As a system of identity, African masculinity is much more than a cluster of norms, values, and behavioral patterns expressing explicit and implicit expectations of how men should act and represent themselves to others. It also refers to more than how African male bodies, subjectivities, and experiences are constituted in specific historical, cultural, and social contexts. African masculinities, as historical subjects embodying distinctive socially constructed gender and sexual identities, have been both male and female. By occupying a masculine sociopolitical position, embodying masculine social traits, and performing cultural deeds socially construed and symbolized as masculine, African men and women have constituted masculinity. Across various African societies and times, there have been multiple and conflicting notions of masculinities, promoted by local and foreign institutions, and there have been ceaseless contestations and synergies among the various forms of hegemonic, subordinate, and subversive African masculinities. Men and women have frequently brought their own agendas to bear on the political utility of particular notions of masculinity. Through such performances of masculinity, Africans have constantly negotiated the institutional power dynamics of gender relations. So, the question is not whether Africans worked with gender binaries, because they did. As anthropologist John Wood puts it, African indigenous logic of gender becomes evident in the juxtaposition, symbolic reversals, and interrelation of opposites. Rather, one should ask, why and how did African societies generate a fluid gender system in which biological sex did not always correspond to gender, such that anatomically male and female persons could normatively occupy socially constructed masculine and feminine roles and vice versa? And how did African mutually constitutive gender and sexuality constructions shape African societies?
Article
African Masculinities
Ndubueze L. Mbah
Article
African Women in Film, the Moving Image, and Screen Culture
Beti Ellerson
While African women in film have distinct histories and trajectories, at the same time they have common goals and objectives. Hence, “African women in film” is a concept, an idea, with a shared story and path. While there has always been the hope of creating national cinemas, even the very notion of African cinema(s) in the plural has been pan-African since its early history. And women have taken part in the formation of an African cinema infrastructure from the beginning. The emergence of an “African women in cinema movement” developed from this larger picture. The boundaries of women’s work extend to the global African diaspora. Language, geography, and colonial legacies add to the complexity of African cinema history. Women have drawn from the richness that this multiplicity offers, contributing on local, national, continental, and global levels as practitioners, activists, cultural producers, and stakeholders.
Article
Animals in African History
Sandra Swart
Animal history in Africa—the multi-species story of the continent’s past—as a separate subdisciplinary “turn” is both recent and tentative, but as an integrated theme within the broader historiography it is both pioneering and enduring. Historians of Africa have long engaged with animals as vectors of change in human history and, of course, at the same time, understood that humans were a key agent of change in animal histories too, especially in the long-lived and extensive writing on epizootics, livestock farming, pastoralism, hunting, and conservation. African animal histories should resist the imposition of intellectual paradigms from the Global North.
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Bodily Ways of Knowing: Anthropological and Historical Approaches to Affect and the Senses
Kathryn Linn Geurts
For centuries, European and Global North observers of non-Western societies have been fascinated by African bodily expressivity and power. Artistic and ritual displays of bodily ways of knowing have captivated explorers, traders, missionaries, anthropologists, historians, and tourists, and this engagement has spawned a robust industry of representational accounts of African affect and sensibilities. Both European colonialism and American imperialism created and produced voluminous documentation of “the black body” through study of folklore, proverbs, myth, sculpture, masks, adornment objects such as beads, tunics, hair combs, and so forth. In addition, film and still photography have been used to capture vivid portrayals of bodily powers revealed in dance and possession trance. A history of such documentation and collection reveals shifts over more than a century in the way body, affect, and sensing have been understood and studied. Anthropology and psychology took the lead in attending to affect and the senses, but by the late 20th century additional fields such as music, art history, archaeology, and history joined in the sensory turn.
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Textiles in West Africa up to the 20th Century
Jody Benjamin
Across the large, dynamic diverse space of West Africa—from the dense urban enclaves in Oyo, Kano, Kumasi, Jenne, and Timbuktu to the smaller towns and village settings of the Sahel or rainy tropics of the southern coast—textiles were important to the social, economic, religious, and cultural lives of local communities. In many parts of the region south from Lake Chad to the Bight of Biafra and west along the Atlantic coast to Mauritania, artisans have processed and woven textiles from raffia, bark, bast, wool, silk, and cotton that was used for clothing such as infant swaddling, wrappers, head ties, turbans, tunics, gowns, trousers, and burial cloths. Textiles have served a variety of utilitarian and ceremonial purposes such as a flexible form of exchange currency to pay a customs tax or to give as a dowry in marriage. Whether as artifacts of everyday use or exceptional splendor, West African textiles have reflected the region’s enormous historical, geographical, ethnic, and religious diversity, as well as the specificity of distinct areas and time periods. Archeologists, art historians, anthropologists, and historians have produced much scholarly literature on cloth both manufactured in and imported to West Africa. These works have debated the still imprecisely understood origins of cloth weaving in West Africa, the use of natural dyes, and the impact of the capitalist global economy that began to emerge in the 18th and 19th centuries on local textile manufacturing and consumers. The study of textiles, especially their circulation and use before the 20th century, challenges the notion of West African societies as either static or isolated from the evolving global scene.
