Becoming Accustomed

Femininity and Strategy on the Margins of Swahili Sexuality

Callodine Camodeca-Schmitz

HIS367 Gender and Sexuality in Africa

Professor Ndubueze Mbah

12/16/21
 1

Introduction

Engaging in a study of marginal genders and sexualities in Africa from the perspective of

a Western-educated student means entangling one’s self in the latest chapter of a long and sordid

historical legacy. The hope, of course, is to select questions, methodologies, and vocabularies

that will minimize the potential of reproducing the failures and misrepresentations of researchers

that came before, and to escape the worldviews handed down by those researchers, but this

aspiration, too, has the potential to produce problematic misconceptions, if it leads to an

intervention oriented more at answering that existing historical tradition than at departing from it,

or at utilizing African genders and sexualities as symbols in domestic culture wars. This process

can be seen in the ways that researchers in the latter half of the twentieth century, in dialogue

with the homophobic and transphobic anthropological work left by the preceeding century of

colonialist anthropology, at times produced works which simply inverted the valuations of those

earlier anthropologists, but left in place their underlying assumptions regarding the essential

equivalency of African categories of conceptualizing gender and sexual behavior with emerging

European lexicons of male/female or heterosexual/homosexual which, despite their own relative

modernity, were assigned the status of universal, transhistorical, “scientific” truth. Recognizing

this process, however, does not immediately liberate the researcher from their position within it,

as any attempt to determine an “authentic” lexicon for a given historical context involves the

selection, by the researcher, of a certain voice or set of voices to speak for that context, and this

selection, too, bears the risk of imposing the researcher’s own preferences and notions onto the

subject of research, only now appropriating the credibility of the subject to conceal that

imposition.

This litany of potential pitfalls might appear daunting, but it is important to go over them
 2

in order to begin to grasp their common epistemological shortcomings, and thereby hopefully

avoid them. I would like to tentatively suggest that one of these shortcomings is an inappropriate

urge to extract legibility from communities which are often quite invested in remaining, to a

certain extent, illegible. Rudolf Pell-Gaudio’s work documenting the yan daudu in Northern

Nigeria is an instructive example of a case where repeated attempts on the part of Western

commentators and NGOs to shine a spotlight on the yan daudu by promoting an international

image of that community as a social strata of oppressed gay men, outposts of Western liberal

sexuality in a context of conservative Islamic repression, ultimately served to produce harsher

scrutiny and greater policing of yan daudu in Northern Nigeria.1 What is perhaps necessary is an

approach which, rather than seeking to produce a complete and coherent picture of gender and

sexual minorities in a given African context, attempts to trace illegibility and legibility, the

selective employment and uses of both, and thus fathom the extent to which this community is

even knowable to a Western researcher at all, and, to the extent that it can be perceived through

certain labels and conceptual categories, critically interrogate the relationship between the labels

and the labelled, and in the process highlight and foreground the agency of those interpreted

through these labels in appropriating, embracing, and evading this process of labelling.

Turning to the study at hand, I will attempt to employ the above-mentioned approach to

studying individuals and communities understood and categorized with the labels “mashoga,”

“wasenge,” and “magei.” In general, all of these terms refer to the same intertwined set of social

identities, those of AMAB (assigned male at birth) individuals who are thought to take a

penetrated role in sex with men, and who, to varying degres, exhibit feminine mannerisms and

presentation. The literal meanings of these terms, however, and their social usage (i.e. the

1
Gaudio, Rudolf Pell. Allah Made Us Sexual Outlaws in an Islamic African City. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons,
Ltd., 2009. pp.178, 182
 3

contexts or purposes which define the selection of one term over another), differ significantly;

the first is a euphemistic term which literally translates to “my friend,” and can have

conspiratorial or derogatory connotations depending on both the speaker and the referent, while

the second is a forceful, generally insulting way to refer to someone, and literally translates to

