Women Embodiment and Sexual Services in Africa

Abstract

This chapter reflects on the evolution and construction of African women bodies as racialised, eroticized, and exoticised objects of desire, repudiation, and control, giving justification to colonisation. Before European contact with Africa, human sexuality and sexual services were sacred and highly valued. Africa had a well-organised and consistent socialisation process where elders initiated young members of society into the concepts and the acts of sexuality without shame, ridicule, or condemnation. Most sexual energies in pre-colonial Africa were expressed differently through multiple sexual behaviours including incest, concubinage, public sexual services, and ritual sex, among others. Nevertheless, these behaviours rarely involved direct payment for the sexual services rendered. With the advent of colonialism in Africa, women who innocently engaged in these various sexual services were demonised, sexualized, and most of them labelled and integrated into a system of regulated prostitution.