Ambiguous Pleasures: sexuality and middle class self-perceptions in Nairobi by Rachel Spronk (review)

What makes you African? This question reverberates from the narratives of young professional Nairobians in Spronk’s book, Ambiguous Pleasures. The book deals with the complexity of life in postcolonial Nairobi as it relates to the sexuality of young professionals. Sexuality in Kenya is moralized, and politicized, and young professionals are navigating the complex terrain of wanting to be connected to their African cultures, but also to be citizens of the ‘modern’ global world. The way in which young people speak of their sexual lives is shaped by postcolonial transformations that include technology, facilitating access to information both within and outside the country.

Spronk contributes, through the bridging of discursive analysis and empirical investigation, to the understanding of sexuality in postcolonial Kenya, focusing on the relationship between affection and sex, eroticism, and female pleasure. Emphasizing an interdisciplinary approach to studying sexuality, Spronk provides a critical reflection on the shortcomings of development and health research on sexuality on the African continent. There is a serious challenge posed by Spronk: ‘to reformulate sexuality research, taking into account how, on one hand, society organises experience and structures desire and motivation, and how, on the other hand, livelihoods or lifestyles frame people’s sexual behaviour’ (p. 28)–a challenge that all who are working on sexuality on the African continent need to embody as we study the diversity of sexuality and sexual identities in different African societies.

As in other metropolitan areas in Africa, Nairobi experienced a huge influx of migration from men who moved from homesteads in the rural areas to the city to pursue working-class jobs. These migrations, for better or worse, changed gender relations, and, with that, how sexuality is seen and practised, and because of the politics of morality that is often attached to sexuality, there is much contestation about the changing ideas around sexuality in Nairobi, and by extension in Kenya. The transformation of gender roles is a slow and complicated process that takes place in postcolonial environments that are sensitive to imperialism while simultaneously anxious about recuperating African traditions from colonial bastardization. This is complicated because the ‘recuperation’ of culture is often hinged on the idea of essentialist purity of culture in the precolonial. This is problematic because it inhibits transformative contemporary readings of African culture in the present moment, while simultaneously representing an idealized past as it is also inevitably read from the vantage point of the present.

Spronk demonstrates that, albeit imperfectly, young people are challenging ideas about gender, young men are challenging gerontocratic power by assuming a softer and more egalitarian relationship with women, and women are demanding to be free to pursue careers and avoid cultural practices that have no place in the contemporary moment. Although there are societal rules that young people obey, there are many ways in which individuals break the rules–or rather bend them to suit their contemporary needs. There is a rearranging of what it means to be a woman, and of how to enjoy sexuality. This is not to say that gendered sexual power does not exist. Women have to worry about being seen as promiscuous, whereas men do not have such worries–a mainstay issue of patriarchal power even in ‘modern’ African relations.

In the postcolony, belonging is troubled by life in cosmopolitan areas such as Nairobi as young people, assisted by new print media and technologies, carve out identities for themselves that do not necessarily align with their cultural background. Language is one of the ways in which identity contestations display themselves. The demand for African languages and the supposed authentication that speaking an African language represents are strong forces. The language conundrum unveils deeper questions about the use of ‘foreign’ languages in Africa. Can, say, English and French be thought of as ‘foreign’ languages, given that they are widely spoken on the continent? Surely an argument can be made that the English and French languages belong to Africans as much as they do to the English and the French. Furthermore, it can be argued that people who cannot speak vernacular languages challenge simplistic ideas...