From roughly the 1860s through the liberation struggles of the 1960s, and the 1990s with the advent of queer theory, up to the first decade of the twenty-first century, I have, over six chapters, identified those texts by a handful of colonial writers and some thirty African postcolonial writers that present homosexuality-as-an-identity, however nebulous, rather than an occasional or ritualized practice as was the case in the early ethnographic imagination. These texts in which men have sex with men or boys and women have sex with women or girls gain in complexity as they move from considering same-sex desire in a subterraneous way and then with increasingly marked confidence.

As the chapters unfold and uncover same-sex practices over the African continent south of the Sahara – from Mali to South Africa, from Senegal to Kenya – from the use of ‘sodomy’ and ‘pederasty’ in fin-de-siècle European anthropological texts (Chapters 1 and 2) to a proliferation of vocabularies variously influenced by local naming practices and contemporary LGBTQI2 rights, a paradigmatic shift has occurred identified in the Introduction as a move towards the exposure, through the subjectivity of literature, of the Foucauldian discourse-as-event around African same-sex desires and practices as a construct.