Exploring Gender and Sexuality in Africa: From Colonial Oppression to Embracing Diversity

Abstract

Analytical Review Gender and sexuality are excellent terms whose weight in defining an individuals' identity cannot be ignored. Ever since time immemorial, various scholars have expressed their views towards gender and sexuality as understood from an African perspective. Arnfred (2004) is among the multiple scholars whose effort to analyze gender and sexuality in Africa aims to enlighten people about the effect and impacts that gender and sexuality have had on African people, especially African women. Based on Signe, approaches of studying gender and sexuality in Africa like colonial anthropology and post-colonial critiques defines masculinity as a dominating power that demands subordination from the female gender. The colonial construction representing gender and sexuality remains grounded on the fact that the male and female become governed and defined through gender-centered roles, which ought to be adhered to at any given time. Women remained viewed as a gender vulnerable to harassment from men. However, with time gender roles initially constructed have been uplifted, with both genders embracing diversity for a better tomorrow. Unlike at current, sex remained viewed as an act, not an identifier which brings the entire difference in defining shifts and changes that the definition of gender and sexuality has experienced amongst African. As Arnfred (2004) argued, African women remained vulnerable to mistreatment during the colonial period from the males governing and ruling their territories (Jackson, 2002). As Jackson (2002) puts it, the colonial period subjected women to esteem issues whereby their worth was zero-rated. Men inhumanly treated them as the gender with no say and expected to submit to male demands. For instance, experiences of private part check by men as women moved from one place to another is a clear act of the limited power that female gender voice had during colonial and even part...