“one who engages in passive anal intercourse.”2 The third term, magei, is a simple translation of

English “gay,” and, according to Moen (2014), has a generally positive connotation, and is

preferred by those Swahili-speakers who are familiar with it.3 For that reason, and in the interests

of brevity, this paper will generally4 use “gei” and “magei” to refer to the continuum of

individual and shared experiences which fall under the three terms introduced thus far, in lieu of

the longer term “individuals/communities labeled as shoga/mashoga, msenge/wasenge, or

gei/magei.” It is important to acknowledge the imperfection of this nomenclature, and to reiterate

that its application is not meant as an assertion of the universal applicability of gei as a label, or

even a theoretical superiority to other labels in terms of “authenticity.” Rather, the usage of gei

reflects a an orientation towards respect, and in particular, a respect for the intentionality of the

subject communities with regards to legibility, as the adoption of a term originating in the

English-speaking West suggests, if not necessarily a desire to render one’s self legible to that

English-speaking world, then at least a willingness to use labels which incidentally enable such

legibility.

What emerges from this approach, in my view, is a picture of a community for whom

construction and description are deeply paired processes, as an incredible variety of experiences

are cohered together, however temporarily or contextually, by the imposition of frameworks and
2
Moen, Kåre, Peter Aggleton, Melkizedeck T Leshabari, and Anne-Lise Middelthon. “Gays, Guys, and Mchicha
Mwiba: Same-Sex Relations and Subjectivities in Dar Es Salaam.” Journal of homosexuality 61, no. 4 (2014):
511–539.p.519-520
3
Moen, p.520
4
Exceptions may be made in the context of paraphrasing or analyzing a text which primarily uses the term shoga, in
an effort to more accurately represent the arguments made there
 4

descriptors by more normative actors whose interactions with said community occur at sites and

in ways which cause them to foreground the shared non-normativity of that wide range of

subjects in applying definitions to those subjects, definitions which, as a result, create an

impression of the primacy and universality of what are, viewed through other lenses, highly

specific and contextual practices and identity markers.

As a white American trans woman with prior lived experience as a gay man, I would also

like to be open about my own positionality and what drew me to this subject. In part, I am of

course interested in studying divergences between dominant gender norms and the experiences

of real gendered subjects, in particular in settings outside of modern-day North America and

Europe, as an effort to understand “gender” as a system more broadly due to the immense

impacts that system has had on my life. More specific to this paper and the methodology

employed here, however, is my own ambivalence regarding the linguistic constructs that have

emerged to describe non-normative genders and sexualities in the United States, and how terms

which originated as slurs or as pathologizing medical terminology have come to be not only

accepted within the queer community, but indeed empowered, elevated, and assigned a central

status as totems of a cohesive, collaborative community which is said to have been forged by

their appropriation (e.g. “queer”). Finally, I was motivated by simple curiosity; as a

classics/history major, whose studies generally orient towards a very different context from East

Africa in the 20th and 21st centuries, I was refreshed by an introduction to a historical and social

terrain which was nearly entirely unknown to me, and, specifically, I found the references to

“mashoga” that I encountered in readings for class to be fascinatingly socially charged yet

vague, and I wanted to understand the circumstances that produced that word, and the meaning

attached to it.
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Dressing Things Up: Social and Conceptual Context

Dominant social discourse regarding a gender or sexual minority group is not

automatically a discourse which reflects an accurate conceptualization of that minority group,

produced as often is by perspectives closer to social centers of power, and thus corresponding to

the needs of those centers of power more than to the needs of a given minority group, e.g. to see

themselves reflected accurately in social discourse. However, insofar as a wide range of

behaviors and practices which, between themselves, may vary so widely as to inhibit

identification and solidarity, may be conceptually agglomerated by the imposition of a normative

gaze which sees them all as equivalent in their variation from the norm, this phenomenon cannot

always be understood in terms of an “authentic” community existing independently of an

