| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sub-Saharan Africa

Marc Epprecht. Hungochani: The History of a Dissident Sexuality in Southern Africa. Ithaca, N.Y.: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2004. Pp. xiii, 317. Cloth $75.00, paper $27.95.
This book by Marc Epprecht is a major contribution to the study of sexuality, politics, and culture in southern Africa. Its main political and scholarly value, at this point in the twenty-first century, lies in providing a well-documented corrective to the two most common fallacies circulating about same-sex sexuality in Africa: that Africans in their heterosexually pure, idealized state have no tradition of same-sex involvement, and that Africans, as antimodern and illiberal peoples, are always viciously repressive of non-normative sexualities. Epprecht works with a catholic array of archival, documentary, and oral sources, bringing to light evidence of same-sex sexuality across time and space in southern Africa, yet without oversimplifying or opting for easy truisms.	1
The refusal to oversimplify means that the title of his book is something of a double misnomer (I say this not as a complaint, but as testimony to the complexity of Epprecht's argument and the richness of his material). First, this book is not about a sexuality, but about a broad constellation of practices and people that differ from normative heterosexuality. Second, the word "dissident," with its connotations of deliberate refusal and contention, does not seem entirely accurate (at least when speaking of the period before the 1990s), as not all same-sex activity fits into a neat dialectic of oppression-and-resistance (or dissent). One of the strengths of this book is how it reveals the extent to which Africans have been able to fly under the radar of customary, colonial, and postcolonial sexual surveillance and carry out same-sex relationships without attracting the attention of moral authorities, much less challenging them. Epprecht does not read same-sex sexuality as a refutation of or a form of dissent from heterosexuality, and he makes a good case that the interpersonal relations surrounding same-sex activity were often isomorphic to predominant heteronormativities.	. . .

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