Sexuality in Africa

Feature article

sexuality in africa

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Re-righting the sexual body

Jessica Horn

Introduction1

“There is a need for action and [lesbians] need everybody’s help. Wherever you are, speak out for them and give them your words of encouragement.” – Ugandan researcher on the African Women’s Life Histories Project (Nagadya, 2005: 75). “On a daily basis we struggle with contradictions that make us strangers to our bodies. Those from whom we should be able to expect support, too often end up betraying us.” – Nigerian activist Dorothy Aken’ova in a speech before the UN Commission for Human Rights (Aken’ova, 2004a). In January 2006, the Nigerian federal government announced plans to introduce punitive and homophobic legislation, on President Olusegun Obasanjo’s proudly announced premise that such unions are “un-Biblical, unnatural and definitely un-African”. The bill proposes to criminalise same-sex marriages, charge any officials who attempt to solemnise them, and to make activism for gay rights a criminal offence. Such a move seeks to close down political space for discussion and debate while violating the fundamental rights of all Nigerians to freedom of expression, association and democratic participation. The bill rides on the back of existing legislation in civil and Shari’a courts,2 and aims, one protest statement asserts, to unite a “splintered and critical electorate” around an “easy scapegoat in distressing times” (Uhuru-Wazobia, 2006). The Nigerian bill follows a ban on same-sex marriages in Uganda, the criminalisation of lesbianism and same-sex marriages in Zanzibar, and a slew of hate speech against gays and lesbians by Robert Mugabe, Sam Nujoma and other African leaders. With the exception of South Africa and its egalitarian (and much admired) Constitution, many African countries have in the past decade marked the continent as a place of legally-mandated homophobic intolerance.3 The tremendous furore and debate surrounding same-sex relations and...