“imagined” one. Rather, as communities are produced and given shape by processes and

perspectives which understand those communities only in a limited, incidental way, and as these

communities engage both internally and externally with dominant narratives in order to preserve

their sense of identity, it is necessary to employ the framework of two simultaneous, mutually

dependent yet functionally distinct processes of production; namely, the normative process, on

the part of hegemonic discourse-shapers, of producing “the community” in terms palatable to

those closer to the gender-sexual norm of a given society, and the strategic process, on the part of

marginalized individuals, of producing a real community out of themselves and their peers, by

appropriating, negotiating, and redeploying elements of dominant narratives in ways which

expand possibilities and mitigate risks.

In the context of Swahili communities’ relationships with groups described by terms like

mashoga, wasenge, and magei, and in the ways that these groups navigate their relationship with

the dominant sectors of gendered society, both of these processes can be seen, and are expressed
 6

in ways specific to the context of Swahili society. In particular, Swahili society’s broader history

of emphasis on practices of dress and public presentation as vital components of the social

architecture of class and gender informs the way that performance of “shoga” femininity by

members of the Swahili gay community functions in the context of regulating the relationship

between those individuals and the communities in which they are embedded. Historian Laura

Fair has documented some of these realities in her history of Zanzibar in the late 19th and 20th

centuries,5 specifically in the context of the transformations undergone by the population of that

city in the decades following the abolition of slavery. This focus on a period of change and

upheaval is fortuitous for the purposes of this paper, as it offers valuable documentation of the

way that urban Zanzibaris, especially the formerly enslaved, used clothing in a strategic way to

facilitate moves across various social and physical boundaries, for instance those between the

city and the country, between the rich and the poor, or between the Islamic world and that of

mainland Tanzania, stressing the deep historical roots and social centrality of this conception of

clothing.6 She further makes it clear that the individuals who employed these strategies to

navigate continuums of class did so not in a vacuum, but did so in ways that involved other kinds

of social distinctions. For instance, Fair points to the way that formerly enslaved women sought

to differentiate themselves from men of their social class, and thereby from their social class

more generally, by adopting forms of dress (i.e. kaniki) that were perceived as more feminine.7

Critically, this transformation was accomplished with minimal real change in the type or quality

of fabric used, with the typical approach being the application of locally sourced indigo dyes to

the same cheap imported fabrics in which men clothed themselves. This is an important note to

5
Fair, Laura. Pastimes & Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945.
Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001, chapter 2 beginning at p.60
6
Fair p.60
7
Ibid p.62-63
 7

highlight because it establishes the independence of social encoding in clothing from the real

social class embodied in those codes; that is to say, the Zanzibari women described did not have

to experience any radical change in social status before altering their clothing, and thus their

perceived class, in radical ways. It is important to remember that what is being discussed here is

not simply clothing as a marker of class, but clothing as a producer of class, in the context of a

society which relied heavily on clothing as a differentiating tool. This is not to argue that this is

entirely qualitatively different from the ways in which clothing functioned in class societies

elsewhere (e.g. ancien regime France, the sartorial dimension of which can be traced to the

lasting fame of the sans-culottes as emblems of that regime’s breakdown), but it does highlight

the particular Swahili context of the primacy of clothing relative to other markers, like speech,

physical location, or legal documentation, in differentiating social class, and the ways in which

this context creates an incentive for individuals in Swahili society to direct their intentions for

self positioning towards clothing as a means of securing desired outcomes.

