Declarations of Promiscuity: “Housing,” Autonomy, and Urban Female Friendship in Uganda

Abstract

AbstractThis article examines the relationship between “sugar daddyism” and emerging forms of female sociality among young, educated women in urban Uganda. In particular, I demonstrate how the practice of “housing”—wherein one man sponsors an outing for multiple women—fosters new spaces for female friendship. Scholars of African social relations have long noted the centrality of material exchange in establishing and maintaining ties of kinship and political patronage; more recently, the interplay between capital and sentiment in sexual relationships has garnered significant attention. Yet friendship, in Africa and elsewhere, remains remarkably undertheorized. Profound generational shifts in sociality, shaped by rural‐urban migration, the expansion of higher education, and the influx of Western media, make Uganda a fertile site for the study of new forms of non‐kin affiliation. In this article, I analyze the relations of exchange that simultaneously constitute sugar daddyism and female peer relationships in order to make three major points. First, although sugar daddyism functions according to logics of asymmetrical exchange, such relationships animate horizontal reciprocity within female peer groups. Second, educated young women discursively construct friendship as a space for “fun,” in opposition to romantic and kin relationships. Third, these peer networks allow female students to cultivate felt freedom according to a logic of independence through multiple dependencies. This article is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with female students at Makerere University in Uganda's capital, Kampala, from 2010 to 2012. [Africa, city, sexuality, reciprocity]