Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-788cddb947-55tpx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-08T09:24:52.834Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

18 - Sex in Lagos from the Mid-Nineteenth to the Mid-Twentieth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 April 2024

Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Mathew Kuefler
Affiliation:
San Diego State University
Get access

Summary

In the Afro-Atlantic city of Lagos, Africans birthed sexualities in slavery and colonialism. Sex undergirded the politics of emancipation, imperial subjecthood, urbanization, and social differentiation. Africans navigated sexual politics as an afterlife of slavery, living a spectrum of gendered unfreedoms ranging from the persistence of slavery to reinventions of Atlantic slavery’s hierarchies under the guise of abolition. Where old slaving and neo-imperial African and European elites exploited African bodies for labour, sex, and power, discourses about the potency and danger of sexed bodies, including slaves, redeemed and adopted children, ‘wives’, soldiers, ‘prostitutes’, ‘delinquent youth’, domesticated and politically marginalized women, and ‘sexually perverse’ subjects, constituted the polysemic production of sexualities. Sexual politics drove British imperial compromises over abolition as well as colonialist conceptions of male bodies capable of wage labour, sports, and political leadership, as distinct from female bodies best suited for social and biological reproduction. Local resistance entailed age- and gender-distinctive conceptions of bodily autonomy to repudiate elite theft of bodily potency and escape the surveillance state. In Lagos the state policed Black youth mobility, criminalized ‘carnal knowledge against the order of nature’, and used military violence to restrain nonconformist sexuality because it asserted power through sex governance.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Further Reading

Achebe, Nwando. The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Aderinto, Saheed. When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900–1958. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Amadiume, Ifi. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. London: Zed Books, 1989.Google Scholar
Azuah, Unoma. Embracing My Shadow: Growing Up Lesbian in Nigeria. Burscough, UK: Beaten Track, 2020.Google Scholar
Azuah, Unoma, ed., Blessed Body: The Secret Lives of Nigerian Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender. Jackson, TN: Cooking Pot Books, 2016.Google Scholar
Azuah, Unoma, and Michelle, Omas, eds. Mounting the Moon: Queer Nigerian Poems. Jackson, TN: Cooking Pot Books, 2018.Google Scholar
Byfield, Judith W. The Great Upheaval: Women and Nation in Postwar Nigeria. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2021.Google Scholar
Fourchard, Laurent. ‘Lagos and the Invention of Juvenile Delinquency in Nigeria, 1920–60’. Journal of African History 47 (2006): 115–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gaudio, Rudolph P. Allah Made Us: Sexual Outlaws in an Islamic African City. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
George, Abosede A. Making Modern Girls: A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development in Colonial Lagos. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Lindsay, Lisa A. Working with Gender: Wage Labor and Social Change in Southwestern Nigeria. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003.Google Scholar
Lindsay, Lisa A., and Stephan F. Miescher, , eds. Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003.Google Scholar
Mann, Kristin. Marrying Well: Marriage, Status and Social Change among the Educated Elite in Colonial Lagos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Mann, Kristin Slavery and the Birth of an African City, Lagos, 1760–1900. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Mbah, Ndubueze L. Emergent Masculinities: Gendered Power and Social Change in the Biafran Atlantic Age. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McIntosh, Marjorie Keniston. Yoruba Women, Work, and Social Change. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Mohammed, Azeenarh, Nagarajan, Chitra, and Aliyu, Rafeeat, eds. She Called Me Woman: Nigeria’s Queer Women Speak. Abuja: Cassava Republic, 2018.Google Scholar
Murray, Stephen O., and Roscoe, Will, eds. Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Newell, Stephanie. The Forger’s Tale: The Search for Odeziaku. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́ What Gender is Motherhood? Changing Ideals of Power, Procreation and Identity in the Age of Modernity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.Google Scholar
Peel, J. D. Y. Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Schoonmaker, Trevor, ed. Fela: From West Africa to West Broadway. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.Google Scholar
Stapleton, Timothy. West African Soldiers in Britain’s Colonial Army, 1860–1960. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2022.Google Scholar
Veal, Michael E. Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×