Eroticism, Sensuality and ‘Women’s Secrets’ Among the Baganda

Tamale studies forms of erotic instruction and knowledge shared among Baganda women, refusing the colonial claim that African sexuality is either primitive excess or silent victimhood. ‘Women’s secrets’ can create spaces in which women exchange techniques, language, and confidence outside male supervision. Pleasure appears as knowledge produced and transmitted by women.

The article does not romanticize secrecy. Instruction may prepare women to satisfy husbands, reinforce heterosexual marriage, or become commodified, while age and status shape who may speak. Colonial law and Christian morality transformed these practices by stigmatizing African erotic cultures even as patriarchal institutions continued to regulate women’s bodies.

Tamale’s method is important to decolonial feminist sexuality studies because it holds ambivalence in view. A practice can preserve women’s authority and reproduce unequal expectations at the same time. The analytic task is not to label culture liberated or oppressive from afar, but to trace who controls knowledge, whose pleasure counts, and how women revise intimate traditions under changing power.