The Sex Lives of African Women Read online

  Copyright © 2022 by Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah

  All rights reserved. Copying or digitizing this book for storage, display, or distribution in any other medium is strictly prohibited.

  The chapters “Amina” and “Chantale” were originally published in a contribution titled

  “Adventures from the bedrooms of queer African women” in Routledge Handbook of Queer African Studies, edited by S.N. Nyeck (Routledge, 2019).

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, please contact [email protected].

  Astra House

  A Division of Astra Publishing House

  astrahouse.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Sekyiamah, Nana Darkoa, author.

  Title: The sex lives of African women : self-discovery, freedom, and healing / Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Astra House, [2022] | Summary: “From her blog, “Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women,” Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah has spent decades talking openly and intimately to African women around the world about sex. Here, she features the stories that most affected her, chronicling her own journey toward sexual freedom. We meet Yami, a pansexual Canadian of Malawian heritage, who describes negotiating the line between family dynamics and sexuality. There’s Esther, a cisgender hetero woman studying in America, by way of Cameroon and Kenya, who talks of how a childhood rape has made her rebellious and estranged from her missionary parents. And Tsitsi, an HIV-positive Zimbabwean woman who is raising a healthy, HIV-free baby. Across a queer community in Egypt, polyamorous life in Senegal, and a reflection on the intersection of religion and pleasure in Cameroon, Sekyiamah explores the many layers of love and desire, its expression, and how it forms who we are. In these confessional pages, women control their own bodies and pleasure, and assert their sexual power. Capturing the rich tapestry of sex positivity, The Sex Lives of African Women is a singular and subversive book that celebrates the liberation, individuality, and joy of African women’s multifaceted sexuality”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021044278 (print) | LCCN 2021044279 (ebook) | ISBN 9781662650819 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781662650826 (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: Women—Sexual behavior—Africa. | Women, Black—Sexual behavior—Africa. | Sex—Africa.

  Classification: LCC HQ29 .S455 2021 (print) | LCC HQ29 (ebook) | DDC 306.7082096—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021044278

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021044279

  First edition

  Design by Richard Oriolo

  The text is set in Bulmer Regular.

  For my daughter Asantewaa, and African girls and women wherever they may be.

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  PART 1: SELF-DISCOVERY

  Nura

  Nafi

  Keisha

  Bibi

  Ebony

  Elizabeth

  Naisha

  Chantale

  Philester

  Kuchenga

  Estelle

  Bingi

  PART 2: FREEDOM

  Fatou

  Helen Banda

  Alexis

  Miss Deviant

  Gabriela

  Amina

  Laura

  Solange

  Yami

  PART 3: HEALING

  Salma

  Mariam Gebre

  Shanita

  Maureen

  Esther

  Baaba

  Vera Cruz

  Tafadzwa

  Tsitsi

  Waris

  Nana Darkoa

  A FINAL NOTE

  GLOSSARY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PREFACE

  FOR MORE THAN ten years, I shared my personal experiences of sex on “Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women,” a blog I cofounded with my friend Malaka Grant. I also facilitated conversations about women’s experiences of sex and pleasure in a variety of public settings, ranging from intimate living-room conversations in Mombasa, Kenya, to public events in Berlin, Germany. I have often spoken and written about the importance of owning one’s body, and my continuing journey in negotiating my own sexuality and desires both within and outside the bedroom. Speaking in public about a subject that is often deemed taboo—especially in the part of the world where I originate, Ghana—is a political act. I think and write about sex in order to learn how to have better sex. I encourage other women to share their experiences of sex in order to build our collective consciousness around the politics of pleasure. This is critical in a world where women too often lack access to a truly comprehensive sex education.

  Black, African, and Afro-descendant women are often told that sex should only be within particular constraints—between people of opposite genders, for instance—and within certain parameters. In some countries, these parameters are marriage. In other countries the law prohibits some types of sexual acts, or tries to control the choices girls and women have when they experience an unwanted pregnancy.

  In The Sex Lives of African Women, individual women from across the African continent and its global Diaspora speak to their experiences of sex, sexualities, and relationships. It was really important to me as a Pan-African feminist that a book about African women’s experiences of sex-centered continental Africans, and included the experiences of Africans who have been violently displaced by the legacies of slavery and colonization, as well as those who have voluntarily migrated to other parts of the world. For this reason I was especially pleased to interview women of African descent from places like Haiti, Barbados, and Costa Rica.

