“Livingstone understood very well that Africans considered monogamy and small families a threat to their entire way of life. A chief with many wives could give great feasts, grow large quantities of food and enjoy the support of many descendants. Why would he wish to throw this away? Failure as a conventional missionary led Livingstone to believe that only massive cultural intrusion could lead Africans to adopt the white man’s customs and religion in any numbers.”
– pg. 271, Explorers of the Nile, Tim Jeal, Yale University Press, 2011
“In this way I gleaned a large amount of brand-new biographical information from reading the many excised personal passages, which had been deemed unsuitable for publication by John Blackwood – such as Speke’s affecting love for one particular Bugandan woman, the sexual advice he gave to Kabaka Mutesa and to the kabaka’s mother, and his sympathetic view of the uninhibited sensuality of Bugandan society.”
– pg. 439, ibid.
“Some years ago we used to have large bodies of natives sent from Africa either on military service or in some travelling show, and it was a revelation of horror and disgust to behold the manner in which English women would flock to see these men, whilst to watch them fawning upon these black creatures and fondling and embracing them, as I have seen dozens of times, was a scandal and a disgrace to English womanhood …
“How then is it possible to maintain as the one stern creed in the policy of the Empire the eternal supremacy of white over black?”
– Raymond Blathwayt in Tit-Bits, July 21, 1917, quoted on pg. 207 of J. A. Rogers’ Sex and Race
“For many years white colonials had shuddered at witnessing repulsive Ethiopians intimately, almost martially consorting with beautiful British girls in streets, in restaurants, in theatres, in night clubs, lodging houses and hotels. There was no concealment of the affectionate attitude of a certain type of white female toward the brown, black and yellow male.”
– Stephen Black in The English Review, Oct. 1919, quoted on pg. 207 of J. A. Rogers’ Sex and Race
Since 1977, my career as a writer has been totally dominated by columns and editorial essays. I have never given up my dream, however, of doing a major work of fiction, primarily because there are important subjects you cannot deal with properly in columns and essays in a “family newspaper.” The approach to certain subjects would have to be oblique, that is to say, in a creative setting.
Sex is a more important subject than is recognized by our Christian society. Certain sexual rules, laws even, have been laid down, and these rules and laws were prescribed during slavery and colonialism, which is to say, the masses of our Belizean people had no say. The rules and the laws were made, in the first instance, by Europeans.
The penetration of Eastern and Central Africa by European explorers of the Nile in the middle of the nineteenth century involved more sustained contact with the African way of life than the West African slave trade had involved centuries before. Those Europeans who began enslaving West Africans in the sixteenth century only stayed on the coast in their ships until they collected enough slaves for a cargo to take across the Atlantic Ocean to America. This would take weeks, at most months. Europeans who were in East and Central Africa exploring in search of the Nile’s source, however, spent much longer periods, always months and more often years, inside African village and kingdom systems. They became more intimate with Africans, and, I submit, they were intimidated by African sexuality. The Europeans who were West African slavers, for their part, were rapists and psychopaths. Once African women were at their mercy in the bottoms of slave ships, the European captains and crews violated them sexually until their cargos were unloaded in America.
Once enslaved black women reached America, white slaveowners took their sexual pleasure of them, and this accounts for most of the European blood in the black populations of this so-called New World. This is not a subject which “mixed” people want to discuss. They prefer to hope that it was marriage, instead of rape. No, cherie: most often it was rape.
But, that aside, the slaveowners in America were practitioners of Christian religions, which mandated monogamy. A large percentage of slaves originated from African societies where males practiced polygamy, which is to say, they were allowed to have more than one wife. As slaves began achieving freedom, in the case of Belize as early as the late eighteenth century and definitely in the earlier part of the nineteenth, they entered a “freedom” where monogamy was the rule and the law. Black Belizean men have been breaking that rule and that law ever since, and the consequences have often been personally and socially disastrous.
AIDS entered Belize in 1987. In other words, we can pinpoint a time when there was no AIDS in Belize. Once we experienced our first case, we were handicapped in our ability to fight against the disease because of our sexual promiscuity and because a kind of institutional prudishness had made it so that our primary and high schools did not deal with sexual education. This is a legacy of the European fear of sex and sexual matters. The Europeans, through the Christian religions, have a simplistic formula for sex: abstain completely until you are married, and then remain faithful to your singular spouse until you die. That formula does not work all that well for them, and it does not work at all for Africans.
But, sex is a subject which cannot be discussed in officially repressed societies like Belize’s. The reason sex should be discussed is because it is the most powerful and continuing urge most of us will ever experience in life. How can you not have reliable knowledge about an issue which is so overpowering?
I think a lot of Europeans continue to be naïve because of their prudishness. Personally, I cannot see how an African king like Mutesa would be paying any kind of serious attention to sexual advice from an English explorer like John Hanning Speke. Nevertheless, it is we Africans who now have most of the problem with AIDS. That is a fact. The fight against AIDS should involve sexual education. But, our European-designed education is not comfortable with sexual discussion. “They” hope that abstention will become the order of the day. But, in the present tense, abstention remains a pipe dream in The Jewel.