Allah Made Us: Sexual Outlaws in an Islamic African City (review)

Allah Made Us is a major contribution to the growing field of gender and sexuality studies in Africa. It also offers fresh, challenging insights and perspectives for scholars of Hausa language and culture, contemporary Nigerian politics, and Islam.

The "sexual outlaws" of the title are yan daudu (sing. dan daudu), typically defined as "homosexuals," "male prostitutes," or "pimps"—if they are noticed at all in accounts of Hausa society and Kano city in particular. Gaudio finds these terms misleading. Indeed, after years of observing and interacting with them he distinguishes all kinds of different and shifting roles, identities, and sexual practices among them and the people with whom they live. The latter include independent women who at times exchange sex for money in arrangements sometimes brokered by trusted yan daudu. There are also "civilians" or "shirted" yan daudu, men who retain the outward guise of hetero-normative masculinity but nonetheless have sex with men; almost all of these "shirted" yan daudu marry and have children, and consider themselves devout Muslims. One cannot assume that sexual roles always conform to predictable passive/active characterizations.

It is clear that through various combinations of sexual practice and degrees of feminine demeanor, attire, language, and occupation, yan daudu are a distinctive feature of one of Africa's largest ethnic groups. Their somewhat secretive existence profoundly challenges commonplace assumptions about the relationships among sex, gender, and sexuality. Official posturing on these topics—such as that displayed in the debates since 2006 on the topic of the "Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Bill" or in Uganda on the subject of the proposed death sentence for "aggravated homosexuality"—sheds light on the "nation building" process in several ways. For example, it includes attempts to define an official "national character" in opposition to the presumably morally corrupt West. At the same time, resistance to political and religious orthodoxies (in some corners) contributes to the development of an active civil society.

Kano is the "hub of a transnational network" of sexual minorities with vibrant links through migrant labor and the haj to the Middle East in particular. Over the last two decades economic crisis and the imposition of sharia law in northern Nigeria have combined to reduce the sphere of tolerance for this network among the majority population. Indeed, Gaudio documents a swell of overtly homophobic rhetoric in popular culture as well as several high-profile cases of police harassment of sexual minorities. But rather than presume an inherent African homophobia, he asks why exactly yan daudu have become targets of suspicion or anger. Gaudio's main objectives in studying yan daudu are to unravel the many stereotypes about them (and by extension, about heteronormative sexuality as well), and then to discover how they survive in this increasingly hostile social environment.

Some debate exists around the origins of yan daudu. To Hausa elites in the precolonial period they (together with the sexually suggestive dancing associated with the Bori possession cult) were an embarrassing and possibly subversive leftover from the pagan past. To the British they seemed to be more in line with such modern phenomena as prostitution or male–male "mine wives" who appeared elsewhere in Africa as the spreading cash economy and urbanization undermined customary social structures and sexual mores. To contemporary Islamists they are a manifestation of Western or southern Nigerian moral decadence which threatens the imputed national dignity. To the yan daudu themselves, they just are as they have always been and always will be, as the title of the book suggests.

Gaudio has a remarkably close eye for linguistic detail, including the shifting use of masculine and feminine pronouns within the course of a conversation or even a single sentence. Another powerful insight comes from comparing Hausa and English translations of a colonial-era text. Whereas in the Hausa version there is little moral condemnation of the yan daudu and the honest recognition that yan...