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Love in Africa

Africans love discussing love. African singers sing about it, advice columnists and novelists write about it and television programmes and feature films depict it in all its permutations. Like people around the world, contemporary Africans are concerned about finding, losing and keeping love. Yet, given the paucity of scholarly attention to the subject, those who are not very familiar with the continent might be excused for holding the misconception that romantic love is of little importance in African life. What explains this inattention to the topic of love in Africa outside the continent, even as discourses about love have flourished on the continent? Addressing this and many other questions head-on, Love in Africa constitutes a largely well-rounded entrée into the long-ignored topic of romantic love in sub-Saharan Africa. In the volume’s superb introduction, editors Cole and Thomas argue that love as an analytic problem has been widely shunned by anthropologists – the social scientists with the most sustained engagement in twentieth-century Africa – because it has been considered too individual an experience and epiphenomenal to the ‘proper’ scientific study of kinship, courtship, marriage and exchange. This avoidance was often reinforced by the cultural ideologies of Africans, who tended to emphasise the importance of social exchange over personal affect in marriage during anthropology’s formative years. Moreover, as Cole and Thomas argue, anthropology’s failure to engage with love is in part a product of theWest’s history with Africa, since Europeans justified their slaveand colonial-era domination in part by depicting Africans as hypersexual and without the emotional or intellectual depth required for nobler sentiments like love. As the HIV epidemic continues to ravage the continent, scholarly attention has come – for better or worse – to focus much more on sexual behaviour than on love. In the eight chapters that follow, the contributors (predominantly North American historians and anthropologists) examine love in settings ranging historically and geographically from 1930s South Africa to contemporary Niger. Taken together, these chapters offer three overarching insights about love in Africa. The first is that ‘love is a crucial idiom through which people in Africa have debated generational and cultural distinctions and made political claims to inclusion, often by engaging new forms of media’ (13). Several of the contributors attend to this project by analysing the ways in which notions of love are constructed through expressions of social distinction. For example, in the first chapter, Thomas juxtaposes textual analyses of 1930s white South African anthropologists’ writing on black African intimacy with a 1930s black South African middle-class newspaper’s articles on intimacy and love. She argues persuasively that for the black elite, discourses and practices of ‘true love’ were a means of defining and defending their own respectability – against more functionalist discussions of black sex as a