Two decades of sexuality research in Africa south of the Sahara

Abstract

The launch of this journal roughly coincided with my personal engagement with the study of sexualities. I had just landed in Zimbabwe at a moment when sexuality was re-emerging as a hot political issue. It had been very hot indeed in the middling days of colonial rule. Then, black Zimbabweans' anxieties about the impacts of cash, urbanization, and the large-scale influx of male migrant labourers from Malawi, and white settlers' fears of black male lust for white women were characteristic features of public discourse that helped to shape the form that the colonial state took (Jeater, 1993). The tone of that discourse tended towards moralistic, paternalistic, and often overtly racist. The liberation struggle, the dream of national development, and the shifting etiquette of scholarly enquiry, put sexuality talk largely off the main agenda in the 1970s and 80s. By the early 1990s, however, sexual mores were coming back in a big way as an area of political concern. The HIV/AIDS epidemic was spiralling out of control, and unequal gender relations expressed in normative sexuality were quite evidently a contributing factor to the calamity. What to do about that was complicated by a tendency in the media and among Western donors to pathologize/ otherize 'African sexuality.' That tendency was in some ways reminiscent of, and to some as infuriating as, in the colonial age. African critiques of the 'westocentrism,' and gender or 'queer imperialism' in Western responses to the HIV/AIDS pandemic-at times astute, at times angry, at times hyperbolic-struck a chord that beckoned for more sensitive, nuanced research (

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