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  • When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900–1958 by Saheed Aderinto
  • Judith A. Byfield
When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900–1958, by Saheed Aderinto. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2015. xviii, 241 pp. $95.00 US (cloth), $32.00 US (paper).

In seven engaging chapters and an epilogue, Saheed Aderinto has produced a very important contribution to African social history and Nigerian historiography specifically. His intellectual journey, as revealed in his introduction, is a “must read” for graduate students for this book is the outcome of a scholar who listened closely to his sources and grappled with the complex realities they revealed. Aderinto had initially planned to write a history of gender and prostitution in colonial Nigeria by examining the correlation between sex work and social class. However, as he followed his sources along the pathways they presented, he came to appreciate that to do justice to the topic he had to engage multiple archives and literatures (6–7). Sexuality was of concern to legal, medical, social welfare, and military arms of the state, as well as multiple social groups including the clergy, nationalists, elite women, village elders, and landlords. While keeping these different actors and their competing perspectives and objectives in the same frame, Aderinto provides a clear and accessible narrative that locates the evolution of prostitution and state sanctions within the changes in the larger political economy. Sexuality, and more specifically prostitution, also raises questions of morality and Aderinto illustrates throughout [End Page 206] the text the multiple ways in which discussions about morality and prostitution were further nuanced by ideas about race, gender, and class.

Aderinto argues that African men and women were at the forefront of discussions to prohibit prostitution. Without creating monolithic or binary oppositions, he illustrates the points of conversion, overlap, and disagreement as Nigerian men, women, and different branches of the colonial state debated prostitution in public and in private. Africans too connected morality and prostitution; however, that connection unfolded in discourses that challenged colonial racism, critiqued colonial policy and practice, and anticipated a post-colonial future. The Lagos Women’s League offered the first concerted effort to compel the government to prohibit prostitution (65). Motivated in part by a politics of respectability and guided by their cosmopolitan experiences in London, the Lagosian elite wanted the colonial state to invest similar levels of resources to address prostitution in Lagos. Both colonial officials and the Lagosian elite expressed moral panic about child prostitutes, and shared the developmentalist notion that mitigating adult crime required juvenile intervention (158). Whereas elite women imagined that they would play a significant role in the infrastructure created to address female delinquents, colonial officials could not imagine educated African women serving in any administrative capacity.

The Nigerian colonial state took little action against prostitution before World War II though they were concerned about the medical, moral, and security implications of the sex work industry. In 1919 the Colonial Office demanded detailed information about the prevalence of venereal disease (vd), its impact on Britain’s civilizing mission, and the cost of establishing and running vd clinics (102). Epidemiological data was faulty for a host of reasons, nonetheless, as Aderinto illustrates, the discussion among colonial officials is germane to a much broader understanding of the cultural frameworks and inter-agency conflicts that shaped colonial policies in this area. Using an idealized notion of European sexual mores as a yardstick, they pathologized African sexuality. Colonial officials theorized that the prevalence of venereal disease reflected the still shallow roots of Britain’s civilizing mission — Western education, biomedicine, and Christianity — therefore Nigerians, like other colonial subjects, needed sexual discipline to both address the prevalence of vd and to climb the “ladder of civilization” (106). Medical officers devised a plan to combat vd in the civilian population, but it was not implemented.

The fall of France in the early months of World War II forced Britain to rely more heavily on the resources of its African colonies. Equally important, the war led to the significant expansion of military personnel in Lagos. In 1941, the Unlicensed Guide (Prohibition) Ordinance came into...

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