (Epprecht 1998, 2004) but also Teunis (1996), Niang et al. (2003), and M’baye (2013) in Senegal; Serhane (2000) in Morocco; Jeay (1991) in Mali; Camara (1997) in Guinea; Gaudio (2009) in Nigeria; Bocahut and Brookes (1998) in Côte d’Ivoire; Lorway (2006: 2014) in Namibia; and Tadele (2012) in Ethiopia, among many others discussed in collections and critical overviews spanning a wide range of academic disciplines, styles, and quality.8
The growing visibility of LGBTI in public discourse has sometimes been taken to indicate an increase in the frequency of homosexual practices. There may be a grain of truth in this in the form of transactional or comfort sex linked to deteriorating conditions in prison, to a growing population of street kids and other people marginalized by the economic malaise of the past few decades, and to the influence of gay‐friendly Western popular culture or HIV education that stresses personal responsibility of care (Nguyen 2005). No credible study, however, supports the claim that a conscious recruitment drive is underway to lead Africans away from their natural and historical path. Yet, as Uganda’s “Scientific Statement” demonstrates, that claim often justifies a backlash against sexual minorities and their allies.
Reaction against representations of African sexuality that disrupt the myth of heterosexual exclusivity can be traced back almost to the beginning of their appearance in the age of coming out. Kenyatta’s sarcasm about European “friends of Africa” is broadly aimed but his bald statements about the superiority of Gikuyu sexual mores make it clear that defending a sharply defined heterosexuality was an important element of his nationalism. Claims that African men were being corrupted by sodomistic Europeans go back to at least the 1950s (Fanon [1952] 1967; Diop 1960), and in the case of Cameroun seem to have inspired a tough new law against homosexuality in 1970 (Nyeck 2013). In the sphere of public health, researchers who complicated the emerging “heterosexual African AIDS” narrative in the mid‐1980s were ignored, mocked, or tarred with the innuendo of racism (Oppong and Kalipeni (2004), notably, attacking an American scholar for wondering about “hidden bisexuality” in Africa). In at least two known cases, researchers received death threats, presumably from state officials who disapproved (see Wilson Carswell, cited in Epprecht 2008; and Kocheloff 2006). The case of Rotimi Fani‐Kayode from the 1980s is also worth noting. The Nigerian‐born photographer gained an international reputation for his work celebrating black male homosexuality but he never showed his homoerotic work in Nigeria for fear of his family’s safety (Williams 2015).
An African nationalism that made white men’s predation upon African men and boys a central metaphor is generally dated from the early 1990s. Winnie Mandela, at the time, notably defended herself against kidnapping and murder charges by alleging that she was merely protecting a vulnerable African boy from the lust of a white minister (Holmes 1994). In the years that followed, many African leaders made or implied a similar existential threat to African cultural integrity coming from the West either directly, through sex tourists, rapists, and gay‐positive propaganda, or indirectly, through donor pressures to provide education about same‐sex sexuality in the fight against HIV. The backlash against sexual minorities has by now reached the point where even to point out Western sources for the new homophobia can be construed as racist (that is, as denying African agency for creating its own prejudices independently of the West). The situation in some African countries has grown fraught with danger (Jjuuku 2013; Thoreson 2014), including the reputational risk for young African scholars taking up the research (Msibi 2014; Tadele 2015). Yet, at the same time, the backlash is proving a powerful stimulus to new research, creative thinking, and public activism (e.g., Nyanzi 2014; van Klinken and Chitando 2016; Chitando and van Klinken 2016; Namwase and Jjuuku 2017; Kaoma 2017; and Chiang, forthcoming). Are we on the cusp of a new age of sexuality studies?
How does the foregoing help us to think of ways to move discussions about sexual rights and sexual health forward? It allows us, first, to make a critical assessment of the “Scientific Statement … on Homosexuality” from Uganda’s Ministry of Health, and other documents or policy initiatives that assert or imply an essentially heterosexual African culture. We can see that the “containment” and “homosexuality is unAfrican” claims in fact have a pedigree stretching back to some deeply racist authors. They were promoted, sometimes unthinkingly, by a wide range of people and institutions in pursuit of diverse objectives other than scientific veracity (prurience, religious proselytization, colonialism, respectability, national liberation, anti‐homophobia AIDS activism in the West, etc.). Knowing where some of the common sense on this issue actually comes from alerts us to the need for more careful research on sexualities in Africa, as indeed the “Scientific Statement” acknowledges.
That said, we should not undervalue the research that already exists but which the authors of the “Scientific Statement” did not consider. That so much of it is by non‐African or white South African authors is an obvious problem for several reasons. But African scholars from around the continent are increasingly engaging in ways that are not just rich in empirical details but also politically quite powerful. One suspects that is precisely why the authors of the statement “neglected” to identify the one African author whose work they cite. Leaving Kapya Kaoma’s name out (and, indeed, any of the other Ugandan social scientists I have discussed) allows readers to infer that Africans are not contributing to the evidence‐based side of the debate and that, at least tacitly by their supposed lack of interest, they are united in their opposition to supposedly Western cultural colonialist impositions like sexual rights. This is patently not true.
Whether historical research is a good place to invest time and energy in the struggles for sexual rights and sexual health is open to debate. The World Bank makes a persuasive case that the focus is more strategically placed on developing economic arguments and targets. The same might be argued for tapping into Africans’ spirituality through the rereading of sacred texts. Perhaps traditional leaders can be co‐opted through the language of Ubuntu. Trusted public health officials might expand the realm of the possible by taking the edge off politicized language. There is also a strong case to be made that litigation in well‐targeted cases can open the door to wider challenges to repressive laws and cultural practices, and that the African Union, for all its problems, holds considerable potential for change. In my own view, these are all promising paths. Neglecting the history, however, can lead to dangerous missteps, as clearly happened in the case of the “Scientific Statement.” The harder we work to make it impossible for the history of sexual and gender diversity in Africa to be so ignored, the better we can challenge ill‐conceived interventions such as Uganda’s Anti‐Homosexuality Act.
I thank colleagues and friends at the “State of the Art of Sexuality Research” workshop in Naivasha, February 2015, for their generous and astute suggestions, and the funders of that event and Queen’s University for enabling me to participate.