Sex in Atlantic West Central Africa and West Africa

Most of what we know about how people engaged in sexual activity in Africa was made available after the period of the early contact with European traders and colonizers. Biased by their Christian religious and moral values, these men produced accounts and travelogues that often described African sexual behaviors in derogatory ways.

Both today and in the era of the Atlantic slave trade, African sexualities are not homogeneous. Instead, they were as diverse as the numerous societies and groups whose members were sold into slavery. Cultural practices and traditions were not fixed and, in fact, continued to evolve during the more than three centuries during which the Atlantic slave trade devastated the African continent. Sexual preferences and activities varied across cultures and age. Religion and kinship framed the development of sexuality of African individuals, shaping gender roles at an early age.

As on other continents, sexuality was a crucial dimension of the lives of West African and West Central African men, women, and children who were enslaved and forcibly transported to the Americas. Yet, scholars have challenged the existence of cultural and social characteristics that distinguish what it was to be a man and to be a woman in Africa. In other words, gender appears to be a Western invention, an idea that may have been foreign to many African societies prior to the European arrival on the continent.³ In Yoruba, a language spoken in several regions of present-day Nigeria and the Republic of Benin, the words ọkọ and aya (respectively translated in English as “husband” and “wife”) are gender-free, and therefore can designate either a male or a female.⁴ Likewise, in Yorubaland, the division of labor did not correspond to gender norms but was very often based on age.

In the decades that followed their first contact with African societies, Europeans described the sexual behaviors of African women as promiscuous, often referring to them as prostitutes and whores. But it was their own behavior that was predatory; Africanist scholars have highlighted how European men violated the bodies of African women during the period they remained stationed on the coasts of Africa. In 1588, the governor of the Portuguese fort São Jorge da Mina, in Elmina, on the Gold Coast, was denounced and sentenced by the Portuguese Inquisition for having had sexual intercourse not only with Christian women but also with young African women who were considered pagans by the Roman Catholic Church. As shown by historian Kwasi Konadu, the Inquisition trial revealed that Pessanha had his African agents bring young local African women to the fortress, where he raped them.⁷

Early European writers described African women as sexually available because their sexual practices and gender roles contrasted with Western and Christian views of European women, who were expected to marry as virgins and remain tied to the same man for their entire lives. Based on observations of European travelers, Olfert Dapper, a Dutch physician and amateur geographer who never visited the African continent, published an account in the seventeenth century that described the sexual practices of men and women in West Africa.

Understanding these interpretations helps us measure the impact of enslavement on women who had previously held influential roles, who prior to their capture were not expected to submit to men’s control but rather occupied complementary positions in their homelands. In the Kingdom of Dahomey, for example, the king’s wives had important religious roles. They constantly influenced political decisions.¹² Dahomey also had a select group of royal women (ahosi) warriors (agodjie) referred to by Europeans as “amazons,” a term evoking the mythological Greek female warriors. This group of women soldiers, whose story has been recently portrayed in the motion picture The Woman King (2022), may have emerged in Dahomey in the early eighteenth century as an armed royal guard that served Tassi HangbĂ©, the daughter of King Wegbadja (who reigned between 1645 and 1685), who ruled as a regent for a brief period following the death of Akaba, her brother and successor to the throne (who reigned between 1685 and 1708).¹³ These Dahomean women warriors were legally considered as king’s wives and regarded as his dependents.

Depending on the period, women warriors could make up nearly one-third of the Dahomey army. They became central players in the military campaigns against neighboring polities that captured prisoners to be sold into slavery to the Americas.¹⁷ In Dahomey and other West African societies, women married other women, even though these same-sex marriages did not always include sexual relations.¹⁸ These features did not make West Africa a paradise where sexual freedom reigned absolute, however. Historian Nwando Achebe has noted that in Igboland, in today’s north-central Nigeria, women were not “free to do as they wished with their bodies before marriage” but rather had several restrictions imposed on them to ensure their “sexual morality and chastity.”¹⁹ Olaudah Equiano reminds the readers of his narrative that in his native Igboland, women who committed adultery were sometimes sentenced to death or sold into slavery.²⁰ Overall, many Africans forced onto slave ships were captured at such a young age that they were prevented from experiencing the rites of passage into adulthood that would prepare them for sexual activity.²¹

In West Africa and West Central Africa, soldiers, traders, and middlemen raided villages, capturing men, women, and children.

European and African encounters generated more than derogatory representations of African peoples. As early as in the fifteenth century, European explorers and traders made implicit and explicit references to the sexual availability of African women and girls in their written accounts. In his first contact with the populations of Cape Verde islands in 1455, Venetian navigator and slave trader Alvise Cadamosto, by that time around twenty-five years old, reported that a local chief gave him as a gift “a girl twelve or thirteen years of age, Black and very beautiful [una garzona de annj 12 in 13 negra e molto bella]” to serve him in his room.²²

We will never know how this West African girl faced the idea of having sex with a stranger who did not even speak her language. Was she a virgin? Was she an outsider who was locally enslaved? Or perhaps in her community being offered as a sexual partner to a foreigner placed her in an important position of intermediaries between European explorers and local African rulers? Admittedly, as briefly discussed on chapter 3, after Cadamosto’s voyage, starting in the sixteenth century, European slave merchants, captains, and other lesser crew members who were established on African coastal regions engaged in sexual relations and even long-term relationships with free African women living in coastal areas such as GorĂ©e Island and Saint-Louis, in today’s Senegal, and Luanda and Benguela, in modern Angola, where their daughters, known as signares and donas, became prominent slave traders.²³ But in the context of the Atlantic slave trade, the bodies of African women also became sites that facilitated commercial transactions.²⁴