Behind the Seine and Other Scenery: African and European Male Intimacies in Western Cities

Abstract

Building on the pioneering studies of Daniel Vignal (1983) and Chris Dunton (1989), this paper discusses three West African novels of the 1970s about African students’ homosexual experiences in European cities—Sierra Leonean Yulisa Amadu Maddy’s No Past, No Present, No Future (1973), Guinean Saïdou Bokoum’s Chaîne (1974), and Nigerian Dillebe Onyeama’s Nigger at Eton (1982). The premise in such novels is that the young African male is initiated back home by a European priest and later experiences what Maddy calls “the white scene” in European cities, which excludes the possibility of a “black scene” back home. These ambiguous texts are presented as a necessary prelude to the (still reluctant) acknowledgment of African homosexualities, with their ancestral foundations in relational nexuses that accommodate same-sex desire.