Unravelling the silences of black sexualities

Abstract

abstract The silence imposed on black sexuality from the advent of colonialism to the present age of globalisation has several histories, impacts, reversals and cultural connotations. The colonising agent deprived the black sexual subject of agency in order to make him/her pliable for a series of penetrative attentions which either virginised or hypersexualised him/her. These penetrative attentions and actions (phallic in their overall orientation) were central to the project of colonialism. This perspective addresses the violence of various forms of silencing (which in most cases are signs of panic) visited on black sexuality both within the context of colonialism and within processes of decolonisation. Second, it offers a critique of current discourses of sexuality in Africa and finally, it presents brief scenes of sexuality in the disparate contexts of South Africa and Nigeria.