Some books have a way of breaking into a class of their own or cementing notions that were often known but never so well crafted for the consumption of the reader. That is what Ignatius Chukwumah’s eminently edited volume, Sexual Humour in Africa, has done.
Gathering fourteen illuminating essays on five countries representative of Africa and grouped into five broad parts, the volume tackles sexual humour, one of the most common themes in popular culture, in ways that are enlightening. In this review, I give a succinct general description of the book and then concentrate on the chapter I consider, by virtue of my area of expertise – traditional African oral culture – the most revelatory of the pieces. In departing from extant literature’s treatment of humour as a mere assembling of data on sexual themes, Sexual Humour in Africa brings together essays that productively contend that African sex jokes do more than simply transmit lewdness.
Flourishing in pop music lyrics, on the internet, in physical social space, in verbal cultural productions such as erotic proverbs, films, pictures and advertising, and in popular fiction across Africa, sex humour is discussed in this volume in its diverse forms. These include pop fictional/musical sex jokes and performed sex jokes, as well as jokes that tackle sensitive and stigmatized topics such as rape and homosexuality. Much more than just joking, these forms of sexual humour construct spaces, guarantee discourse conformity, inaugurate communality, subvert decency, ensure gender filiation, encapsulate traditional African linguistic strategies, aid a subject’s navigation of pressured environments, enhance dominion and inequality of genders, upstage oppression, and heighten violence against women. The essays tackle matrices of gender, socio-historical-cultural praxis and implications, and other varied marks of the milieu of sexual humour.
The work does not just present original research through its treatment of sexual humour, a subject that few studies have tackled; it also unveils unique, multi-vocal perspectives on the analysis of sex humour in Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and Zambia, representing North, West, East and Southern Africa. Sexual humour takes on a heightened significance as scholars unearth the many acts this phenomenon inadvertently accomplishes for the audience. The contributors use perspectives drawn from postcolonialism, performative gender studies, typology, semiotics, queer studies, postmodernism, radical feminism, critical discourse analysis and psychoanalysis. These varied approaches expose the diverse sexual humour that abounds in Africa, thus offering an articulate and accessible description of the culturally durable object that is the sex joke.
Of the three essays appearing in Part II (‘African language, folk music and rhetorical strategies’), Chapter 4, J. B. Amissah-Arthur’s ‘Pudendic cult and public discourse: pornogrammar as a rhetorical strategy in Ghana’s public spaces’ (pp. 65–87), presents a study steeped in the Akan cultural tradition. He argues effectively that sexual humour in Ghanaian public space – or, at least, in the immediate Akan speech community – is dependent on what he calls ‘the veneration of the pudenda’ (p. 73), a certain cultural, rhetorical and ritualistic speech and dramatic modelling in which sexual notions are overlaid with more socially acceptable terms in public arenas. With a focus on settlement names, proverbs, gold weights, fecundity practices, linguistic arts, puberty rites and folk songs (all part of the Akan folkloric tradition), this chapter marshals different modes of sacralizing the sexual idea when engaging in humour.
Amissah-Arthur uses Roland Barthes’s relatively unknown concept of pornogrammar (an evasive expression used to disguise overt sexual references) to evaluate indigenous rhetorical strategies against the mediated expressive moulds that social media offers, a theme that can be found in other essays in the volume. Such rhetorical schemes (including the use of special characters in obscene words, for instance, d&ck, p++sy and f^ck in Chapter 14) are deployed to avoid breaking Akan social norms, while also allowing the sexual humour to slip through verbal exchanges in public spaces. Amissah-Arthur points to the enigmatic ways in which traditional African cultural practices have become the precursors to today’s internet sexual humour, albeit without much notice or recognition. He thus offers us a view of the sophistication of public discussions of sexual matters in traditional Africa before the advent of social media, which in many ways has increased the overtness of sexualized conversations while also greatly anonymizing the speakers. The rhetorical strategies discussed in this chapter contrast greatly with what has become the norm today, as described in Chapter 14 of the book. Side by side, Amissah-Arthur’s Chapter 4 and Nwagboso and Okafor’s Chapter 14 show us the old and new ways of enacting sexual humour in Africa today. Overall, Sexual Humour in Africa is an illuminating work that sexologists, Africanists, sociologists, gender scholars, literary scholars, anthropologists, ethnographers and the general public will find compelling and rewarding.