  The stories in this book are based on in-depth interviews I conducted between 2015 and 2020, with women between the ages of twenty-one to seventy-one, from thirty-one countries across the globe. I made conscious efforts to interview women who came from a broad range of backgrounds: across socioeconomic lines, women of faith and women who practice no particular religion, women for whom English was not their first language, and women representative of communities that have been historically marginalized in society. The biggest challenge for me personally was interviewing women who were not native English speakers because in one instance it meant speaking through a translator, and it also meant that I ended up speaking primarily to women who were also fluent in English. I can see how my book would be even more rich in content if I had interviewed women in a variety of African languages, for instance. When I started working on this project, I focused on interviewing people face-to-face, a goal that was made possible by the privilege of my job, which allows me to travel across the globe. That changed with the COVID-19 pandemic, and I started to do more interviews via video. One particular woman and I ended up concluding our conversation via a series of voice notes because she lives in a country with poor internet connectivity that also experiences frequent power outages.

  In my introduction to each story I describe each woman as she self-identified. This allows me to show the diversity of ways in which people see themselves, whether they identify as cis women, femmes, trans, heterosexual, or pansexual, for instance. I also share people’s ages and their country of origin and residence in order to contextualize their experiences. A significant proportion of the women I interviewed represented more than one nation, and had their sexual encounters shaped by the various countries they had lived in and cultures they had experienced. After speaking to more than thirty women for this book, I started to see several common threads weaving through the stories, threads that I also see reflected in my own life. My conclusion is very much this:
we’re all on a journey towards sexual freedom and agency. In order to get there we need to heal. Healing looks different for everybody. For some of the women in this book, healing came about through celibacy and spiritual growth. For others, healing came through taking back power as a dominatrix and sex worker. For some others, healing is still part of the journey they need to travel.

  Many of the women I spoke to inspired me with the realities of how they live their best sexual lives. This included deeply personal stories: for example, about navigating freedom and polyamory in conservative Senegal, or resisting the erasure of lesbian identity and finding queer community in Egypt in the midst of a revolution. African women grapple with the trauma of sexual abuse, and resist religious and patriarchal edicts in order to assert their sexual power and agency. They do this by questioning and resisting societal norms while creating new norms and narratives that allow them to be who they truly are. The journey towards sexual freedom is not a linear one, or one that is fixed and static. Freedom is a state that we are constantly seeking to reach.

  All names used in this book are pseudonyms unless indicated with an asterisk.

  PART 1: SELF-DISCOVERY

  AT TWENTY-TWO I WAS STILL TECHNICALLY A VIRGIN. THIS WAS IN spite of the fact that Eric had told my boyfriend Jeremy six years ago: “I fucked your girlfriend by a gutter near her house.” The day I met Eric, I was walking down from Community 11 along the snaky bend of the road aptly named )w) junction towards Community 10 in the city of Tema, Ghana. I had on my new favorite miniskirt that my aunt in the US had gifted me on one of her infrequent visits to Ghana. My mum was horrified by the skirt, a double strip of faded denim with brass rings punched through the second strip. “It’s all the rage in New York,” my aunt explained when Mum attempted to object to the gift. I wore it every chance I got, and was wearing it when the red sports car came hurtling around the side of )w) junction and, in what seemed like seconds, overturned into a nearby gutter. I stood there like a mumu, frozen to the spot. What should I do? There’s no one else around. Is the driver hurt? As these thoughts tumbled about in my head, I saw a flash of red and blue as a smallish light-skinned man extricated himself from the wreckage only to start kicking the car in anger. I was still frozen to the spot when he saw me and ran over. “Hey, can you watch my car for me? I just need to go and get my brothers to come help me.” I nodded, still lost for words, and was still in the same spot minutes later when he came back with a group of boys piled into the back of a pickup. “Thanks for watching my car, can I have your number?” His name was Eric, and I spent the rest of the summer hanging out with him. We would spend all day together and at dusk he would walk me to my house, or I would walk him home. In the quiet spots behind the houses, or on the part of the road where the streetlights failed to come on, we would kiss with open mouths and tongues like I had seen on TV. “Why do you kiss with your eyes open?” he asked one day, and then I knew that one must always kiss with eyes closed.

