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Reviewed by:
  • Love in Africa
  • Elisha P. Renne
Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas, eds. Love in Africa. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009. 280 pp. Illustrations. Bibliography. List of Contributors. Index. $63.00. Cloth; $23.00. Paper.

While African marriage has been a longstanding interest of anthropologists and historians, the study of love—defined by Jennifer Cole and Lynn Thomas as "the sentiments of attachment and affiliation that bind people to one another" (2)—in Africa has been studied infrequently. In their excellent introductory essay to the volume, they note some of the reasons for scholarly reticence in this area of study. Because earlier analyses tended to get subsumed under "modernization" theory—which cast young people's preoccupation with love as part of a process whereby they became more like Western individuals—disenchantment with this teleological and essentially ethnocentric approach led many to avoid the subject altogether. Indeed, the fact that polygyny still thrives in many parts of Africa amidst a concern with love relationships suggests that the study of love in Africa requires con-textualized approaches that are situated in particular social, cultural, political, economic, and historical circumstances.

Three general themes emerge from the book's eight chapters, which examine love in several parts of the continent. The first, the question of how love relationships are characterized as relations of interest or emotion, or permutations of both, is examined in chapters by Cole and Mark Hunter. While Cole focuses on the Malagasy concept of fitiavina (love) in terms of its material and emotional implications in contemporary Madagascar, Hunter examines the transitional meanings of premarital exchanges in South Africa in the context of a changing political economy, which affected subsequent exchanges of gifts and sex. A second theme, the impact of different [End Page 213] forms of media on the ways that African women and men imagine intimacy, follows from earlier studies of newspaper love advice columns and how-to booklets on writing love letters. In her chapter on "Dear Dolly" columns published in the magazine Drum in the 1960s and 1970s, Kenda Mutongi explores the ways that prevailing gender relations and sexual orientation influenced the column's messages about courtship. Rachel Spronk, in her chapter on young professionals' pursuit of "healthy" love relations in contemporary Nairobi, examines the lifestyle magazine Saturday Magazine, which encourages twenty-first century readers to "work" on their relationships and to attend church premarital counseling classes. Thomas analyzes both the women's pages of Bantu World, a commercial black newspaper published in South Africa in the 1930s, and anthropologists' writings from the same period on changing ideals of love, kinship, and gender relations. In another chapter on changing marital relations, Daniel Jordan Smith writes about Igbo women's hopes—that monogamous marriage will serve as a buffer against extended family demands—which are tempered by the disappointments of their husbands' sexual infidelity.

Two electronic forms of media, film and television, provide additional models for new ways of thinking about love and intimate relationships. Laura Fair considers the Hindi film Awara, which thrilled audiences around the world as well as in Zanzibar and prompted discussion about obligations to family and about the power of love. In the case of the popular telenovela series Rubí, aired thrice-weekly in Niger, Adeline Masquelier observes that this series provided impoverished young Nigeriens with models for considering new forms of love relationships and for imagining possible, more optimistic, futures.

Although several chapters in this fine collection of essays focus how the media frame new ways of imagining love relationships, one surprising omission is an extended discussion of the impact of Nollywood videos, which are widely viewed by Africans—they are regularly shown, for example, on STC buses in Ghana. Nonetheless, it would be hard to ask for more from this volume, which provides both invaluable studies of love in Africa and a fresh perspective for HIV/AIDS researchers about intertwined emotional and pecuniary attachments.

Elisha P. Renne
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan
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