ABSTRACT
Christianity, with adherents numbering over 200 million, is a major religion in Africa and has made indelible impressions on African socio-cultural outlook. Christianity has redefined the cultural beliefs and practices of many African countries, and has shaped the understanding of sexuality in Africa. Christian spirituality has been predicated on a high level of moral conduct which invariably included sexual behaviour. Indeed, sexuality has become a challenging issue for African Christians since the 1980s, hence sexual issues such as gender role, sexual orientation, sexual identity, sex outside marriage and sexual pleasure have generated controversies among Christians in Africa. This article assesses the interaction of African Christianity on sexual issues, such as polygamy, puberty rites, pre-marital sex, marriage, chastity, same-sex relationship and regulations of sexual behaviour among Christians. The introduction of Christianity in Africa from the fifteenth century ushered
in a new perspective of sexuality than previously held in traditional African societies. By the late nineteenth century, evangelical Christianity adopted a hostile attitude to African traditional ideas on sexuality and sought to project a new understanding of sexuality by condemning puberty and initiation rites, by insisting on monogamy, and condemning polygamy as sinful and incompatible with the Christian faith. Consequently, missionary teaching on marriage and sexuality fostered a new spirituality that became dominant in African Christianity even till the twenty-first century. Since the 1960s, when the sexual revolution from the West began to creep in, the Church in Africa has been forced to rethink its position on several sexual issues. In particular was the increasingly liberal perspective on casual sex, which was seen by evangelical Christians as an antithesis to chastity, a value that has some congruence with the traditional
African value placed on virginity. Beginning from the 1980s, the promotion of homosexuality as an acceptable sexual orientation by the Western media and societies has largely been condemned and resisted by the Church and the larger society in Africa. Existing literature on Christianity and sexuality in Africa has assessed how the
Christian faith in some African societies has contributed to their value systems. Uwem Edimo Esiet,1 Rakiya Booth,2 Mumbi Machera,3 Augustine Ankomah4
and L. J. Nicholas5 have described how Christian values have shaped sexuality in countries like Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and South Africa. They posit that the dominant religion in a country influences sexual norms and policies in that country. Indeed, in Africa, the Christian faith has restricted humans from expressing their sexuality the way they like. This corroborates Ojo’s sexual right theory which stipulates that African Christians always subject their sexual rights to their denominations’ doctrinal emphases which, sometimes, restrict their sexual freedom.6
