Among the many myths created about Africa, the claim that
homosexuality and gender diversity are absent or incidental is one of
the oldest and most enduring. Historians, anthropologists, and many
contemporary Africans alike have denied or overlooked African
same-sex patterns or claimed that such patterns were introduced by
Europeans or Arabs. In fact, same-sex love and nonbinary genders were
and are widespread in Africa. Boy-Wives and Female Husbands
documents the presence of this diversity in some fifty societies in
every region of the continent south of the Sahara. Essays by scholars
from a variety of disciplines explore institutionalized marriages
between women, same-sex relations between men and boys in colonial
work settings, mixed gender roles in east and west Africa, and the
emergence of LGBTQ activism in South Africa, which became the first
nation in the world to constitutionally ban discrimination based on
sexual orientation. Also included are oral histories, folklore, and
translations of early ethnographic reports by German and French
observers. Boy-Wives and Female Husbands was the first serious
study of same-sex sexuality and gender diversity in Africa, and this
edition includes a new foreword by Marc Epprecht that underscores the
significance of the book for a new generation of African scholars, as
well as reflections on the book's genesis by the late Stephen O.
Murray.
