6- Exposing the "Unthinkable"

Abstract

Re-thinking Sexualities in Africa by Signe Arnfred, ed. Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2004, 276pp.

There was indeed a large void on discourses relating to sexuality/ies in Africa. This disturbing silence is not unrelated to the violence and humiliations of colonialism. As so many scholars – such as Ann Laura Stoler, Anne McClintock, Sander Gilman, Megan Vaughan, Robert Young – have demonstrated, the colonial event in its various dimensions and reverberations was
shot through by very powerful sexual undercurrents. The colonial drive, in other words, was essentially phallic: the adventurous agents of empire – the soldier, the administrator and the missionary – penetrated a seemingly passive geographical space, a virginal wilderness that was awaiting the thrust, domestication and eventual uplifting of Euro-modern civilization and modes of rationality. From Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespusi to the Japanese invasion of China during the Second World War, the colonizing gesture was a manoeuvre of powerful phallic drives, a violent act of copulation that is often difficult to disguise.