The Historiography of Homosexuality in Africa South of the Sahara

The article analyses the development of historical writing about non-heterosexual sexual/intimate relationships in Africa south of the Sahara, with the principal focus on southern Africa but acknowledging important contributions from non-British colonialisms/historiographies elsewhere. It ranges from brief and often highly moralistic early missionary and traveller accounts going back to the beginning of European exploration of Africa to the first labour histories (in the 1970s and 1980s) to the emergence of self-consciously African queer research in the 2000s. We consider debates about methodology, terminology, and the relationship between non-African researchers and their African subjects or other interlocutors, concluding with some suggestions for future potentially fruitful research avenues.