In this chapter, my concern is with two texts emanating from either side of the colonial African linguistic divide: Le roman d'un spahi (1881) by French novelist Pierre Loti and My Kalulu (1873) by the British explorer Henry Morton Stanley. Even though it is not a text pertaining to Africa, I also make a brief incursion into T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1938) because it provides insights a posteriori into Loti's and Stanley's texts. I also briefly refer to Stephanie Newell's research findings on British writer John Moray-Stuart-Young in that they locate his desire between Nigerian (Igbo) parlance and ‘Urania’, presumably after the Muse of astronomy. Such texts, in which same-sex desire could be deemed nebulous because it can only be inferred, are part of a large discursive body of relations between European (French and English) colonizers and colonized males, most of them young and dispossessed and seemingly lacking in agency and desire. As we shall see, even if power-relations are at play and the subaltern cannot speak, such relations point to fractures within the colonial project and within the subordinate/dominant paradigm characteristic of colonial encounters in ‘the tropics’.

Such seemingly unequal relations can be tracked in the colonial journeys of seminal, nineteenth-century figures. The English-born businessman and mining magnate, Cecil Rhodes, founder of the State of Rhodesia, supposedly kept company with a series of Southern African young male assistants or ‘lambs’, who find their match in the Irish-born British earl Kitchener's ‘cubs’ and ‘happy family of boys’, who were part of his retinue during his imperial campaigns in the Sudan.