Histories of Heterosexualities in Colonial Africa

Three new monographs add significantly to our understanding of the transformations of gender relations and sexual mores from premodern to modern times in diverse contexts in Africa. While the focus in all three is overwhelmingly on heterosexual relationships, they contribute to the theorization of "global queer" by introducing meticulously gathered empirical evidence from otherwise under-researched historical African contexts. This evidence underscores how unnatural heterosexuality is: today's heteronormative gender relations and sexual mores did not become hegemonic except through a lot of hard ideological, legal, and other labor over decades of sometimes wrenching economic, political, and social change. Even then, heterosexuality as practiced is clearly a broad tent under which all kinds of relationships have flourished frequently in glaring contradiction to commonly heard claims about "African culture" or "African sexuality." These books also bring fresh insights into how and why colonial subjects were often attracted to and sought to shape for their own benefit certain aspects of metropolitan culture under the umbrella of modernity.

Rachel Jean-Baptiste's elegant history of colonial Gabon opens with an anecdote that poignantly reveals the yawning gaps between European intentions and African aspirations. France had abolished slavery and the slave trade in 1848. It thus found itself in a similar situation as the British had from 1807, with its navy patrolling the coasts of West Africa encountering ships laden with now-illegal human cargo. What to do with the liberated contraband? Like Britain with Freetown, France established an outpost on a convenient stretch of coast that was otherwise of little interest to it. This became Libreville ("Free Town"), where recaptives could be resettled with a hut and a plot of land. Within months, however, the first beneficiaries of French generosity rebelled. Roughly half of the freed slaves took up arms to attack France's African allies in the neighborhood. They wanted more wives than Libreville itself allowed, and for several weeks the men kidnapped young women from villages along the Gabon River. After the mutiny was quelled, the French state and Catholic missionaries hastily facilitated a mass, "proper" marriage for the survivors to restore the reputation of the civilizing mission.

This dramatic incident sets the stage for Jean-Baptiste to ask her big questions. How and why did heterosexual relationships change over time? What were the roles of African women in particular in effecting those changes? And how did sexuality affect the development of other social, economic, and political structures up to the end of the colonial era in 1960? Chapters unfold in rough chronological order, beginning with a close reconstruction of precolonial gender relations and the emergence of a vibrant transactional sexual economy (this makes the book a rare study of sexualities in Africa to include significant content from the nineteenth century). Chapters in the second part of the book focus on specific French and African anxieties and campaigns as the French state sought to mitigate perceived negative consequences of the emergent sexual economy: changes to the bride-wealth economy, marriage and divorce laws, the regulation of extramarital sex, and the propriety of interracial sex. The key concern was how best to manage people's often unruly affairs as the city transitioned from colonial backwater to booming, cosmopolitan center on the verge of independence.

In posing these questions, Jean-Baptiste acknowledges her indebtedness not just to the rich feminist historiography of women and gender in Africa but also to the more recent scholarship on same-sex sexuality. In that vein, she describes looking for evidence of homosexual relations to provide a fuller picture of the history but comes upon complete archival silence and oral informants' flat denials. She then made a strategic decision...