This chapter reflects on the evolution and construction of African women bodies as racialised, eroticized, and exoticised objects of desire, repudiation, and control, giving justification to colonisation. Before European contact with Africa, human sexuality and sexual services were sacred and highly valued. Africa had a well-organised and consistent socialisation process where elders initiated young members of society into the concepts and the acts of sexuality without shame, ridicule, or condemnation. Most sexual energies in pre-colonial Africa were expressed differently through multiple sexual behaviours including incest, concubinage, public sexual services, and ritual sex, among others. Nevertheless, these behaviours rarely involved direct payment for the sexual services rendered. With the advent of colonialism in Africa, women who innocently engaged in these various sexual services were demonised, sexualized, and most of them labelled and integrated into a system of regulated prostitution.
Top1. Introduction
This chapter retrace the key historical developments in theorising women embodiment and sexualities in Africa to bring out the link between the past and the present, the continuities and the changes thereof. A historical analysis illuminates some enduring assumptions and beliefs that underlie many of the theories about African women embodiment and sexualities (Tamale, 2011). From oral tradition and African praise poetry and traditional narratives, we see that sex was treated as very important in human life, not only for reproduction and procreation purposes, but also as a means to connect with mother earth, creation, the spirit and the symbolic world. Harming human life, especially women (mothers) was equated to evoking the wrath of mother earth as the one who does that becomes an outcast and faces punishment from the departed and the spirits. Contact with the female body was thus very sacred as it translates to new life in terms of the accruals (children, passage of time, reputation and sometimes mystical power, self-fulfilment, and so on). Africans, thus, could not imagine something of that importance being sold on the market. Among the Shona of Zimbabwe, oral tradition and precolonial Portuguese narratives report that Munhumutapa (emperor) Nyatsimba Mutota set a condition that his successor among his sons had to sleep with his daughter Nyamhita for him to become a great emperor. The youngest son Matope, took heed of this condition, slept and shared the kingdom with his elder sister Nyamhita, and thus became a great emperor. The spirit of Nyamhita (Nehanda) became immortal and a symbol of strength and motivation, especially in wars with foreign invaders. Therefore, sex and sexuality are so sacred among Africans to the extent that it could not be imagined that human beings, simple mortals, can disrespect it and stoop so low as doing it in public, selling and displaying it on the market and using it as a tool of oppressing the other sex. The least they could do was simply enjoying it with the respect it deserves without making the other part feel violated or lose her dignity.
Travel narratives of European explorers reveal their preoccupation with African women’s bodies and sexualities. Abrahams (2000) observes that European “scientific” examination and classification of indigenous women’s genitalia in Africa informed colonial science’s classification of the local populations as sub-human species. They “classified the Khoekhoe as not quite part of the human species on the basis of … perceptions of their genitals” (Abrahams, 2000: 102). Social Darwinian classification located Africans in the lower echelons of a racial hierarchy, on the basis of categorising the human race according to their genitalia. This provided key moral justification for genocide and enslavement of Africans. Their descriptions of the genitals of Khoi Khoi women obliterated the rich texture and nuanced quality of their everyday sexual, social and economic lives. Instead, these women became hyper-sexualised bodies, devoid of names, individual personalities, personal opinions, vital relations with kin, or membership in social groups. The undressed Khoi Khoi woman with her “strange” elongated genitalia and protruding buttocks became a trope that justified colonial racism and the economic underdevelopment of Africa, and implicitly sustained the power and the glory of the Empire (Salo & Gqola, 2006). Scientific and legal discourse about African sexuality informed colonial policies that denied the gendered personhood and citizenship of indigenous Africans. As observed by Abrahams (2000), the colonial discourses, which sustained the binaries of race, nationalism and development (White/European/civilised and Black/African/uncivilised), simultaneously entrenched the hegemony of heterosexual masculine regimes and homogenised the internal complexity and diversity of African sexualities as they interlocked with gender, identity and the political economy.