Thread by @MsOlisakwe

I've been following the theme of sexual deviancy rampant in early modern European narratives that contributed to the racist discourse about West Africa. They said we had no morals, were fucking whomever we wanted, and that our idea of marriage was too transactional.

https://twitter.com/vincentdesmond_/status/1463883755282735106

Sir John Mandeville said that "in Ethiopia and in many other countries [in Africa] the folk lie all naked . . . and the women have no shame of the men.”

Samuel Purchas said that the West African, unlike their northern neighbors, lived "a brutish and savage life, without any King, Governour, Common-wealth, or knowledge of husbandry.”

Leo Africanus added our ancestors were "clad ... in skinnes of beasts, neither had they any peculiar wives . . . and when night came they resorted, both men and women, into one cottage together . . . and each man choosing his [woman] which hee had most fanciee unto."

This tradition contributed to the globalized narrative of the African, and consequently, the Igbo. And then, enter Anglican Bishop George Basden and his 1921 book “ethnographical” text, “Among the Ibos of Nigeria.”

Basden said Igbo women “select their companions from their own sex, as do the men, but each has her own particular male friend, independently of her husband, with whom a more or less clandestine relationship is maintained.”

Basden continued, saying that “women consort to women.” Emphasis on "consort."

This is part of our supposed moral decadence they tried to correct.

In “Transforming Christian Womanhood: Female Sexuality and Church Missionary Society Encounters in the Niger Mission, Onitsha,” Jenny Daggers said that the “effort to convert African women to Christianity transformed the religious and sexual lives of African women converts.”

A lot went into beating the Igbo into shape to fit the Victorian notion of womanhood, marriage, and family. And so, most of what we call our culture today are colonial relics they thought were superior to our structures/systems.

It's okay to say you disagree with their racist framing of our early approach to sex, marriage, and gender realities. That's the point of this thread, to critically access the lens through which they narrativized us.

Anyway, more on the purity culture they enforced via the CMS: