Love and Sex in Islamic Africa: Introduction

Author(s): Corrie Decker

Source: Africa Today, Vol. 61, No. 4, Special Issue: Love and Sex in Islamic Africa (Summer
2015), pp. 1-10
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/africatoday.61.4.1
Accessed: 05-06-2017 15:33 UTC

REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/africatoday.61.4.1?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Africa
Today

This content downloaded from 186.60.183.85 on Mon, 05 Jun 2017 15:33:28 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Love and Sex in Islamic Africa:
Introduction
Corrie Decker

Groundbreaking studies on the intersections and divergences between Afri-

can understandings of gender and European understandings of gender in
Africa emerged in the 1980s and 1990s and have expanded greatly during
the past few decades. Collaborative works such as Love in Africa (Cole and
Thomas 2009), Romanic Passion (Jankowiak 1995), and Love and Globaliza-
tion (Padilla et al. 2008) laid the groundwork for questioning the universality
of romantic love. Recent ethnographic inroads into African sexuality, such
as Re-Thinking Sexualities in Africa (Arnfred 2004), Hungochani (Epprecht
2004), and Heterosexual Africa? (Epprecht 2008), have deconstructed his-
torical and contemporary ideas about African sexuality by pointing to the
colonial origin of heteronormative frameworks. Most work on love and sex
in Africa, however, has focused on predominantly Christian areas of the
continent and necessarily highlights the extent to which Western missionar-
ies and colonial officials reshaped African notions of sexuality and gender.
Missing from this emergent field is a deeper investigation into shifting
concepts of love, sex, and sexuality in Islamic Africa, both historically and
today. This observation prompted us to organize a workshop on love and
sex in Islamic Africa, held at Tulane University in September 2012. Three
important conclusions emerged from the event. First, whereas European
colonial officials and missionaries often blamed social problemssuch as
homosexuality, premarital sex, and female promiscuityon indigenous Afri-
can cultures, Muslim Africans tended to associate these and other practices
that challenged the prevailing social order with colonialism and Western-
ization, especially in areas affected by Western tourism. Second, from the
precolonial era to the present, many Muslims in Africa have had more fluid
ideas about love, sex, and sexuality than popular discourses associate with
either Islam or Africa. And third, campaigns to promote the acceptance of
nonheteronormative approaches to love and sex in Islamic Africa stress the
need to reconcile personal experiences with local articulations of Islam and,
in doing so, draw on both historical traditions and current global politics.
Workshop participants explored love, sex, and sexuality within the
context of Islamic Africa, which included studies of Muslims in predomi-
nantly non-Muslim regions of Africa and both Muslims and non-Muslims in
predominantly Islamic regions. The workshop sparked a conversation among
scholars whose work addresses these issues in historical and contemporary

This content downloaded from 186.60.183.85 on Mon, 05 Jun 2017 15:33:28 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 periods and from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches.
The articles in this special issue of Africa Today speak to the diversity of
interpretations among workshop participants and that of the communities
and individuals featured in their work. They point to continuities in the
Islamic experience of love and sex over time and through space and therefore
add texture to scholarly debates about universal human experiences of love
and sex.
africa TODAY 61(4)

LoveDivine and Romantic

By the mid-1990s, literature on love in Africa began to challenge the colo-

nial notion that romantic love did not exist in precolonial Africa (Bell
1995; Plotnicov 1995; Regis 1995). During the colonial period, European
2

administrators and missionaries often assumed that the social institutions

of African marriagespolygamy, arranged marriages, and the exchange of a
LOVE AND SEX IN ISL AMIC AFRICA: INTRODUC TION

bride priceprecluded the existence of romantic love. Even in the most con-
servative Islamic communities that systematically practiced arranged mar-
riages, however, Africans often exhibited a great degree of freedom in making
decisions based on emotional attachment. The production of philters, for
example, indicates the extent to which people attempted to control their
choices in marriage and love through magic (Cole 2009; Graeber 1996; Parle
and Scorgie 2012; Wilson 2012). At the same time, works such as Love in
Africa (Cole and Thomas 2009) challenged the universality of certain notions
of romantic love. The introduction of Western cultural ideals about love and
marriage, along with other factors, resulted in new forms of expression and
partnership during the twentieth century, but these were not simply repro-
ductions of European practices. In colonial Africa, young people were espe-
cially adept at reconciling familial expectations with their own modern
ambitions and desires. For example, in the 1950s and 1960s, young lovers in
Zanzibar incorporated the symbolism of popular Hindi romance films into
their stories of courtship (Fair 2009). Further reassessment of African tradi-
tion in the context of postcolonial globalization has provided a plethora of
options for analyzing and expressing desire and devotion. The distribution
of romance novels in Northern Nigeria, for instance, has brought about new
feminist approaches to love, romance, and womens position in an otherwise
conservative Islamic society (Whitsitt 2003).
The Arabic term ishq, used widely in Islamic writing across Africa,
conveys notions of love, desire, and the wish to possess the object of desire.
Some Islamic scholars and, especially after the tenth century, Sufi mystics
associate ishq with love for God. It denotes a deeper, more passionate love
than the Quranic term mahabba, the more common term for love in con-
temporary Arabic literature, but both can be used to describe love for God
and romantic love (Abrahamov 2003; Lewisohn 2008; Kennedy-Day 2003).
The fact that divine and romantic love can be expressed in a term that con-
veys everything from a general devotion to a carnal obsession reminds us

This content downloaded from 186.60.183.85 on Mon, 05 Jun 2017 15:33:28 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
that in many African Muslim communities, ones love for or from another
human is considered a reflection of ones love for God. In some West African
communities, for example, Quranic phrases are key components of love
amulets (Mommersteeg 1988). The workshop and the papers that emerged
out of it were concerned primarily with romantic attachments, rather than
filial, platonic, or divine love, but the connection to religious sentiment
cannot be forgotten.

africa TODAY 61(4)

Conference participants grappled with identifying the extent to which
these interpretations of love informed Muslim experiences in Africa. Jean
Danglers contribution to this collection delves into the theological and
philosophical aspects of love. She argues that medieval literature on the idea
of love decoupled love and desire and in this way provided a platform for
discourses on homosexuality within religious debates. Another site through
which debates about romantic love surfaced was family disagreements

3
about marriages. Elisabeth McMahon, in her analysis of taboo relationships
between upper-class women and men of lesser means in colonial Zanzibar,

Corrie Decker
points to the hidden transcript of love as the subtext in these cases. Both
works analyze love beyond standard social and economic discourse into
the realm of affect, where love is a fluid but powerful force, which shaped
religious and social experiences.

Veiling, Transgression, and Secrecy

In many African societies, marriage was a public responsibility, while love

and sex were private affairs (Breckenridge 2000)which was certainly the
source of conflict in the cases McMahon discusses. Lila Abu-Lughod (1999)
writes that there is a modest discourse of detachment balanced by a poetic
discourse of attachment and deep feeling in Islamic discourses on love.
This public/private distinction, pervasive in Islamic societies, has strict
gendered connotations, manifest symbolically in the veil. At the same time,
scholarship on this gendered dichotomy reveals the multiple ways in which
mens and womens worlds are inextricably intertwined (Abu-Lughod 1999;
Askew 1999; Cooper 1997; Hirsch 1998; Robson 2000; Strobel 1979; Swartz
1982). The ongoing politics of the veil and the resurgence of conservative
Muslim dress in recent decades remind us that in Islamic Africa, studies
of love and sex must take into account the ways in which religion and
the cultural expressions related to it inscribe local understandings of emo-
tions, the body, love, sex, and marriage. A good example of this approach is
Adeline Masqueliers work on the veiled she-devil in Niger. Masquelier
(2008) postulates that non-Islamic beliefs and practices can be reinterpreted
within Islamic frameworks of sexuality and gender as a warning against
those who transgress them and a commentary on the contradiction of the
veil as that which protects the innocent and conceals the guilty. Similarly,
this tenuous meaning of the veil appears in this collection, where Corrie
Decker analyzes the tensions between colonial attempts to protect, control,

