Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T08:14:07.301Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN AFRICAN HISTORY: A PERSONAL REFLECTION*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2014

Nakanyike Musisi
Nakanyike Musisi*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This piece considers the subfields of African gender and sexuality history, from the perspective of an unusual career path that has moved between higher education and activist work in Canada and Uganda, and included policy and public service work in the latter. Over the past few decades, African women's history has shifted from the margins of African historiography to the mainstream; scholars have subjected a wide range of topics to insightful gender analysis; and increasingly sophisticated studies of sexuality have emerged. This piece surveys these important developments and how they have played out in the classroom in relation to students’ shifting political and social sensibilities. It argues that, moving forward, scholars should devote more attention to the precolonial history of sexuality and develop creative methodologies for reconstructing that history, especially through engaging historical demography.

Keywords

HistoriographygendersexualitymethodUganda
Type
JAH Forum: Gender and Sexuality
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , November 2014 , pp. 303 - 315
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers of this piece for their constructive criticism and valuable suggestions. Author's email: [email protected]

References

1 For the historiography of HIV/AIDS in Uganda, see Kuhanen, J., ‘The historiography of HIV and AIDS in Uganda’, History in Africa, 35:1 (2008), 301–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Tamale, S., ‘Out of the closet: unveiling sexuality discourses in Uganda’, in Cole, C. M., Manuh, T., and Miescher, S. F. (eds.), Africa After Gender? (Bloomington, IN, 2007), 17–30Google Scholar.

2 See, for example, Schmidt, E., Peasants, Traders, and Wives: Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe, 1870–1939 (Portsmouth, NH, 1992)Google Scholar.

3 Epprecht, M., ‘New perspectives on sexualities in Africa: introduction’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 43:1 (2009), 1–7Google Scholar.

4 van Onselen, C., Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia, 1900–1933 (London, 1976)Google Scholar; van Onselen, C., The Small Matter of a Horse: The Life of ‘Nongoloza’ Mathebula, 1867–1948 (Johannesburg, 1984)Google Scholar; White, L., ‘A colonial state and an African petty bourgeoisie: prostitution, property, and class struggle in Nairobi, 1936–1940’, in Cooper, F. (ed.), Struggle for the City: Migrant Labor, Capital, and the State in Urban Africa (Beverly Hills, CA, 1983), 167–94Google Scholar; White, L., ‘Prostitution, identity, and class consciousness in Nairobi during World War II’, Signs, 11:2 (1986), 255–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robertson, C. C. and Klein, M. A., ‘Introduction: women's importance in African slave systems’, in Robertson, XX and Klein, XX (eds.), Women and Slavery in Africa (Madison, WI, 1983), 3–25Google Scholar; Caldwell, J. C., ‘The social repercussions of colonial rule: demographic aspects’, in Boahen, A. A. (ed.), General History of Africa, Volume VII: Africa Under Colonial Domination, 1880–1935 (UNESCO, London, 1985), 458–86Google Scholar; Hunt, N. R., ‘“Le bébé en brousse”: European women, African birth spacing and colonial intervention in breast feeding in the Belgian Congo’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 21:3 (1988), 401–32CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Parpart, J. L., ‘Sexuality and power on the Zambian copperbelt, 1926–1964’, in Bennett, N. R. (ed.), Discovering the African Past: Essays in honor of Daniel F. McCall (Boston, 1987), 53–72Google Scholar.

5 See, for example, Canning, K., ‘Feminist history after the linguistic turn: historicizing discourse and experience’, Signs, 19:2 (1994), 368–404CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mbembe, A., On the Postcolony (Berkeley, CA, 2001)Google Scholar; Mudimbe, V. Y., The Idea of Africa (Bloomington, IN, 1994)Google Scholar

6 Berger, I., ‘African women's history: themes and perspectives’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 4:1 (2003), 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Epprecht, M., Hungochani: The History of a Dissident Sexuality in Southern Africa (Montreal, 2004)Google Scholar; Hoad, N., African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization (Minneapolis, 2007)Google Scholar.

