The stereotype of "sexual animal" has plagued the African since the first European explorers brought home news of an over sexualized race with inexplicable erotic inclinations and passions. To this day, there are many people including some Africans themselves who believe that what has been singled out as a distinct "African sexuality" is nature's strongest proof of their racial inferiority and HIV/AIDS is God's punishment and judgment on an excessively permissive sexual culture. The mere mention of African sexuality conjures in most people the common notions of wild, animal, primitive, savage, ecstatic, excessive, out of control, dangerous on one hand and exotic, sex goddess, love machine, spontaneous, "in the moment" on the other etc. This contradictory image of the African (and of Africa for that matter) - that of a degenerate entity on the one hand, and of a source of regeneration on the other - occupies in the Western subconscious a sort of "delicious fright" and engages most people in the approach-avoidance-approach dance.
Even now as the West turns to indigenous sacred traditions, wisdom and values as a potential fountain of nourishment to parched souls of the post-religious West, many Africans are still ashamed of this aspect of their heritage. What was once an open and guilt-free expression of sensuality and sexuality is now a culture off stone-like silence (taboo) around issues of sex and sexual intercourse especially among the "educated" and those who want to be seen as "westernized." A silence which both Western and African scholars, researchers, politicians and the international aid community have condemned for perpetuating the spread of HIV/AIDS but which silences few are willing to further explore to find out what the "noises" filling those silences are saying, and to provide a platform for more appropriate responses.
Studies of African sexuality mostly carried out by Westerners and taken out of the social context in which they are naturally embedded have tended to rely on particular problematics imbued with assumptions about African culture. These studies tend to focus on the "oddness of the other" held up against a Western model. They focus on HIV/AIDS, the horrors of female circumcision, the traumas of armed violence and rape, sex work and trafficking. The African woman especially has been criticized by the "feminist movement" for wanting sex. Apparently because she thinks she can willingly engage in sex she is participating in her own oppression. African women who are willing to have sex and refuse to embrace the "Western " way of granting or withholding the treat of sex as a means of training men to give them what they want are weak minded fools who have internalized their own oppression because they're unable to know any better and patriarchy controls their every move.
Western research on African sexuality has paid far too limited attention to the African's point of view completely denying and negating it, and insisting that Africans not only accede to, but adopt, the Western point of view. The interpretation of the sensory experience, sexual perceptions and practices is based entirely on the perceptions of Western reality. Cultural stereotyping of Africans, especially African women demands that they dissociate themselves from any enjoyment of their own sexuality lest men "stop buying cows, because they could get the milk for free." This deeply entrenched subjective view of African sexuality fails to recognize the positive aspects of African culture and how these specific aspects have uniquely enriched the lives of African people - and in many ways may well provide the much needed spin to our North American shame-based, guilt-ridden, body despising, Â repressed sexuality.
Many western observers, including those who have lived all their lives in Africa, journalists and other liberals who claim to speak for Africans often look for their own preconceived notions and then try to interpret and explain what African sexuality (and anything "African" for that matter) should look like rather than trying to see or ask Africans about what is really going on. Many do not know or are completely blind to an African erotic culture and sensual charisma that is alive, vibrant and very profound, or more precisely those erotic pursuits and forms of pleasure that are hidden to the rest of the world public. A few of these practices unique to Africa and to the Africans have found expression and global acceptance through African artifacts (sculpture and painting) and through theatre and cultural festivities but many are performed in private, behind the mask of darkness, in the privacy of four walls and between sheets.
Personally, I say forget taboo, "let's talk about sex" - our own experiences with our own voices. It is about time that Africans write about and speak for themselves in our own right. Not the "monkey dey see, monkey dey do" indiscriminate imitation of everything "first world" -enough of that already. But let us say it the way we know it, the way we do it and the way we want to say it -our own way of explaining our existence. Words, however inadequate must be found. There are only a handful of us "talking", my hope is that plausible efforts will follow in lifting the blanket of mystery on sex bringing to the open a realistic picture and understanding of the continent's rich and diverse erotic extravaganza; a lot of which remains implicit and thus unknown.
African sexual socialization patterns are highly developed - probably even the most developed in the world. Parents teach their children about sex starting from the age of six to eight. They are not concerned about the sexual parts of their children and do not prevent them from playing with them or exploring with their bodies - this offends no one. As boys approach puberty there is a great deal of anxiety among mothers who want to see that their little boys are capable of having an erection and mothers have been known to encourage their sons to masturbate just to make sure everything is working properly. Through the parents' responses, the child learns to trust his or her own body and the biological urges that go with it. Children will often answer without embarrassment if they are asked about it but as they grow older they learn that one openly talks about sex and sexual parts only among one's age mates (people ten years younger and ten years older than one self) and if the age mates can't provide a satisfactory response, they can always approach an older person as a group. Most African children incorporate the way of things are by observing their elders and the flocks and herds and certainly by overhearing. Thus a child when asked about sex will reply, "I have always known".
Traditionally, sexual education comes from selected same-gender elders offered at the puberty rites. Girls and boys are instructed with songs, riddles, games and parables of an explicit character, the transmission of data being regarded as a most central part of the rite of passage to adulthood. Boys learn about a masculinity cockiness whose discourse is centered on protecting, taking care of and giving pleasure to women. Their education includes knowledge about "medicinal plants", ideas about sexual prowess and endurance and "sex-fasts" - a ritual type of abstinence used as away of heightening the senses. The rites of passage curriculum for girls is centered on self-awareness, grace and dignity. Their "pleasure' education includes such techniques as clitoris elongation and massage, masturbation (looking for the bean in the oil as they call it), cunnilingus, orgasm timing, culturally prescribed coital positions, genital muscle squeezing and releasing also known as "milking", clitoris stroking and the use of certain herbs, oils, magic beads, incense, chants etc that keep two people going at it all night.