This content downloaded from 186.60.183.85 on Mon, 05 Jun 2017 15:33:28 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 and possess Muslim schoolgirls in Zanzibar. The veil is a powerful symbol of
the control of womens sexuality and the secrecy of sex and love in Islamic
communities, but it provides a platform on which these conventions can be,
and have been, subverted.
Whether transgressing Islamic gender restrictions or challenging other
social limitations with regard to race, ethnicity, class, or religion, stories
of forbidden love are as elusive as they are titillating. Marriages and affairs
africa TODAY 61(4)

between Europeans and Africans were a defining feature of colonial Africa

despite (or perhaps because of) the imposition of strict rules of racial seg-
regation. When these encounters involved African men, they often led to
accusations of rape and racist fears about the degeneration of the white com-
munities on the continent. Whereas European men openly and frequently
partnered with African women as a strategic aspect of colonial rule, the
black peril made formal recognition of unions between black males and
4

white females impossible during this period (Etherington 1988; Keegan 2001;
McClintock 1995). Crossing the boundaries between colonizer and colonized
LOVE AND SEX IN ISL AMIC AFRICA: INTRODUC TION

was not the only, or even in some cases the primary, manifestation of sexual
transgression in colonial Africa. The love affairs that Elisabeth McMahon
examines were problematic precisely because they challenged the racial,
ethnic, and class hierarchies that reified the islands social hierarchy.
In Islamic Africa, sex is a powerful secret, shared between forbidden
lovers, protected by the marital bedroom, and always posing a threat to ones
honor and status if exposed. This secrecy, closely linked to the gendered
public/private distinction, is thus at the heart of much work on love and
sex in Islamic Africa. Scholarship by Signe Arnfred (2007), Sheryl McCurdy
(2006), and Katrina Daly Thompson (2011) explores ways in which women
employ their expertise in sex and manipulate prevailing discourses on
sexuality to subvert this gendered relationship of power. Not surprisingly,
secrecy is the central theme in studies of homosexuality. Given that mar-
riage is often considered a social obligation and love and sex private matters,
homosexuality has often been relegated to the latter in African communi-
ties (Gaudio 1998). The primary difference between the West and Africa
with regard to the politics of homosexuality is that, whereas the gay rights
movement and reactions to it have shaped much of the discourse on homo-
sexuality in recent decades in the West, sexual identity politics have not
been a prominent feature of most African societies. We should not assume,
however, that ones sexuality had no bearing on ones personal identity or
psychological well-being (Epprecht 2008:98). The discourse on homosexual-
ity in Africa is shifting rapidly and dramatically. Sylvia Tamale (2007) and
others argue that today, many Africans find a sense of empowerment in the
international gay rights movement (Munro 2012; Mutua 2011). In this col-
lection, the question of whether or not homosexuality is a public concern
lies at the center of Claudia Bhmes analysis of the Tanzanian film Shoga.
The interplay between exposure and censorship of the film sparked an array
of responses, locally and globally; ultimately, Boehme argues, it brought this
previously taboo topic into public debate.

This content downloaded from 186.60.183.85 on Mon, 05 Jun 2017 15:33:28 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Secrecy is a defining feature of discourses on HIV, regardless of the
religious context (Beckmann 2010; Whyte, Whyte, and Kyaddondo 2010).
Corinne Squire (2007) points to ways in which South Africans have dealt
with not only the stigma and physical reality of being HIV positive, but also
how many people have found solidarity and agency through speaking about
their status. When one decides to reveal this secret and to whom she or he
can speak are questions pregnant with social consequences. This threat

africa TODAY 61(4)

intensifies in conservative Muslim societies, where it is presumed that the
transmission of HIV occurs as a result of transgressions: sex between men,
premarital sex, or extramarital affairs. For instance, Zanzibaris mitigate
the dual dangers of infection and public shaming by carefully managing the
secretion and exchange of sexual fluids (Beckmann 2010). In the present
collection, Kathryn Rhine offers a unique linguistic journey through the
narrative of an HIV-positive Nigerian woman. Rhine analyzes Halimas story

5
as a reflection of the interpersonal dynamics informing ones willingness to
tell the secret of her status.

Corrie Decker
The central tensions here are not only the social consequences of the
public exposure of seemingly private actions, but the fact that transgres-
sions, and discourse about them, exist in public spaces, just as public identi-
ties often shape intimate relationships. Sexuality is in fact not private, but
always present in public discourse and the everyday public actions of men
and women. The metaphor of the veilas that which marks and conceals
the objects of sexuality and the secrecy of sexhelps us understand the
complex and often contradictory terms on which Muslims negotiate secrets
about love and sex in their public and private lives.

