Examining a place of over 1.2 billion with purely top-down approaches would be a mistake of massive proportion. Africa is incredible diverse in language, ethnicity, governance, and culture. Only by studying the fine details of African places from the national to the community can one approach appreciating the experiences that make up even just some of Africa’s 1.2 billion lives. That being said, there are some common themes; there are threads that we see running through nearly every African context studied. There is the theme of global interaction and the African expectation of some sort of membership in worldwide modernity, a “place in the world” as James Ferguson calls it (2007). This global interaction and African willingness to take part also bumps up against the concept of neocolonialism—where outside powers take advantage of African aspirations in something that is like colonialism, but also too semi-consensual and implicit to be exactly that. There is the theme of economic and political transformation, often towards a neoliberalism that prizes financialization, privatization, and deregulation. There is the theme of structural inequalities, old and new. But, uncovering these themes is not as simple as coming up with definitions. True, realistic expositions of these complex themes require that we dig in to people’s lives—and see what we find.
We will examine two ethnographic studies; the first of these, by Laura Wangsness Willemsen and Joan DeJaeghere centers on a girls’ school in Tanzania that puts a focus on life skills education, especially relating to sexual relationships (2015). In Tanzania, sex for young women is not so simple; economics and education can be thoroughly intertwined thanks to the commonness of transactional sex and the frequency of pregnancy-related terminations of schooling. The teacher of these life skills classes, Ms. Vera, offers a space where students can openly challenge their understandings and misconceptions, and come to terms with their desires and realities as they relate to sex. For example, the girls are inspired to seek to find sexual encounters they enjoy physically and emotionally, but also to be wary of getting into relationships at the wrong time of life.
Ms. Vera’s class is an excellent case study for some of the themes alluded to in the introduction: membership, neoliberalism, and structural inequality. Ms. Vera teaches her students themes of the modern, 21st century world that Africa strives to be a part of. This is evident in her instruction on agentic and mutually beneficial sexual relationships. For much of its history, sex and marriage in Africa and the world has been a way of seeking power or economic gain. But, Ms. Vera believes that the Tanzanian girls she educates belong in the modern world—the same modern world that everybody else belongs to, where sex can be enjoyable for women, where you can choose your marriage based on love. But, Ms. Vera is not merely aspirational; she is realistic that transactional sex will be on offer to the girls she educates. She is also realistic about the world she and her students live in, seeking to educate them about the Tanzanian laws that govern their relationships. There is a toeing the line in Ms. Vera’s teachings: these girls are African, and they always will be, but that does not mean that they are destined to live in the same Africa and experience the same Africa that the women before them did. Ms. Vera seeks cultural development through education to a place where women have more agency to navigate their sexual relationships.
The theme of neoliberalism is slightly harder to tease out of this case study, but it is there nonetheless. To show this, one must explain one of the tenants of neoliberalism: variety.[*] Neoliberalism theoretically relies on markets that drive difference and ingenuity, hoping that the most successful of various approaches will win out. In a fully regulated, state-owned and state-managed school system, it is quite possible that an outlier like the Sasema school, the subject of this article, could not exist in the inspirational form that it does. Neoliberal capitalism can certainly be overutilized, especially when it comes to public goods like education, but there is a certain disorganized diversity that often accompanies neoliberalism—and this can create some unique success stories like Ms. Vera and her students.
There is also the issue of why this class is so urgently needed, which gets us to the theme of structural inequality. There are some structural inequalities that hamper agentic approaches to relationships for young women. Some of these have more immediate causes than others. First, there is the structural inequality of biology: girls, starting at a very young age, are capable of getting pregnant. This is obviously not a thing boys in Tanzania or elsewhere have to deal with, and in this way, potential for pregnancy is a real structural inequality that just appears to be patently unfair. However, with good resources, we can temper the effects this biological fact has on young women. Access to contraception is an important issue in much of the developing world, and willingness to use it is arguably an even more important issue, and a more difficult one to change. Beyond contraception, there is an issue of structural inequality that is even harder to deal with: girls just don’t have very much money and many older men do. The girls may enter into transactional sexual relationships that lead to their pregnancies, which then derail their education and chance to be lifted out of poverty. There is also the structural inequality of the lives the girls were born into. The school only serves girls who were out of school due to lack of financial/emotional support or any other reason that required them to work instead of obtaining their education. The girls were likely disadvantaged long before they enter the classroom.
The second case study I will be discussing is an ethnographic paper by George Paul Meiu entitled “‘Mombasa Morans’: Embodiment, Sexual Morality, and Samburu Men in Kenya” (2009). The paper focuses on Samburu men who have been able to leverage the attractiveness they have to some white female tourists into economic gain. In addition to economic gain, the utilization of sexual tourism markets also brings with it a sort of moral shame from others.
There is something very neoliberal about the concept of sexual tourism. For one, it is almost the definition of financialization. In many conceptions of a neoliberal world, anything can be turned into an economic problem and commodification of bodies may result. In a highly regulated economy, it is quite possible that sexual tourism either exists not at all or behind closed doors, rarely talked about, and constantly investigated. Young Maasai men routinely migrating, then suddenly gaining large sums of money would not go easily under the radar of a government and economy that has the force, ability, and desire to prevent the commodification of bodies. But, in a neoliberal world, where growth happens, questions don’t. The massive growth of Kenyan tourism is likely not going to be overanalyzed. For the most part, the Kenyan government and their international donors appreciate the growth, not the source. A free market prizing growth and economic success above all else is a very efficient way of arriving at a society where white women journey from thousands of miles away to bestow monetary gifts on hypersexualized African warriors in an illicit exchange for sex.