8 I use this term ‘fugitive’ in the same way Margaret Jean Hay used it to refer to African women's history by the late 1980s, in ‘Queens, prostitutes, and peasants: historical perspectives on African women, 1971–1986’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, Special Issue: current research on African women, 22:3 (1988), 431–47. For other studies, see Cooper, B. M., Marriage in Maradi: Gender and Culture in a Hausa Society in Niger, 1900–1989 (Portsmouth, NH, 1997)Google Scholar; Davison, J., Voices from Mutira: Change in the Lives of Rural Gikuyu Women, 1910–1995 (Boulder, CO, 1996)Google Scholar; Thomas, L. M., ‘“Ngaitana (I will circumcise myself)”: the gender and generational politics of the 1956 ban on clitoridectomy in Meru, Kenya’, Gender and History, 8:3 (1996), 338–63CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Robertson, C., ‘Grassroots in Kenya: women, genital mutilation, and collective action, 1920–1990’, Signs, 21:3 Spring (1996), 615–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 van Onselen, Chibaro; van Onselen, Small Matter of a Horse.

10 van Onselen, Small Matter of a Horse, 52.

11 See also Moodie, T. D. with Ndatshe, V., Going for Gold: Men, Mines, and Migration (Berkeley, CA, 1994)Google Scholar.

12 Bay, E. G. (ed.), Women and Work in Africa (Boulder, CO, 1982)Google Scholar; Feierman, S., ‘The Shambaa’, in Roberts, A. (ed.), Tanzania before 1900 (Nairobi, 1968), 1–15Google Scholar; S. Feierman, ‘Concepts of sovereignty among the Shambaa and their relation to political action’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Oxford University, 1972); Feierman, S., The Shambaa Kingdom: A History (Madison, WI, 1974)Google Scholar; Geiger, S., ‘Women's life histories: method and content’, Signs, 11:2 (1986), 334–51Google Scholar; Geiger, S., ‘Women in nationalist struggle: TANU activists in Dar es Salaam, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 20:1 (1987), 1–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Guyer, J. I., Women and the State in Africa: Marriage Law, Inheritance, and Resettlement (Boston, 1987)Google Scholar; Hay, M. J., ‘Luo women and economic change during the colonial period’, in Hafkin, N. J. and Bay, E. G. (eds.), Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change (Stanford, CA, 1976), 87–109Google Scholar; M. J. Hay, ‘Queens, prostitutes and peasants: historical perspectives on African women, 1971–1986’, Boston University African Studies Center Working Papers, 130 (Boston, 1988); Johnson, C., ‘Class and gender: a consideration of Yoruba women during the colonial period’, in Robertson, C. and Berger, I. (eds.), Women and Class in Africa (New York, 1986), 237–54Google Scholar; Mann, K., Marrying Well: Marriage, Status, and Social Change Among the Educated Elite in Colonial Lagos (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar; Parpart, J. I. and Staudt, K. A. (eds.), Women and the State in Africa (Boulder, CO, 1988)Google Scholar; Sacks, K., Sisters and Wives: The Past and Future of Sexual Equality (Urbana, IL, 1982)Google Scholar; Stichter, S., Women, Employment, and the Family in Nairobi: The Impact of Capitalist Development in Kenya, Boston University African Studies Center, Working papers, 121 (Boston, 1986)Google Scholar; Stichter, S., Migrant Labour in Kenya: Capitalism and African Response, 1895–1975 (Harlow, UK, 1982)Google Scholar; White, L., The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; L. White, ‘Prostitution’.

13 M. J. Hay, ‘Economic change in Luoland: Kowe, 1890–1945’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1972). For S. Feierman, see ‘The Shambaa’; ‘Concepts of sovereignty’; and The Shambaa Kingdom.

14 I am grateful to the blind reviewer who brought this detail to my attention. See, for example, Guyer, J., ‘Beti widow inheritance and marriage law: a social history’, in Potash, B. (ed.), Widows in African Society: Choices and Constraints (Stanford, CA, 1986), 193–219Google Scholar.

15 White, The Comforts of Home.

16 Janet Bujra and Benedict B. Naanen similarly emphasized the economic aspect of prostitution and women's agency. See Bujra, J., ‘Production, property, prostitution: “sexual politics” in Atu’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 17:65 (1977), 13–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Naanen, B. B., ‘“Itinerant gold mines”: prostitution in the cross river basin of Nigeria, 1930–1950’, African Studies Review, 34:2 (1991), 57–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Discussing prostitution in the broader framework of gender and power relations, Emmanuel Akyeampong called prostitutes’ ability to move sexuality out of marriage a social revolution. Akyeampong, E., ‘Sexuality and prostitution among the Akan of the Gold Coast, c. 1650–1950’, Past and Present, 156:1 (1997), 144–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Moodie, T. D., ‘Migrancy and male sexuality on the South African gold mines’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 14:2 (1988), 229–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harries, P., ‘Symbols and sexuality: culture and identity on the early Witwatersrand gold mines’, Gender and History, 2:3 (1990), 318–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Moodie, ‘Migrancy and male sexuality’, 249.

