Caldwell et al. should be credited for looking at polygyny like this—instead of the usual approach which pities the co-wives for competing with one another for the husband’s favours. In polygyny, according to Caldwell et al. and the sources to which they refer, “the economic unit is the woman and her children—and in con­temporary society […]

Lineage is more important than marriage As far as my anthropological knowledge goes1 the lineage/marriage balance dif­fers from one society to the next, and in matrilineal/matrilocal societies (like the northern Mozambican Makhuwa) the lineage group to which you belong by birth is more important that the one to which you are connected by marriage. This […]

Boiled down to essentials the problem regarding ‘African sexuality’ from the point of view of Caldwell et al. is that necessary (male) control and regulation of female sexuality is lacking, and that ‘female chastity’ (emblem of civilization) is not held in sufficient regard. From a feminist point of view readings and evalua­tions will obviously differ: […]

To Caldwell et al. presumably a custom like this would be just another case of ‘ex­tra-marital relations’, and thus ‘permissiveness’. “What the Caldwell’s model really fails to do” Heald says, “is to grasp the essential sacredness of sex in Africa” (Heald 1995:497). So far so good: Ahlberg’s points that Christianity altered sexual mores and previous […]

and changed, if HIV/AIDS is to be curtailed. Caldwell et al. are well aware that the ’Eurasian’ obsession with ’female sexual purity’ and abhorrence of “sexuality that had contrived, and especially commercial, components” (Caldwell et al. 1989:192) have influenced Western ways of seeing, to the extent that “even now Western social analysts find it difficult […]

That these lines of thinking have not expired during the three quarters of a cen­tury which have passed between the (supposed) epidemic of syphilis in Uganda in the first decades of the 19th century and the present pandemic of AIDS is ev­ident in many a discussion of ‘African sexuality’. When John Caldwell et al. launched […]

than those of whites” (Gilman 1989:292). In this dictionary article the ‘Hottent — tot’ woman is seen as the epitome of lasciviousness, for which the author’s “cen­tral proof is a discussion of the unique structure of the Hottentot female’s sexual parts, the description of which he takes from the anatomical studies of his con­temporary, Charles […]

This leads on to the introduction of the second tale of sexuality as related to Af­rica: the story of Sarah Bartmannd —the Khoikhoi woman who was taken to Eu­rope from Cape Town in 1810 and exhibited as the ‘Hottentot Venus’. The factual course of events behind the mythical story, is a sad tale of a […]

ture of his own sexuality” (Gilman 1989:302). In Gilman’s reasoning black wom­en are targets for projection in a double capacity (as women and as black) thus be­coming sexual beings par excellence; sexuality as such is savage, and implicitly black. As also expressed in Haggard’s landscapes: beneath the peaceful and invit­ing virgin land—as surveyed by the […]

ground caves and passages.[48] Thus this male-invented split in female sexuality is also presented in Haggard’s novels: virgin lands contra gruesome caverns. The implicitly sexualized landscape is serene and pure—but also threatening. In the lines of thinking at Haggard’s time, metaphors of imperialism and sex­uality were closely interwoven. The land was seen as a female […]