Many traditional communities also have formalized flirtation and seduction ceremonies - settings in which young people ages 13 - 18 are allowed (expected is more like it) to explore seductive and flirtatious communication including through silent speech and suggestive and provocative dance moves. Elders and parents as a whole do not interfere with the flirtations of their children. There may be affectionate petting- stroking and caressing- but sexual intercourse is not supposed to take place - well, sometimes it does. Enabling the sexes to meet on neutral ground, openly and respectably tends to remove some of the secrecy and unhealthy curiosity that is part of the mental transition from the self-contained experience of early youth to the new awareness of the new polarity of sex. Younger boys and girls follow their more experienced brothers, sisters and cousins imitating their movements and afterwards sitting with them while they pay compliments to their "sweethearts".
These occasions do not only offer parents and elders the opportunity to teach young people about what is socially unacceptable and what is successful in transmitting sexual energy and attracting attention in order to be chosen by the opposite sex (i.e. showing off healthy skin and childbearing hips, eye or soul-gazing, "dare me" playfulness or cockiness, physical fitness and flexibility and all the other things that catches the eye, gets the brain all wound up and the heart fluttering) but provides an individual a level of confidence and exuberance that comes from a healthy sexual attitude and a healthy sexual life.
Most Westerners who visit Africa report that Africans do not kiss or cuddle in "public" and thus conclude that Africans are not affectionate towards each other or Africans do not flirt. What they fail to see, and is probably beyond their imagination is the intensity and subtlety of African seduction. Two people can literally engage in sexual foreplay just by looking at each other. Those familiar with the body language that accompanies this "gaze-seduction" know what is happening. So when two people "disappear", others in their company know they are "doing it". I've had incidences when two people return after you-know-what and my western companions innocently ask "where have you been?" drawing giggles and sometimes loud laughter from those of us who know.
Many African couples ( at least the ones I know) do not have "intimacy time schedules" as we do in North America. Seduction is an all day thing. Â Sometimes it doesn't immediately end up in sexual intercourse but you can see the build up to it and only imagine what will happen when those two finally do it. There is no need or pressure to appear "sexy" (I am not even sure the word "sexy" exists in any African language). It is what one can do with the body and not what the body can do for you that counts. The body language that leads up to sexual intercourse can make any man or woman "sexy" by the time they are done with it. Every look, word, touch and even breathing is purposed and almost calculated - it is like two big cats seizing each other up.
Very senior and experienced women play the role of counselors, sex therapists and village tribunal with the powers to "direct" a husband or wife of a sexually unfulfilled spouse to "deliver" or pay a fine. It is widely believed among many indigenous people that a sexually unfulfilled man or woman may begin to act "weird" (socially withdrawn, cynical or pessimistic, irritable, impatient, nervous, edgy or act out insidious sexual behaviour) becoming a danger to collective "peace". Unless there are other "complications" that accompany the weird behaviour, the elders will make sure that the individual gets some one way or the other - for the good of the individual and the whole village.
However, due to the breakdown of tradition, young people today get too little or no meaningful information at all about sexuality and tend to experiment with sex, based on the little sexual information they come across in books, on television and from their peers. Formal schools and universities in modern Africa are often the centres of even greater ignorance.
We in North America could benefit from a healthier attitude towards sex and positive expression of sexuality. Many of the African practices may only apply within context and it would be irresponsible to uproot them and duplicate in a different culture, different setting and different mindsets, but there are many things that we could learn that makes some of the world's economically and technological poorest also some of the most vibrant, happiest, most self- fulfilled and mystical people in the world.
Let's be honest, to an average North American, sex belongs on TV (and only a frenzied desperate groping millisecond of it), porn magazines and to the adult sites on the computer. It is not a part of most people's everyday life and yet many people spend a lot of time thinking about sex. That is why TV and print advertisers use sex to sell everything from cars to chewing gum. I know and have met women and men who actually believe that the next great orgasm is an important goal. Whole sections in local bookstore are dedicated to achieving orgasm - and yet people wonder why the big O has eluded so many. This virtual sexual paradox characterized by romanticized and over dramatized themes and images of sexuality has gotten so many confused, anxious, insecure and sometimes downright phony (and oh-yes, I mean phony not horny, silly). We might even say that repression of our primal biological imperative creates rapists and pedophiles.
We need to unlearn our guilt about wanting sex. We must claim the animal within which is truly divine (the word animal is derived from the Latin anima, or "soul" ), but beyond that, we must learn to fully inhabit the body (not feel uncomfortable and alien in it), to explore what sexual ritual and celebration could be, how many different ways there are to experience pleasure and to give ourselves the permission to really celebrate what we have inside with ourselves and with each other. This means seeing beyond beliefs that damage and distort our sexuality, uncovering our authentic sexual desires, and developing the emotional and social skills we need to be able to share our real selves with our partners. As we learn to express our true nature, we also learn to exercise good judgment and honor boundaries held by the other. As we leave behind our shame based beliefs around sex our sexual expression becomes freer.
Christine Akiteng is an internationally renown Dating Coach, Sex appeal and Erotic Educator with a unique and fresh outlook to what love is really about and what we can expect from our sexual relations. If you enjoyed reading this article check out Christine's Website: http://www.torontosnumber1datedoctor.com for more articles