19 Jeater, D., Marriage, Perversion, and Power: The Construction of Moral Discourse in Southern Rhodesia, 1894–1930 (Oxford, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Vaughan, M., Curing their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar; Hunt, N. R., A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Durham, NC, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Summers, C., ‘Intimate colonialism: the imperial production of reproduction in Uganda, 1907–1925’, Signs, 16:4 (1991), 787–807CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon.

22 Lindsay, L. A. and Miescher, S. F. (eds.), Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa (Portsmouth, NH, 2003)Google Scholar; Morgan, R. Z. and Wieringa, S. (eds.), Tommy Boys, Lesbian Men and Ancestral Wives: Female Same-Sex Practices in Africa (Johannesburg, 2005)Google Scholar; S. F. Miescher, ‘Becoming an Ɔpanyin: elders, gender, and masculinities in Ghana since the nineteenth century’, in Cole, Manuh, and Miescher, Africa after Gender?, 253–69; Hodgson, D. L. and McCurdy, S. (eds.), ‘Wicked’ Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa (Portsmouth, NH, 2001)Google Scholar; Gunkel, H., The Cultural Politics of Female Sexuality in South Africa (New York, 2010)Google Scholar; Semley, L. D., Mother is Gold, Father is Glass: Gender and Colonialism in a Yoruba Town (Bloomington, IN, 2011)Google Scholar.

23 Njambi, W. N., ‘Irua ria atumia and anticolonial struggles among the Gĩkũyũ of Kenya: a counternarrative on “female genital mutilation”’, in Oyěwùmí, O. (ed.), Gender Epistemologies in Africa: Gendering Traditions, Spaces, Social Institutions, and Identities (New York, 2011), 179–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Hoad, African Intimacies.

25 Musisi, N., ‘Women, “elite polygyny”, and Buganda state formation’, Signs, 16:4 (1991), 757–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 See, for example, Stephens, R., A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700–1900 (Cambridge, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Hansen, K. T. (ed.), African Encounters with Domesticity (New Brunswick, NJ, 1992), 172–94Google Scholar.

28 See, for example, Epprecht, Hungochani; and Gunkel, The Cultural Politics.

29 Musisi, N., ‘A personal journey into custom, identity, power and politics: researching and writing the life and times of Buganda's Queen Mother Irene Drusilla Namaganda, 1896–1957’, History in Africa, 23 (1996), 369–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 C. Robertson and M. Klein's studies have already demonstrated how sexuality and gender are central to our understanding of slavery and the slave trade. Robertson and Klein (eds.), Women and Slavery in Africa.

31 See, for example, Johnson-Hanks, J., Uncertain Honor: Modern Motherhood in an African Crisis (Chicago, 2006)Google Scholar; Johnson-Hanks, J. A., Bachrach, C. A., Morgan, S. P., and Kohler, H.-P. (eds.), Understanding Family Change and Variation: Toward a Theory of Conjunctural Action (New York, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bledsoe, C., ‘Reproductive relativity: time, space and Western contraception in rural Gambia’, Ahfad Journal, 22:1 (2005), 3–20Google Scholar.

32 Musisi, N., ‘Gender and the cultural construction of “bad women” in the development of Kampala-Kibuga, 1900–1962’, in Hodgson, and McCurdy, (eds.), ‘Wicked’ Women, 171–87Google Scholar; Musisi, N., ‘The politics of perception or perception as politics? Colonial and missionary representations of Baganda women, 1900–1945’, in Geiger, S., Allman, J. M., and Musisi, N. (eds.), Women and African Colonial History (Bloomington, IN, 2002), 95–115Google Scholar.

33 Foucault, M., History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introdcution, trans. R. Hurley (New York, 1978)Google Scholar.

34 Davidson, A., The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (Cambridge, 2001)Google Scholar.

35 See, for example, Kendall, L. K., ‘“When a woman loves a woman” in Lesotho: love, sex, and the (Western) construction of homophobia’, in Murray, S. O. and Roscoe, W. (eds.), Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities (New York, 1998), 223–41Google Scholar; and Kendall, K. L., Looking for Lesbians in Lesotho (Scottsville, 1997)Google Scholar.

36 Lyons, H., ‘Genital cutting: the past and present of a polythetic category’, in Lyons, A. P. and Lyons, H. (eds.), Sexualities in Anthropology: A Reader (Malden, MA, 2011), 251–62Google Scholar.