Presenting author: Eileen Moyer
Title: Secret pleasures: Imagining sexuality on the Swahili Coast
Through an exploration of contemporary popular arts and culture, the authors discuss how
people in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania communicate ideas about sexuality, pleasure and morality
in a contexts veiled to outsiders. An attempt to understand local constructions of sexuality
and pleasure within a complex cosmopolitan context demands analyses that take into account
the interconnectedness of the Swahili coast and the world beyond. People have been
immigrating to the coast of eastern Africa for thousands of years from India, Arabia,
Persia, and Europe, as well as, inland Africa, bringing with them new ideas about everything –
not the least of which includes sex and pleasure. Local versions of orientalism and
occidentalism have contributed to the development of a dominant view whereby things
foreign are easily exoticized and eroticized. Recent proliferation of internet access and
videos in Dar es Salaam further contributes to a sense of heightened voyeurism in regards
to Euro-American and Indian sexual practices and proclivities that directly inform local
notions of what is pleasurable, beautiful and desirable. Women and women’s bodies are a
frequent subject of this often erotic discourse (a form of pleasure in itself) that takes
place both across and within gendered categories. Increasingly popular fashion shows, and
beauty and modeling contests provide forums for discussing ideal beauty in regards to
African and Western aesthetics. Could a Miss Tanzania win Miss Universe, and perhaps
more important, could a woman considered beautiful by local ideals ever win a beauty
contest at all? Men play an important role in generating ideal images of female bodies and
sexualities that have the capacity to be both empowering and disempowering. It is women,
however, who are celebrated and, fairly often, derided for their skilled practice of weaving
innuendo, double entendre, and slang into daily discussions, cloth designs, music and wedding
ceremonies. These practices, though often glossed as gossip by both sexes, play an
important factor in creating a space for sexuality and pleasure within the context of a
moral lived world that is constantly being reshaped.