This chapter is an intermediate outcome of an ongoing effort to think sexualities in contexts of gender in Africa. I have called it ‘tales and silences’ a) because in the field of ‘African sexuality’ there seems to be an abundance of re-circulated ideas and conceptions, which on closer scrutiny tell more about the minds of those who made them than they tell about Africa and Africans (cf. Abrahams 1997:37), and b) because there might be an inner connection between this type of tales and one type of silence:the general absence of ‘sexuality’ as an issue in African feminists’ writings.
This then is the guiding question of the chapter: Why is it that discussions of sexuality are so noticeably absent in analytical works of African feminists?[45] The contrast in this respect to the Western women’s movement and feminist studies is striking: here analysis and critique of discourses on female sexuality were key issues right from the start (cf. Simone de Beauvoir 1949, Kate Millet 1969, Germaine Greer 1970 among others). Amina Mama—one of the few African feminists who has touched on sexuality in her writings—suggests that the Western tales and the African silences may be interlinked, that it is “the historical legacy of racist fascination with Africans’ allegedly profligate sexuality [that] has deterred researchers” (Mama 1996:39). There may be other reasons as well linked to the ways in which sexuality is and has been dealt with in daily and ritual life. As has been analyzed by Foucault, the, according to him, obsessive “putting into discourse of sex” (Foucault 1978:12) is a particular characteristic of post-Enlightenment Western society.
The chapter is divided into three parts. In the first part, I follow Amina Mama’s lead, also urged by the ways in which issues of sexuality in Africa are conceptualized in contemporary (often donor-driven) investigations and debates, centring on illness and violence (HIV/AIDS, Female Genital Mutilation) and often victimizing as well as blaming women. Sexuality—and female sexuality in particular—seems to be linked to violence and/or death. Not much is said about pleasure and enjoyment, or desire—certainly not female desire. How come that sexuality in Africa is approached and contextualized in such ways? Looking into the issue took me back to the heyday of imperialism and evolutionary thinking in the
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