Murray is the co-author, with Will Roscoe (American scholar, activist and author), of the seminal volume ‘ Boy Wives and Female Husbands: Studies of African Homosexualities’. Suspicion of what women are up to among themselves and a strong need for the shelter from male competition/hostility/suspicion in an emotionally-intense best friend relationship are especially strong in West Africa.” Herskovits also noted, “homosexuality is found among women as well as men by some it is claimed that it exists among women to a greater extent”. Sometimes an affair of this sort persists during the entire life of the pair. A boy may take the other ‘as a woman’ this being called ‘gaglgo’, homosexuality. In the 1930s American anthropologist Melville Herskovits reported the view of the predominant Fon tribe in Benin that homosexuality was an adolescent phase: “ the games between (prepubescent) boys and girls are stopped, the boys no longer have the opportunity for companionship with the girls, and the sex drive finds satisfaction in close friendship between boys in the same group…. Burton noted that “it is difficult to obtain information in Dahome (now Benin) concerning eunuchs, who are special slaves of the kind, and bear the dignified title of royal wives”. In the late 1800s the British explorer Sir Richard F. Needless to say, as everywhere in Africa, sexual varieties and behaviors have characterized tribal territories for centuries. In 2005 he wrote an overview titled ‘Homosexuality in ‘Traditional’ Sub-Saharan Africa and Contemporary South Africa’ that included historic perspectives on which the following comments are based. Murray, a gay sociologist, anthropologist, and independent scholar.
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One of the most respected authorities on human sexuality is Prof. Same-sex sexual acts are recently legal in Benin but this does not mean that they are approved by the general population.
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The literacy rate in Benin is among the lowest in the world: in 2002 it was estimated to be 34.7%. More recently, with acceptable elections, the country seems stabilized. After independence there was warfare between competing tribes for power which destabilized the country, becoming a Marxist country for 20 years, in the 1970s and 80s. Benin has suffered the historic fate of being a major slave trade center in the 19th century as well as a victim of French imperialism from 1892 to 1960.