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Ethnic identities and gendered violence in sub-Saharan Africa: a commentary

Gender has increasingly been used as an analytical tool to understand the various forms of violence, principally framed as violence against women by male perpetrators who abuse women sexually, physically and emotionally, predisposing them to injuries and poorer health outcomes. However, the term ‘gender-based violence’ is subject to contestation. In this commentary, the term ‘gender-based violence’ is an umbrella term for any harm that is perpetrated against a person’s will on account of gendered power inequities that not only exploit distinctions between men and women but also among men and among women. Although violence against women has dominated our knowledge on gendered violence, there has been a slow but growing body of knowledge on violence against men. Ethnicity has emerged as a salient analytical tool for understanding gendered violence, particularly during times of political conflict. In times of political strife, ethnic identities become polarised and performative, with the rape of ‘enemy’ women and men from different ethnic and political groups used as strategies of humiliating and degrading the ‘enemy’. Kenya’s post-election violence attest to the ways ethnic and cultural differences that define what it means to be a man can become politicised and performed in public spaces. There is a need to critically consider the polarisation of ethnic identities during political crisis as ethnic ‘retribalisation’ (Kagwanja 2003): the turn to ‘primodialistic’ notions of ethnicity based on metaphors that conjure shared blood (Hutchinson and Jok 2002) rely on notions of relatedness and kinship that may actually harm men’s health. The various forms of violence regularly suffered by women such as rape, trafficking, forced labour and genital mutilations (Watts and Zimmerman 2002) take new cultural meanings when the perpetrators and the victims are men. Papers by Izugbara et al. (2013) and Ahlberg and Njoroge (2013) bring new meanings and understandings to the discourse of masculinities, men’s health, ethnicity and the various ways violence has evolved in Kenya. The two papers bring examples from Kenya and interrogate intersections of ethnic masculine identities with various forms of gendered violence on men’s health. The paper by Izugbara et al. (2013) explores Luo men’s perceptions about how their masculine ethnic identities in the slums promote or place their health at risk, whilst the paper by Ahlberg and Njoroge (2013) examines the production of forced