When Sex Threatened the State: illicit sexuality, nationalism, and politics in colonial Nigeria 1900–1958 by Saheed Aderinto (review)

This monograph addresses the politics of the regulation of prostitution in colonial Nigeria. The key concepts in the title are illicit sexuality, which mainly means prostitution, and politics, which includes nationalist politics but also extends beyond this. In seven chapters and an epilogue, ‘Prostitution and trafficking in the age of HIV/AIDS’, Aderinto tracks the practice and ideological underpinnings of prostitution control in Lagos from the first decades of colonial rule through the nationalist era, and also in the present-day Fourth Republic. The central questions of the book are: how did successive regimes conceive of the threat of prostitution, what policies were followed, and what actually changed over time?

Aderinto argues that answering the question of how different regimes conceived of the threat of prostitution requires first that we identify two characters: the figure of the prostitute and the figure of the customer. Whether the individual sex worker was an adult or an underage child made a difference in how lawmakers and enforcers conceived of the degree of menace posed by prostitution. Whether the sex customer was a civilian or a member of the colonial armies and whether they were Nigerian or European also had an impact on the degree of seriousness with which prostitution was treated as a threat to the political order. In short, prostitution threatened the state to different degrees depending on who was selling sex and who was buying it.

Aderinto’s exploration of the special role of soldiers in the history of prostitution control in Lagos is especially fascinating and insightful. The West African Frontier Force (later the Royal West African Frontier Force), on which colonists relied to police the subject civilian population, was itself imagined as relying on ready access to commercial sex in order to maintain its martial masculinity. European sailors in Lagos during the First and Second World Wars were similarly the focus of policy discussions that prioritized protecting the health of the soldier (and thus the imperial might) while preserving his sense of entitlement to sexual pleasure and privacy. Thus prostitution regulation, from the colonial state’s point of view, was driven more by a need to appease or control colonial militias and imperial armies than by any concern for the well-being of sex workers or the larger public.

Colonial officials were, of course, not the only ones engaged with the issue of prostitution control. Aderinto offers a thoughtful reading of the changing engagement of elite Nigerian women with this issue and how the politics of prostitution control splintered African elites along gender lines. Aderinto’s study of the history of prostitution control organically opens up other fascinating subjects, such as the history of venereal disease control in Nigeria, the long-standing wars between native medicine practitioners and purveyors of Western pharmaceuticals, local sexual ideologies and vocabularies, the urban underclass world populated with boma boys, crooked cops, bar girls, belligerent touts, drunken sailors and young musicians, who documented urban dramas in song for posterity. Aderinto draws on a wide array of cultural and social history sources, including music, the Segilola novel and advertisements, as well as medical records, military records, court records, contemporary newspapers and colonial welfare reports. Aderinto’s evident facility with Yoruba and Pidgin also allows for the rich use of oral evidence on sexual cultures in colonial Lagos.

Any African history book addressing the topic of prostitution is going to invite comparison with Luise White’s seminal project The Comforts of Home. Aderinto’s use of an oral history method invites a double comparison. What White was able to accomplish in Comforts was to focus the reader on a view of the sex economy in colonial Nairobi as narrated from the point of view of the women who were at the heart of that economy. From the point of view of...