African history enriches the comparative study of sexualities, demonstrating a breadth of practices, inflected by location, era, and historical contingency. Despite pervasive stereotypes, earlier sexualities were often varied and expansive. Examples challenge conventional academic categories, revealing the intersections between aspects personal and societal, romantic and transactional, and even sacred and sensual. Some African cultures endorsed varied pre-marital sexual explorations among adolescents and many emphasized initiations that shaped youths into gendered adults. Marriages and children often represented sources of power for families, elders, and elites, including older women. African cultures often defined gender according to role and status, not biology, such as the widely occurring instances of female husbands who married women in recent times. Both marriages and lovers factored into African politics, providing important means of alliance-building. Yet, interests in sexual partners extended beyond these concerns and included instances of same-sex partnerships along with practices aimed at mutual pleasure. Sexuality also mattered to many Africans’ cosmologies about well-being, healing, and power. Some healers gained power through sexual acts, and others through abstinence.