Investigating sexuality in Africa beyond the load of Christian, colonial, patriarchal connotations is no easy matter. Particularly so because the keen obsession with ‘sexuality’ which accompanied the colonial intervention did not seem to be matched by a similar focus on sexuality from the African side. What was important in African systems of kinship and marriage was fertility, not sexuality as such. Compounding the issue is a certain uncertainty regarding what actually counts/ counted as ‘sexual’. Kathryn Kendall (1999) reports from work in Lesotho that women she interviewed who engaged in what seen with Western eyes would be same-sex practices did not see this behaviour as sexual at all. To them sexuality had to do with penetration. From their point of view “you cannot have sex unless somebody has a koai (penis).” Thus: No koai, no sex. “No koai, no sex means that women’s ways of expressing love, lust, passion, or joy in each other are neither immoral nor suspect,” Kendall notes (1999:167)/ Similarly, Wieringa reports from the work of German anthropologist Karsch-Haack (1911) about a German judge Autenrieth, who “in 1907 asked a Wassiba man whether there existed any ‘unnatural vices’ in his ethnic group. The answer was that such practices did not exist. This has to be understood that same-sex practices or other practices considered ‘unnatural’ in the contemporary European context were not outlawed in this group, or even considered unnatural, whereas Autenrieth concluded that they did not exist at all” (Wieringa 2001:11). Same-sex practices in African contexts seems to have been quite effectively silenced, even to the extent that heads of state nowadays claim these to be Western imports. A rapidly increasing body of research shows this not to be the case (cf. Murray and Roscoe 1998, Kendall 1999, Aarmo 1999, Moodie 2001, among others).
A notion regarding a ‘Culture of Silence’ seems to have currency in certain African contexts, indicating a “socially accepted behavioural constraint” dictating “women’s reserve, modesty and discretion in sexual relations” (Osakue and Mar — tin-Hilber 1998:193. Cf. also Kolawole, this volume). On a closer look, however, the usefulness of this notion is doubtful; it tends to merge all sorts of different silences together into one. What seems to be important, in an initial phase, is rather to identify different types of silences. [57]
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