A final set of narratives of social-historical change in East-Central Africa over the periods from the First Age of Farming through the Age of Political Reconfiguration can be written around the themes of sex and sexuality. This story is a broad one, in which certain long-lasting developments can be discerned, but the more specific elements of change often prove difficult to situate in time.

Over the many precolonial centuries of East-Central African history, sexual relations between women and men intersected with custom, ritual, and production in a variety of ways. East-Central Africans of the nineteenth century viewed sexuality as normal and ordinary and not at all as furtive or forbidden, and these ideas were embedded and expressed in cultural practices going back many centuries. The frank acceptance of sexuality put East-Central Africans startlingly at odds with the European (and particularly British) attitudes they encountered at the beginning of the colonial era. At the same time, East-Central Africans differed from the Europeans in another way: they understood that the sex act was capable of conveying numinous potency in liminal contexts or, if misused in such contexts, was dangerous. The cultural expressions of these attitudes reveal a high degree of female empowerment in social relations extending far back in the history of East-Central Africa.

It is difficult to determine the antiquity of particular customs that represent East-Central African views on sexuality, but broadly speaking, many such customs are likely to date back to the early Luangwa Age a thousand years ago and may have spread or been reinforced by the spread of the Luangwa cultural sphere of the Sabi-speaking societies since then.