‘Plain Clean Facts’ and initiation schools: Christianity, Africans and ‘sex education’ in South Africa, c. 1910–1940

abstract

This focus engages with what I see broadly as two (there are more) different discourses around African sexuality in the 1920s and 1930s. In one, concern for sexuality was linked to a moral panic around the behaviour of young girls and boys who were attempting to assert their independence from what were essentially patriarchal forms of control. In contrast to this, I look at other currents around sexuality for the same period and examine how Christian Africans learned about sex, and what they were taught.

keywords:

• Christianity
• sex education
• sexuality
• initiation
• gender
• circumcision