New Approaches to Love and Sex in Islamic Africa

Early studies of African sexuality arose out of colonial interventions to curb

promiscuity, prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, end the
practice of female circumcision, improve maternity and child welfare, and
replace polygamy with monogamy and the nuclear family (Dougall 1937;
Gilman 1985; Phillips 1935; Morrell 1998; Thomas 2003). At the same time,
they opened the door to ethnographic studies of African sexual cultures. In
the vein of Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead, works such as Audrey
Richardss Chisungu (1956) recorded the sexual rites and experiences of Afri-
can adolescents as a microcosm of the communitys social and cultural char-
acteristics. Jomo Kenyatta (1938), responding to Eurocentric views of African
custom as encouraging promiscuity, included extensive discussions of boys
and girls initiations and young peoples sexual experiences in his Facing
Mount Kenya. Cultural anthropology allowed for a nuanced interpretation of
African rites governing puberty, marriage, and sexuality, even as it reinforced
the notion that these customs had remained unchanged prior to colonialism.
Postcolonial international interventions have suffered from the legacy
of colonial discourses, and many scholars have grappled with stereotypes

This content downloaded from 186.60.183.85 on Mon, 05 Jun 2017 15:33:28 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 about African promiscuity in attempting to present new perspectives on
love and sex in Africa (Ahlberg 1994; Caldwell, Caldwell, and Quiggin
1989; Nnaemeka 2005; Shell-Duncan and Hernlund 2000; Thomas 2003).
Oyrnk Oyewm (1997) blames this misunderstanding of African sexu-
ality on the imposition of Western concepts of gender and social differ-
ence. Western discourses on gender, she argues, reify embodiment, even
though this biologization . . . of social difference is by no means uni-
africa TODAY 61(4)

versal; understanding love and sex in Africa can emerge only from studies
grounded in the local milieu, rather than based on universal findings made
in the West (Oyewm 1997:9, 16). Reconceptualizing the body and gender
within African contexts opens the door for discourses that occur outside
the parameters of Western epistemologies. Marc Epprecht (2008), Evan
Mwangi (2009), Sylvia Tamale (2011), and many others (including Arnfred
2004; Falola and Amponsah 2012; Gaudio 2011; Murray and Roscoe 1998;
6

Veit-Wild and Naguschewski 2005) have decentered the West as the primary
reference point in studies of gender, sex, and love in Africa.
LOVE AND SEX IN ISL AMIC AFRICA: INTRODUC TION

Public debates about sexuality are windows into the religious, social,
economic, and political forces at play. The papers in this special issue high-
light the Islamic component of our case studies, not to privilege this angle
over others, but to do as Oyewm asksto ground these cases in their local
contexts. Research on love and sex that takes into account the ways in which
Islam informs peoples sexual practices and ideologies of intimacy offers
unique perspectives on and proposals for addressing HIV/AIDS, inequalities
based on sexual identities and practices, and other social issues (Amory 1998;
Becker 2007; Becker and Geissler 2009; Beckmann 2009; Murray and Roscoe
1997; Svensson 2009). The papers in the workshop reminded us that religious
belief and praxis do not always affect every aspect of Muslim peoples lives
and that, at the same time, Islam often greatly affects non-Muslims living
in Muslim communities. Rather than belief per se, Islamic culture, space,
and practices influence individuals actions and behaviors. We are reminded
by Jean Danglers work here that Islamic cultures of love and sex expanded
beyond predominantly Islamic regions and helped shape concepts of love
and sex across non-Muslim societies in Europe, Africa, and Asia. From the
fetishized sexuality of Zanzibari schoolgirls in seclusion to the ways in
which HIV-positive Hausa women lived dangerously by having nonmarital
sexual partners unaware of their HIV-status, the attitudes and behaviors
of the girls and women in Deckers and Rhines articles existed within the
framework of Islamic gender norms regardless of their religious orientations,
and as McMahon and Bhme demonstrate, same-sex and unequal unions
challenged the religious parameters that define the boundaries of marital
and sexual relationships.
Sexuality may include:

sexual knowledge, beliefs, values, attitudes[,] and behaviours,

as well as procreation, sexual orientation, and personal and
interpersonal sexual relations. [It] touches a wide range of

