“Let’s hope there are some good girls” – sugar relationships and feminine respectability in post-independence Zambia

Journal article

This essay examines the popular genre of sugar daddy stories in post-independence Zambia. Sugar relations in African history have typically been discussed using either a structuralist approach focusing on economic inequality and poverty, or one highlighting the individual agency of women in order to not present them as pawns, victims or dupes. Instead, this article zooms into the fantasies of observers of these relationships and the fluid feelings sugar babies provoke in them. Based on material from the Zambian youth magazine “Speak Out” between the 1980s and the 2000s, I argue that women engaged in sugar relations are seen to be unsettling as they potentially hold the power to dismantle adult men’s authority. Looking at the three most popular settings in which sugar stories unfold – the school, the workplace, and the national stage – this essay demonstrates that sugar stories are windows into gender dynamics and fragile masculinities, as well as into tensions around class, generation, and race. Feelings about these women range from jealousy and anxiety to fury and are inherent to a moral debate on disorder and corruption in the urban Copperbelt of Zambia.

Authors: Lämmert, S

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage
• Journal: L'Homme. European Journal of Feminist History
• Volume: 32
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 21–40
• Publication date: 2021-10-11
• Acceptance date: 2021-06-29
• DOI: 10.14220/lhom.2021.32.2.21
• EISSN: 2194-5071
• ISSN: 1016-362X
• Language: English
• Keywords: FFR