Another element of Swahili society’s construction of class and social structure that is

relevant for the consideration of the gay community within Swahili centers, is the way in which

gendered distinctions of space, particularly in questions of public decency and permissible

gendered behavior. According to the anthropologist Mary Porter, whose dissertation is quoted

here as a product of direct field research in Mombasa, public/private space distinctions, and a

relegation of women to strictly private spaces, was, at least at the time of her research, a salient

marker of Swahili identity in Kenya.8 Elsewhere in the text, she relates an anecdote in which a

Swahili man showed up drunk to an event at his daughter’s all-girl school and proceeded to

conduct himself in a disruptive manner, interrupting the proceedings and even attempting to

8
Porter, Mary Ann. “Swahili Identity in Post-Colonial Kenya: The Reproduction of Gender in Educational
Discourses”. (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2009) p.1
 8

dance with his daughter’s peers, to show how this space/gender nexus operated in the context of

a complicating factor.9 As Porter goes on to describe, however,

…there was no immediate move to quell the man when he first began wandering
around the stage. He was neither restrained nor thrown out at once, because
people did not wish to add to the public display. No one on the stage did anything
except to look very upset…It was not appropriate for women to challenge the
man, and other men did not want to get involved because it damaged their own
reputations to be involved in a public scene.10
For Porter, this is indicative of male status, and how male status functioned in Swahili

society to restrict the agency both of men and women in engaging with male misbehavior, and to

an extent, this is an angle of analysis which is also relevant for the present work. However, the

portion of this anecdote which is most relevant to the present study is not restrictions on

behavior, but on freedoms: specifically, the license implicitly granted to those individuals who

violate social norms to such a flagrant degree that it would ultimately be indecorous to attempt to

restrain them, a license to, if not entirely transform the nature of a space, then at least redefine

the boundaries of acceptable behavior. It is true, of course, that this is contingent on a variety of

factors, and the status of the man in question as an educated, urbane, male Swahili residing in a

coastal city all plausibly played a role in granting him this license. However, as the gays

described in this paper all fall, to varying degrees, under the categories of “Swahili,” “urban(e),”

and “male,11” this qualification is ultimately much more relevant to Porter’s set of inquiries than

it is to my own, and Porter’s own work contains a discussion of the roles played by mashoga in

marking certain public events (particularly those seen as falling under the purview of women,

such as weddings) which seems to suggest certain similarities.12 Porter describes the presence of

9
Ibid. p.201
10
Ibid. p.206
11
At least in the sense of being assigned male at birth, although, as will be demonstrated, the relevance of the sex
category “male” to gay experience in Swahili settings appears to be dubitable.
12
Porter, p.110-111
 9

mashoga at these sites as “essential,” (and financially rewarded in the form of rental fees)13 and

in particular highlights their public performance of dances, songs, and forms of humor and

storytelling that are highly inappropriate for Swahili men (due both to gendered concerns and to

their at times lewd content), but greatly appreciated and enjoyed by all attendants, especially the

women who share in these practices. This does not only include particularly gendered

celebrations like weddings, however, and it is worth noting that mashoga, in Porter’s telling, also

perform similar semi-comedic roles at Eid celebrations, and, in more somber settings like

funerals, often are seated with women.

Deborah Amory, in her study of “mashoga” and “magei” in East Africa, also supports the

position that the performance of non-normative behavior, i.e. the performance of shoga

femininity, serves a functional role in creating and marking certain spaces as areas where

deviance from strict social norms was permissible.14 Amory’s framing here is precise, and she

refers not to mere presence, but rather to “the practices of mashoga at work and play” (emphasis

added).15 In other words, via a performance of shoga femininity, gei individuals engage in a

productive process, of creating liberating social spaces which are desirable for men and women

alike, and, as Porter describes, they are rewarded for this creation, both in direct financial terms,

and via inclusion and celebration, the value of which must especially not be underestimated for

individuals whose marginality exposes them to isolation and violence.16 The significance of this

is that it shows how the assumption, at public events, of shoga identity and the performance of

shoga femininity constitute both some of the most visible points of gei emergence into the public

13
Porter, p.111
14
Amory, Deborah. “Mashoga, Mabasha, and Magei: “Homosexuality” on the East African Coast.” In Boy-Wives
and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities, edited by Murray, Stephen O., Will Roscoe, and Marc
Epprecht. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2021. Page numbers unavailable, section entitled “Work,”
paragraph 2
15
Loc.cit.
16
Amory, “Life Histories,”
 10

sphere in Swahili life, and some of the most rewarded, demonstrating how shoga identity is

shaped at a nexus of visibility, financial reward, and conditional acceptance, and how this

identity becomes most coherent, specific, and concrete (especially in terms of its social function)

at the moments where it serves the greatest utility for all parties involved.