This content downloaded from 186.60.183.85 on Mon, 05 Jun 2017 15:33:28 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 other issues[,] including pleasure, the human body, dress,
self-esteem, gender identity, power[,] and violence. It is an
all-encompassing phenomenon[, which] involves the human
psyche, emotions, physical sensations, communication,
creativity[,] and ethics. (Tamale 2011b:1112)

We embrace this approach to love and sex as we take into account interper-

africa TODAY 61(4)

sonal exchanges and political and economic structures, anomalous voices
and the pervasiveness of culture, and emotional responses and religious
doctrine. It is for this reason that we are especially concerned with the
individual experience. Personal stories of love and sex necessarily form the
backbone of these discussions because it is through them that we can imag-
ine the worldview of the medieval Islamic philosopher contemplating the
essence of desire, the betrayed lover fighting for dignity in court, the sexual-

7
ized schoolgirl flirting with a colonial official, the Muslim filmmaker craft-
ing his message about morality, and the stigmatized HIV-positive woman in

Corrie Decker
search of empathy.

REFERENCES CITED

Abrahamov, Binyamin. 2003. Divine Love in Islamic Mysticism: The Teachings of Al-Ghzal and
Al-Dabbgh. New York: Routledge Curzon.
Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1999. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Ahlberg, Beth M. 1994. Is There a Distinct African Sexuality? A Critical Response to Caldwell. Africa:
Journal of the International African Institute 64(21):22042.
Amory, Deborah P. 1998. Mashoga, Mabasha, and Magai: Homosexuality on the East African Coast.
In Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies of African Homosexualities, edited by Stephen O.
Murray and Will Roscoe. New York: St. Martins Press.
Arnfred, Signe, ed. 2004. Re-Thinking Sexualities in Africa. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet.
. 2007. Sex, Food, and Female Power: Discussion of Data Material from Northern Mozambique.
Sexualities 14(1):14158.
Askew, Kelly. 1999. Female Circles and Male Lines: Gender Dynamics along the Swahili Coast. Africa
Today 46(34):67102.
Becker, Felicitas. 2007. The Virus and the Scriptures: Muslims and AIDS in Tanzania. Journal of Religion
in Africa 37:1640.
, and Wenzel Geissler, eds. 2009. AIDS and Religious Practice in Africa. Leiden: Brill Academic.
Beckmann, Nadine. 2009. AIDS and the Power of God: Narratives of Decline and Coping Strategies in
Zanzibar. In AIDS and Religious Practice in Africa, edited by Felicitas Becker and Wenzel Geissler.
Leiden: Brill Academic.
. 2010. Pleasure and Danger: Muslim Views on Sex and Gender in Zanzibar. Culture, Health, and
Sexuality 12(6): 61932.
Bell, Jim. 1995. Notions of Love and Romance among the Taita of Kenya. In Romantic Passion: A Universal
Experience?, edited by William Jankowiak. New York: Columbia University Press.

This content downloaded from 186.60.183.85 on Mon, 05 Jun 2017 15:33:28 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Breckenridge, Keith. 2000. Love Letters and Amanuenses: Beginning the Cultural History of the Work-
ing Class Private Sphere in Southern Africa, 19001933. Journal of Southern African Studies
26(2): 33748.
Caldwell, J. C., P. Caldwell, and P. Quiggin. 1989. The Social Context of AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Population and Development Review 15(2):185233.
Cole, Jennifer. 2009. Love, Money, and Economies of Intimacy in Tamatave, Madagascar. In Love in Africa,
edited by Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
africa TODAY 61(4)

, and Lynn Thomas, eds. 2009. Love in Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cooper, Barbara. 1997. Marriage in Maradi: Gender and Culture in a Hausa Society in Niger, 19001989.
Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann.
Dougall, James W. C. 1937. Christianity and the Sex-Education of the African. London: Society for
Promoting Christian Knowledge.
Epprecht, Marc. 2004. Hungochani: The History of a Dissident Sexuality in Southern Africa. Montreal:
McGill-Queens University Press.
8

