19th and early 20th centuries, the times when hierarchies of ‘race’ were facts of science. This makes one speculate regarding what passes as ‘science’ today. It also means that you cannot just jump into talking and thinking about sex in Africa. The conceptual terrain is carved and cut in all sorts of often invisible ways; if unaware of this, your thinking might be following tracks whose course you do not even know. A thorough work of conceptual de-constructing is called for, the challenge of this part of the chapter being an inquiry regarding colonial lines of thinking on sex in Africa, which of course again were linked to structuring of sex in the imperial metropolis. Tracing some of these lines of thinking I look closer at two colonial ‘tales’. One is a novel: King Solomon’s Mines, first published in 1885, and the other the conception and staging in Europe of Sarah Bartmann, a Khoikhoi woman, in 1810—1815.
In the second part of the chapter I investigate a contemporary text considered an important scholarly contribution, a 1989 paper by demographer John Caldwell et al. discussing ‘African AIDS’. The Caldwell paper, as I shall show, is based on some of the same conceptions as those active in the 19th century ‘tales’. Midway in the second section I reverse the perspective, looking at the Caldwell paper, and particularly at the anthropological data on which it is based, from a feminist point of view—a vantage point which gives rise to a very different reading. The feminist reading is further supported by data from my own investigations and interviews in northern Mozambique.
Finally, in the third part of the chapter, I very tentatively look into other possible causes for the absence of discussions of ‘sexuality’ in African feminists’ works, briefly discussing different types of silences. The aim of the entire chapter is to be a contribution to attempts to clear the way for lines of thinking about sexuality in Africa not determined by the tales of ‘African sexuality’.