Just The Way They Like It(?): Narratives and Counter-Narratives

Approaching this same concept from the perspective of a source more specifically

focused on marginalized gender identities, rather than one such as Porter, in which said identities

feature as illuminating counterpoints to a broader analysis of normative gender relations, the

same emphasis on spaces and the gendered nature of gei participation in said spaces appears, but

with a different connotation. Amory mentions this presence at weddings, but crucially, she

highlights that this presence, and their participation in sex work (represented in earlier treatises

as definitional to shoga identity),17 is merely the most visible form of gei employment, owing to

the performative, public nature of both. She highlights that magei, in fact, found employment in

a variety of settings, and that while these were generally professions gendered traditionally as

female (e.g. beauticians),18 the overall picture is of a variety of backgrounds and working

histories which ultimately defies any attempt to neatly identify a singular gei relationship to

employment. Such an appearance of singularity is only a consequence of the application of

generalizing labels to an otherwise heterogenous group of workers, who only assume an

appearance of coherence in the context of being labeled as “magei” or “shoga" by outside

observers and prospective sexual partners. Moen et al., in a similar context of discussing gei

employment in traditionally female roles,19 introduce the term laini to describe “softness,” as a

17
Shephard, Gill. “Rank, gender and homosexuality: Mombasa as a key to understanding sexual options.” In The
Cultural Construction of Sexuality, ed. Pat Caplan, 240–70. London: Tavistock, 1978. p.250
18
Amory, “Work”
19
Moen p. 527
 11

concept which is commonly applied to magei in opposition to “real men,” and they quote “CO,”

a self-identified gei, on the meaning of this term;

What can I say; it is like you do not feel like an ordinary man. You are soft,
something like that. One grows with it; it is like a behaviour you grow with, so
that you are not like a real man. There are things that men like and we don’t like
them20
What is interesting about this quote is the subtle disparity, in terms of conceptual form, between

the masculinity of “ordinary men” and the “softness” of magei. Whereas the usage of a singular

term, like laini, communicates the impression of a coherent category, especially to

English-speaking audiences who are likely encountering this Swahili term for the first time, and

thus might be inclined to view it as a term with a unique context, CO’s usage of “softness” is not

remotely congruent with that impression, beginning as he does with a variance from “ordinary”

men, which he then attempts to describe as softness, “or something like that.”21 The difference

here is that while the gender performances of “ordinary men” appear here as a coherent category,

“softness” is only a commonplace adjective, tentatively applied to the almost impossibly broad

category of “not… ordinary man,” in an effort to create a coherent definition out of that category.

This is an incredibly illuminating process, and it is fortunate that Moen et al. relate this quote in

its original text instead of paraphrasing, because it enables an examination of the way that these

labels function in actual, practical speech, rather than in a sterilized, extracted context which

would then render an analysis of its real usage a matter of reconstruction and guesswork.

This is true also of the discourses of magei which concern gender self-positioning. Moen

et al. capture a variety of viewpoints, including those of “HR,” a gei who, despite claiming to

have “female hormones,”22 nevertheless excoriates feminine-acting magei as follows;

20
Loc.cit.
21
Loc.cit.
22
Moen p.528
 12

I have always been like this since I was a child; that is why I say I have [female
hormones]. I am very different from those magei who wish to make themselves
into women. Have you ever seen me wear ladies’ clothing or make-up? I never
have and I never will; and I frankly find it a stupid thing to do.23
Also included, however, are viewpoints of those like “AK,” another magei, who

described his gender position thusly;

