When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900–1958 by Saheed Aderinto

Abstract

When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900-1958, by Saheed Aderinto. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2015. xviii, 241 pp. $95.00 US (cloth), $32.00 US (paper). In seven engaging chapters and an epilogue, Saheed Aderinto has produced a very important contribution to African social history and Nigerian historiography specifically. His intellectual journey, as revealed in his introduction, is a must read for graduate students for this book is the outcome of a scholar who listened closely to his sources and grappled with the complex realities they revealed. Aderinto had initially planned to write a history of gender and prostitution in colonial Nigeria by examining the correlation between sex work and social class. However, as he followed his sources along the pathways they presented, he came to appreciate that to do justice to the topic he had to engage multiple archives and literatures (6-7). Sexuality was of concern to legal, medical, social welfare, and military arms of the state, as well as multiple social groups including the clergy, nationalists, elite women, village elders, and landlords. While keeping these different actors and their competing perspectives and objectives in the same frame, Aderinto provides a clear and accessible narrative that locates the evolution of prostitution and state sanctions within the changes in the larger political economy. Sexuality, and more specifically prostitution, also raises questions of morality and Aderinto illustrates throughout the text the multiple ways in which discussions about morality and prostitution were further nuanced by ideas about race, gender, and class. Aderinto argues that African men and women were at the forefront of discussions to prohibit prostitution. Without creating monolithic or binary oppositions, he illustrates the points of conversion, overlap, and disagreement as Nigerian men, women, and different branches of the colonial state debated prostitution in public and in private. Africans too connected morality and prostitution; however, that connection unfolded in discourses that challenged colonial racism, critiqued colonial policy and practice, and anticipated a post-colonial future. The Lagos Women's League offered the first concerted effort to compel the government to prohibit prostitution (65). Motivated in part by a politics of respectability and guided by their cosmopolitan experiences in London, the Lagosian elite wanted the colonial state to invest similar levels of resources to address prostitution in Lagos. Both colonial officials and the Lagosian elite expressed moral panic about child prostitutes, and shared the developmentalist notion that mitigating adult crime required juvenile intervention (158). Whereas elite women imagined that they would play a significant role in the infrastructure created to address female delinquents, colonial officials could not imagine educated African women serving in any administrative capacity. …