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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
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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 

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers of this piece for their constructive criticism and valuable suggestions. Author's email: nakanyike.musisi@utoronto.ca

References

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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