AT: Well, if you are fucked like a woman, you are somehow a woman.
Kåre: So, what about yourself; would you say that you are somehow a woman?
AT: Since I am practising to be fucked, I could say that I am a woman, I would
say fifty-fifty.24
While other individuals, like “BO,” expressed a context-dependent relationship with

femininity when encountered in feminine dress;

You didn’t realize it is me? Come on, this is B. But today I am a malaya
[promiscuous person; prostitute], that is why you encounter me like this…
I do not dress like this very often, really, and when I am together with bwana
wangu [my husband] I would never. He would not want to be seen with me when
I appear like this.25
There emerge, then, a wide range of attitudes among magei regarding the performance of

femininity and visible “shoga” status, based on a wide range of subjective relationships with

femininity. For some, like HR, performative femininity and womanhood (which neither he nor

AT meaningfully differentiate) appear as objects of a rhetorical scorn which subtly serves his

broader identity construction, as a naturally, physically feminine gei who is differentiated from

his peers by his more “authentic” relationship with his gender. For AK, womanhood seems to

serve as a device for conceptually integrating his own sexual history into a dominant gendering

discourse which implies a contradiction between maleness and penetrability. Apart from these

two perspectives, which seem to at least implicitly reify gender as a conceptual category, BO has

a quite openly transactional and calculating relationship with femininity, viewing it as a mode of

23
Loc.cit
24
Ibid p.528
25
Ibid p.529
 13

social signaling to be worn and discarded based on the tastes of whatever male partner she is

soliciting at a given moment (particularly interesting in light of Moen’s comments on her

financial dependence on male partners).26 The point of enumerating these varied viewpoints at

such length is not to attempt to construct an “authentic” gei relationship with femininity and

“shoga” signaling out of the contradictions and congruences visible above; rather, the point is to

highlight that no such singular “authentic” relationship exists, and that relationships between

magei and the social expectations of femininity are defined by situational, functional

considerations, rather than any kind of innate, essential identity or set of motives.

This is also true, however, of the sexual dimensions of gei identity, as documented by

Amory and Shephard’s research into early gei life histories, which repeatedly feature narratives

beginning with childhood gender incongruence, leading to both disciplinary actions and

rhetorical othering as mashoga or magei, which culminates in sexual predation by older men

during childhood, an event often described in emotive terms of violation, “ruining,”

traumatization, and eventual acclimation.27 This is, again, not to suggest that gei or shoga

identity can be universally located in an innate femininity, and that male-oriented sexual

attraction is subordinate or consequential to that femininity, but rather to highlight the ways in

which gei narratives of the interplay between gender non-normativity and sexual

non-normativity feature recurring elements of adaptation to and accomodation with imposed

gender or sexual categories, impositions which produce the very commonality between sexual

and gender non-normativity that they purport to describe, by socially marking an individual as an

acceptable target for certain forms of objectification and sexual advances.

26
Loc.cit.
27
Amory, Life Histories paragraphs 1-2. Shephard p.250-251
 14

However, from the perspective of some mabasha28 (male sexual partners of magei), and

of broader Swahili society,29 gei and shoga relationships with femininity and sexual-roles can be

neatly accounted for in sweeping terms, employing logics which share, more than any particular

narrative of gei identity (though the plurality do seem to position same-sex experiences in an

originating role relative to gender non-normativity), a common set of assumptions that provide

the basis for theorizing about the logic of gei behavior; namely, the assumptions that there is a

coherent and singular logic to be identified and that there is a singular gei behavioral pattern

which corresponds to this logic and necessitates explanation by reference to it. These

assumptions are visible in the diction employed in these narratives, making use of sweeping