. 2008. Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS.
Athens: Ohio University Press.
LOVE AND SEX IN ISL AMIC AFRICA: INTRODUC TION

Etherington, Norman. 1988. Natals Black Rape Scare of the 1870s. Journal of Southern African Studies
15(1):3653.
Fair, Laura. 2009. Making Love in the Indian Ocean: Hindi Films, Zanzibari Audiences, and the Con-
struction of Romance in the 1950s. In Love in Africa, edited by Jennifer Cole and Lynn Thomas.
Chicago: University of Chicago.
Falola, Toyin, and Nana Akua Amponsah, eds. 2012. Women, Gender, and Sexualities in Africa. Durham,
N.C.: Carolina Academic Press.
Gaudio, Rudolf P. 1998. Male Lesbians & Other Queer Notions in Hausa. In Boy-Wives and Female Hus-
bands: Studies of African Homosexualities, edited by Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe. New
York: St. Martins Press.
. 2011. Allah Made Us: Sexual Outlaws in an Islamic African City. Hoboken, N. J.: John Wiley and
Sons.
Gilman, Sander L. 1985. Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late
Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature. Critical Inquiry 12(1):20442.
Graeber, David. 1996. Love Magic and Political Morality in Central Madagascar, 18751990. Gender
and History 8(3):41639.
Hirsch, Susan. 1998. Pronouncing and Persevering: Gender and the Discourses of Disputing in an African
Islamic Court. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Jankowiak, William. 1995. Romantic Passion: A Universal Experience? New York: Columbia University
Press.
Keegan, Timothy. 2001. Gender, Degeneration, and Sexual Danger: Imagining Race and Class in South
Africa, ca. 1912. Journal of Southern African Studies 27(3):45977.
Kennedy-Day, Kiki. 2003. Books of Definition in Islamic Philosophy: The Limits of Words. New York: Rout-
ledge Curzon.
Kenyatta, Jomo. 1938. Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu. Introduction by Bronislaw
Malinowski. London: Secker and Warburg.
Lewisohn, Leonard. 2008. Divine Love in Islam. Encyclopedia of Love in World Religions, edited by Yudit
K. Greengerg. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, Inc.
Masquelier, Adeline. 2008. When Spirits Start Veiling: The Case of the Veiled She-Devil in a Muslim Town
of Niger. Africa Today 54(3):3964.

This content downloaded from 186.60.183.85 on Mon, 05 Jun 2017 15:33:28 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York:
Routledge.
McCurdy, Sheryl. 2006. Fashioning Sexuality: Desire, Manyema Ethnicity, and the Creation of the
Kanga, ca. 18801900. International Journal of African Historical Studies 39(3):44169.
Mommersteeg, Geert. 1988. He Has Smitten Her to the Heart with Love: The Fabrication of an Islamic
Love-Amulet in West Africa. Anthropos 83(46):50110.
Morrell, Robert. 1998. Of Boys and Men: Masculinity and Gender in Southern African Studies. Journal

africa TODAY 61(4)

of Southern African Studies 24(4):60530.
Munro, Brenna M. 2012. South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come: Queer Sexuality and the Struggle
for Freedom. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Murray, Stephen O., and Will Roscoe, eds. 1997. Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature.
New York: New York University Press.
, eds. 1998. Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies of African Homosexualities. New York:
St.Martins Press.

9
Mutua, Makau. 2011. Sexual Orientation and Human Rights: Putting Homophobia on Trial. In African
Sexualities: A Reader, edited by Sylvia Tamale. Oxford: Pambazuka Press.

Corrie Decker
Mwangi, Evan. 2009. Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality. Albany: State University
of New York.
Nnaemeka, Obioma, ed. 2005. Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge: African Women in
Imperialist Discourses. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers.
Oywm, Oyrnk. 1997. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender

Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Padilla, Mark B., Jennifer S. Hirsch, Miguel Munoz-Laboy, Richard G. Parker, and Robert Sember, eds.
2008. Love and Globalization: Transformations of Intimacy in the Contemporary World. Nashville,
Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press.
Parle, Julie, and Fiona Scorgie. 2012. Bewitching Zulu Women: Umhayizo, Gender, and Witchcraft in
KwaZulu-Natal. South African Historical Journal 64(4):85275.
Phillips, Ray E. 1935. African Youth and Sexual Hygiene. Durban: American Board Mission in South Africa.
Plotnicov, Leonard. 1995. Love, Lust, and Found in Nigeria. In Romantic Passion: A Universal Experience?
edited by William Jankowiak. New York: Columbia University Press.
Regis, Helen A. 1995. The Madness of Excess: Love among the Fulbe of North Cameroun. In Romantic
Passion: A Universal Experience? edited by William Jankowiak. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Richards, Audrey. 1956. Chisungu: A Girls Initiation Ceremony among the Bemba of Zambia. London:
Faber and Faber.
Robson, Elsbeth. 2000. Wife Seclusion and the Spatial Praxis of Gender Ideology in Nigerian Hausaland.
Gender, Place, and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 7(2):17999.
Shell-Duncan, Bettina, and Ylva Hernlund, eds. 2000. Female Circumcision in Africa: Culture, Contro-
versy, and Change. Boulder, Colo.: Lynn Rienner Publishers.
Squire, Corinne. 2007. HIV in South Africa. New York: Routledge.
Strobel, Margaret. 1979. Muslim Women in Mombasa, 18901975. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press.
Svensson, Jonas. 2009. Muslims Have Instructions: HIV/AIDS, Modernity, and Islamic Religious Edu-
cation in Kisumu, Kenya. In Aids and Religious Practice in Africa, edited by Felicitas Becker and
Wenzel Geissler. Leiden: Brill Academic.

This content downloaded from 186.60.183.85 on Mon, 05 Jun 2017 15:33:28 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Swartz, Marc J. 1982. The Isolation of Men and the Happiness of Women: Sources and Use of Power in
Swahili Marital Relationships. Journal of Anthropological Research 38(1):2644.
Tamale, Sylvia. 2007. Out of the Closet: Unveiling Sexuality Discourses in Uganda. In Africa after Gender,
edited by Catherine M. Cole, Takyiwaa Manuh, and Stephan Miescher. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
. 2011. Researching and Theorizing Sexualities in Africa. In African Sexualities: A Reader, edited
by Sylvia Tamale. Oxford: Pambazuka Press.
africa TODAY 61(4)

Thomas, Lynn. 2003. Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Thompson, Katrina Daly. 2011. Zanzibari Womens Discursive and Sexual Agency: Violating Gendered
Speech Prohibitions through Talk about Supernatural Sex. Discourses and Society 22(1):320.
Veit-Wild, Flora, and Dirk Naguschewski. 2005. Body, Sexuality, and Gender. Versions and Subversions
in African Literatures, 1. New York: Rodopi.
Whitsitt, Novian. 2003. Islamic-Hausa Feminism Meets Northern Nigerian Romance: The Cautious
10

Rebellion of Bilkisu Funtuwa. African Studies Review 46(1):13753.

Whyte, Susan R., Michael A. Whyte, and David Kyaddondo. 2010. Health Workers Entangled: Confiden-
LOVE AND SEX IN ISL AMIC AFRICA: INTRODUC TION

tiality and Certification. In Morality, Hope, and Grief: Anthropologies of AIDS in Africa, edited by
Hansjorg Dilger and Ute Luig. New York: Berghan Books.
Wilson, Anika. 2012. Of Love Potions and Witch Baskets. Western Folklore 71(2):14973.

This content downloaded from 186.60.183.85 on Mon, 05 Jun 2017 15:33:28 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
IU Press, in partnership
with the Indiana University
Black Film Center/Archive,
is now the publisher of Black
Camera, The New Series,
edited by Michael T. Martin.

Black Camera is devoted

to the study of the black
cinematic experience and
is the only scholarly film
journal of its kind in the
United States. It features
essays and interviews that
engage film in social as
well as political contexts
and in relation to historical
and economic forces that
bear on the reception,
distribution, and production
of film in local, regional, national,
and transnational settings and
environments.
Published semiannually
eISSN 1947-4237
pISSN 1536-3155

SUBSCRIBE http://www.jstor.org/r/iupress
CONTRIBUTE blackcam@indiana.edu
For more information on Indiana University Press
http://www.iupress.indiana.edu

This content downloaded from 186.60.183.85 on Mon, 05 Jun 2017 15:33:28 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms