counter-offensive that reached the headlines of the international press.[61] The same is happening in Casamance. These campaigns are generally perceived as part of imperialistic strategies counteracting local culture and women, in particular, sus­pect the campaigns of being attempts to abolish the secret societies. In contrast to Western belief, excision in the context of secret societies […]

The Jola, a small ethnic group of about 500,000 individuals who subsist mainly on rice paddy farming in Lower Casamance, pose an intriguing challenge to the com­mon Western understanding of female circumcision as an un-changing, deeply rooted custom introduced by men in order to control women’s sexuality. Since the middle of the twentieth century, the […]

assumed by many that the procedure is an ancient, un-changing custom intro­duced by men in order to control women’s reproduction and deny them their sex­uality. In this paper I will show that from a local perspective in Senegal, the cul­tural interpretations of female circumcision are very different from these Western assumptions. My study of the […]

Experiences from Fieldwork in Casamance, Southern Senegal Liselott Dellenborg[58] The men don’t know how to come to a decision. They used to say that a girl must be circumcised in order to approach the mosque, to be able to pray. But now they say circumcision is archaic and that uncircum­cised women are more pleasurable, more […]

In this vein, one type of silence has to do with the fact that some important ways of structuring sexuality takes place through proceedings that are often perfor­mative rather than discursive. Commenting on Audrey Richard’s puzzled confu­sion when attending the Bemba chisungo ritual of female initiation in the 1930s, Henrietta Moore points out that: [T]he […]

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 […]

In Europe the linking of monetary exchange and sexual or familial exchange is seen as either typically immoral or as a source of humour and dissonance. By contrast, in Madagascar the need to keep the two areas separate is not present. The right thing for a man to do is to give his lover a […]

The final point about sexual transactions, is the central and decisive one, the point where African women go beyond the pale, mixing sex and money. The moral di­viding line between sex and money cuts deep in the Christian ‘Eurasian’ culture in which the Caldwells are embedded, and whose lines of thinking they are unable to […]

In this section, Caldwell et al. refer to the ‘dual sex system’ “characterized by sep­arate women’s traditional political organizations, and even by queens of women” (Caldwell et al. 1989:203)—a point generally highlighted particularly by feminist authors (e. g. Okonjo 1976; Amadiume 1987, 1997). I find it very important to be aware of this possibility, in […]

specific emphasis on the mother/child matri-centric unit (Amadiume 1987) even in patrilineal societies. Another feature of polygynous households (in a patrilineal environment) is the collaboration of co-wives. Especially in a place like southern Mozambique, where many men are away for long periods as labour migrants, it will be the women left on the land—two or […]