“theys,”30 confident predictions of future behavior based on stereotyping,31 and an almost

metaphysical perception of certain sex acts (namely, anal penetration) and their capacity to not

only socially define an individual,32 but even induce physical changes that limit sexual

capabilities.33 Reference to magei discourses provides a ready corrective; we have already seen

above the ways that the many-varied life histories of magei display a varied and highly

individualized relationship to the many gendered and sexual components that make up gei

identity, but even in contemporary evaluations of adult gei life and the realities of the gender

system as it is experienced on the margins, gei narratives repeatedly contradict those of mabasha

and normative Swahili society. This is highlighted by comparisons across studies, for instance in

the ironic juxtaposition between Amory’s documentation of gei awareness of mabasha

28
Moen pp.529, 532
29
Amory, Life Histories paragraph 3, Moen pp.523, 528
30
Moen p. 528
31
Shephard p.251
32
Moen p.523
33
Loc.cit.
 15

penetrability34 and the above-cited certainty, on the part of a basha, that being penetrated would

mean the immediate dissolution of his basha status in the eyes of mashoga.

The Arabs Dwelled Here, You Know: Contexts and Conclusions

The discourses described here, despite their many differences in perspective, logic, and

relationship to reality, all function in similar ways, as they create a space for the accommodation

of gei identity in Swahili society. It is important, however, to note that these discourses do not

remotely constitute the sole narratives regarding gei identity in Swahili contexts. Recent

coverage of hostility and harassment directed at magei communities in Tanzania35 is instructive

not only as a counterexample to generalized acceptance (although it is important to bear it in

mind as such), but as an insight into an ongoing process of Westernizing orientation of speech

and identification, as homophobic and transphobic politicians negotiate an international

environment poised to punish populations for their governments’ hostility to gender and sexual

minorities,36 and references to American culture and especially American discourses of sexuality

and “gay liberation” continue to spread and grow in influence among the gei community,

particularly under the influence of AIDS advocacy groups. 37 This discursive shift, especially

when combined with those situating the origins of Swahili gei acceptance in the Arab world, 38

and when considered in light of the inadequacy, hopefully demonstrated above, of any single

narrative to account for the wide variety of gei experience and self-identification, is an important

example of the interplay between historical circumstance and the ongoing production of identity

34
Amory, Life Histories paragraph 3
35
Ghoshal, Neela. “‘If We Don't Get Services, We Will Die.’” Human Rights Watch. Human Rights Watch, June 18,
2020.https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/02/03/if-we-dont-get-services-we-will-die/tanzanias-anti-lgbt-crackdown-and
-right.
36
Loc.cit., specifically with regards to the World Bank and Danish government’s withholding of large sums of aid in
response to Paul Makonda’s initiatives, and the resultant tonal shift on the part of President Magufuli
37
Amory, Transnational Popular Culture and New Identities.
38
Moen p.526
 16

in correspondence with existing discourses, reminding us of the fact that the gei community, like

any other, is a work in progress, continually made and remade in the moment.
 17

Bibliography

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Coast.” In Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities,
edited by Murray, Stephen O., Will Roscoe, and Marc Epprecht. Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2021

Shephard, Gill. “Rank, gender and homosexuality: Mombasa as a key to understanding

sexual options.” In The Cultural Construction of Sexuality, ed. Pat Caplan,
240–70. London: Tavistock, 1978

Fair, Laura. Pastimes & Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-Abolition
Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945. Athens: Ohio University
Press, 2001.

Gaudio, Rudolf Pell. Allah Made Us Sexual Outlaws in an Islamic African City. Hoboken:
John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2009.

Ghoshal, Neela. “‘If We Don't Get Services, We Will Die.’” Human Rights Watch. Human
Rights Watch, June 18, 2020.
https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/02/03/if-we-dont-get-services-we-will-die/tanzanias-ant
i-lgbt-crackdown-and-right.

Moen, Kåre, Peter Aggleton, Melkizedeck T Leshabari, and Anne-Lise Middelthon.

“Gays, Guys, and Mchicha Mwiba: Same-Sex Relations and
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