degree of social independence and avoid the severe control often exercised by a true husband.” Marriage is an option and a choice for these economically active women, who may prefer to navigate between various ‘donors’ rather than to risk the subordi­nation to one particular husband. Whether also motherhood is seen as an option is less […]

In traditional patrilineal societies, marriage is the link between procreation and kinship. It is through marriage that children born of mothers are brought into fa­thers’ lineages. Until recently in many African societies marriage has been a pre­condition for adulthood. Compare here the discussions in Becker’s chapter of efundula, the initiation ritual which is seen as […]

Female agency is nothing new in Africa. On the contrary, as forcefully pointed out by Kolawole (this volume), not only are notions of ’universal female subordina­tion’ misplaced in Africa, but there is also a long tradition of women’s struggles against colonial domination, and resisting traditional rulers’ oppression. Howev­er, with social and economic transformation, female agency […]

This last point about multiplicitous sexualities and critique of the conception of the subject as a bounded, trans-situational unit, corresponds neatly with Helle — Valle’s critique of the mainstream notion of a person as a unitary, bounded in­dividual. Instead he introduces the term ‘dividual’, in order to “lead our attention to that fact that human […]

structures among Creole women of African descent in Suriname, where such re­lationships are called mati. In Suriname, ‘mati-work’ is part of working-class cul­ture, as opposed to the middle-class, where according to dominant values women must be ‘feminine’ and dependent on men; as seen from middle-class positions ‘mati-work’ is perceived as ‘rowdy, unseemly behaviour’ (Wekker 1997:338). […]

Amazingly, until recently, same-sex relations have been understood as (largely) non-existent in Africa, the official (and widespread) opinion being that same-sex is decadence, imposed on Africa from the outside. Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe made that very clear in his (in)famous speech at the opening of the Zim­babwe International Book Fair in 1995: “I find it […]

Thabo Mbeki’s speeches (above) are a case in point. This politics further tends to keep desire out of the politics of ‘race’, as well as that of sex and gender. Neverthe­less, particularly as not acknowledged, this politically incorrect desire goes on working as an active force in the continued re-producing and re-fetishisation of ‘race’. Pleasure […]

Every intellectual gain requires a loss in sexual potential. The civilized white man retains an ir­rational longing for unusual eras of sexual license, of orgiastic scenes, of unpunished rapes, of unrepressed incest. […] Projecting his own desires onto the Negro, the white man behaves ‘as if’ the Negro really had them (Fanon 1952/1986:165). Whatever the […]

Problems of Pleasure and Desire Increasingly, as shown above, sexuality for pleasure—for men and for women— is acknowledged as a social fact, and investigated as such by sociologists, anthro­pologists and historians. A direct focus, however, on pleasure and desire opens a wide field of investigations, the contributions in this volume showing a range of possible […]

is a lot of difference, between calling a secret lover ‘the top of the pot’—signifying something extra, something nice, a pleasure and luxury—or stigmatising a mar­ried woman with a lover as a ‘loose’ woman. Nevertheless, in the period with which Hunter is concerned (the 1920s and 1930s) a married woman with one or more lovers […]