But there is a key ingredient to this exchange. While one could theoretically argue that Samburu men want to migrate to Mombasa to attract older women to have sex with them for money, it is probably the case that this phenomenon is aided by the dim prospects for the men. In other words, this exchange is the result of one major structural inequality: the poverty of rural Kenyan communities vs the wealth accumulation of foreign white women. Neoliberalism turned this structural inequality into economic agency for Kenyan men—and maybe it should be praised for that—but neoliberalism could not work its magic if there wasn’t the key ingredient: a massive economic power dynamic. Part of this economic power dynamic is no doubt the result of deep determinants such as colonialism or poor governance. However, part of it can just be traced to the economic and social events (both local and not) of 2005. There were large labor strikes that year which turned out to be fruitless, causing crisis-level shocks to the labor market without much benefit. The group of Samburu men expected to be circumcised that year now had difficulty paying for their for expensive ceremonies. The group older than them was expected to marry that year, but now struggled to pay for expensive bride prices, exacerbated by structures of polygyny. With the labor market crises going on, the capital necessary for these cultural staples was lacking.
But there is also a more micro-level structural inequality at play here: not every man can be a Mombasa moran. These transactional sexual relationships are not only dictated by the Samburu man—it is often not up to the person whether this agency will be afforded to them. The men that are successful in this practice cannot be “too short” or “too chunky.” One must also be of the right ethnicity, or at least be able to fake it well. The inherent fact of modeling yourself to fit someone else’s sexual fantasy is that those that match it best will be most successful. This leaves those that don’t match the fantasy on the periphery, unable to take advantage of a practice that is neoliberal, structurally unequal, and finally, neocolonial.
This last descriptor seems obvious, but it is worth discussing in depth. Europeans using power disparity to extract gain is definitely a seemingly colonial narrative. The commodification of black bodies is also a colonial narrative seen time and time again in history. This was true in the obvious sense of slavery, but it was also true in the sense of the rape and exploitation of black women during various parts of colonialism’s history. The idealization of black bodies as a neocolonial concept is also present, where black bodies are prized, but not black people. There are even elements of neocolonialism found in those bodies which are not chosen. In modern-day Mombasa sexual tourism, wealth is being allocated by subjective European standards, not merit. This practice seems not unlike the practice of Europeans selecting local, educated elites for their colonies as well, once again not usually on merit. As the name suggests though, neocolonialism is not colonialism. There is the added concept of consent and agency in those who choose to partake. The potential for coercion on economic grounds, however, makes the agentic narrative harder to believe in.
This same strategy of analyzing individual acts and cultural events in the context of larger sociocultural themes can be applied to other places outside the continent, like in the United States. The example of student debt both at Dartmouth and across the country comes to mind. Looking at Dartmouth’s website (“Financial Aid,” n.d.), the average student debt for all four years is just over $20,000. This is slightly less than the American average, where 44 million debtors owe a combined $1.5 trillion, making the average about $34,000 (Thune and Warner, 2019). Many of the same themes analyzed in an African context can be analyzed in an American context as well. First, there is the concept of membership as a reason for why people take on this debt. People are seeking higher paying jobs, but they are also seeking to belong to the class of people who have college degrees and all the status and accomplishment that they might see as coming with that. Especially at the level of Dartmouth and other old and prestigious institutions, there is also the structural inequality of not everyone having to go into this debt. Getting strapped with tens of thousands of dollars in debt at the age of 22 may take quite a heavy toll, but the fact of the matter is that many people don’t have to deal with this toll simply because of the parents they were born from. The neoliberal philosophy of governance of the US is also at play here. Not only are private schools abundant, but they are also not heavily regulated into setting affordable tuitions. Their tuition is allowed to rise seemingly infinitely, and millions of Americans (again, only the ones that aren’t rich) suffer as a result.
Giant issues and trends can be very hard to understand, let alone judge and evaluate, without looking at individual places and sometimes individual people. The idea of “membership” and “place in the world” sounds plausible and achievable in theory, but it manifests itself in interesting and different ways in different places. Neoliberalism is also easy to understand on paper, and finding statistics that seem to support its successes is easy as well. But, understanding the effects neoliberalism has on people, or understanding the gaps it leaves, the peculiarities it causes, is impossible without the work of person-to-person communication and understanding. These overarching themes of development, of Africa and of the modern world, require micro-level interaction to flesh out and truly understand.
Bibliography
Ferguson, James. 2006. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. 1st ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
“Financial Aid.” n.d. Dartmouth. Accessed November 22, 2019. https://financialaid.dartmouth.edu/.
Meiu, George Paul. “‘Mombasa Morans’: Embodiment, Sexual Morality, and Samburu Men in Kenya.” Canadian Journal of African Studies 43, no. 1 (2009): 105–28.
Thune, John, and Mark Warner. 2019. “How Congress Can Ease Americans' $1.5 Trillion Student Debt.” Time. Time. August 27, 2019. https://time.com/5662626/student-loans-repayment/.
Willemsen, Laura Wangsness, and Joan DeJaeghere. “Learning to Negotiate Sexual Relationships: A Girls’ School in Tanzania as a Restrictive and Agentic Site.” Gender and Education 27, no. 2 (2015): 183–97.
[*] I realize neoliberalism doesn’t always mean variety and free-market capitalism does not always mean legitimate competition. All too often in Africa (and elsewhere), one tenant of neoliberalism, competition through variety, gets sacrificed for another: deregulation. However, at least ideologically (if not in practice), neoliberalism does prize variety in a way that other governmental and economic philosophies (especially those that advocate state monopolies) do not.