  By the time I met Fiifi I was ready to lose my virginity. At twenty-two, it had started to feel like an unwanted weight that I was carrying between my legs. I no longer worried about being called a mattress, or any of the names that guys gave girls they slept with. I had firsthand knowledge now that most of the guys were lying about the girls they had slept with; besides, I now lived in London, where most girls my age were already sharing flats with their boyfriends. I don’t remember much about the first time I had sex with Fiifi, except that he fucked me three times. When I told my friend, she exclaimed, “Weren’t you in pain?” I was, but I also believed him each time he told me, “It’ll be easier the next time round,” and in a sense he was right. I don’t remember much about the sex we had over the five years we were together. Our sex was vanilla: missionary mainly, me going down on him a lot, me begging for the first three years of our relationship for him to go down on me. And then he found out I had cheated on him. “Why did you wait for us to get married before you cheated on me?” he asked. I had no words to offer to him. If I had, I might have said:

  I spent years avoiding sex with guys because I didn’t want anyone to gossip about me. I wish I had realized sooner that no matter what I did guys would claim to have fucked me every which way under the sun.

  I spent years scared that sex would result in a pregnancy, and that would mean dropping out of school and having my life ruined forever. I wish I had known about contraceptives, and that sex could be enjoyed for its own sake.

  I spent years thinking that once I had sex with a guy I would need to stay with him forever, and then once I was married I realized I should have done what a lot of guys are encouraged to do and sown my wild oats. I too have wild oats to sow.

  But I had no words to offer him, and he had gone insane at the thought that this girl, this woman whose body had been wholly his, had been possessed by someone else … and in his words, someone had put his dick where he used to put his mouth. Thinking about this over and over again made him hurl words at me in the middle of the night when we were sleeping, or even in the park where we had picnics in a vain attempt to get back to how things used to be.

  What did you do with him?

  Tell me again.

  You enjoyed it, didn’t you?

  Let’s have sex now.

  Look, you’re wet. Talking about him turns you on. You weren’t wet before.

  Look at you; you’re growing fat while I grow lean.

  One night when he had reluctantly gone to work the night shift at his job, I packed a suitcase and left. I knew he would call me on the house phone just before midnight, as had become his new habit. I made sure to leave before that phone rang. I walked out of the relationship three times before I found the strength to leave permanently.

  What I have learned over the years is that you don’t discover yourself by sticking to well-trodden paths. You discover yourself by embarking on your own personal odyssey, which is experienced differently by everyone. The journey towards self-discovery may be long and winding, but it is also one filled with the infinite possibilities that come with adventure.

  It is imperative to break out of the boxes circumscribed by society in order to discover one’s self, and the multitudes we hold within us. This requires practicing an audacious form of bravery, and often requires one to go against the grain of everything that has been presented as the norm.

  The women whose stories I share in this section speak to the quest that many women need to undertake to discover their true sexual selves. Sometimes, this involves a literal journey, like moving to another country for love, as was the case for Nura, who married a man she had never met before and subsequently moved from Kenya to Senegal. For others, self-discovery requires stepping out of the relative safety of the familiar to explore different relationship models based on consent, openness, and love. Getting to know one’s self may even mean a reckoning with the gender that was assigned at birth.

  Travel features a lot in the stories shared here. Travel to a city where one can work legally as a sex worker, in the case of Kuchenga; or in the case of Elizabeth, migrating from Lagos to London just as she was falling in love with her childhood friend. For many Africans in the Diaspora, their very existence has been shaped by travel—the journeys their ancestors may have taken to the countries where they currently live. They are forged not just by where they are immediately from, but also where they originated. This is visible in stories shared by Estelle, for instance, whose ancestors came from Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, an ancestry that is visible in the color of her skin and the texture of her hair.

  In many ways, we are all on a journey and are on different parts of the road towards our true selves and sexual freedom. The women in this section model bravery and vulnerability. They challenge us all to continue our own paths towards discovering our true selves, even if that journey remains an ongoing one.

  I met Nura on a trip to Senegal in January 2020. It was my last international trip before many countries started closing their borders due
to the COVID-19 pandemic. I had decided to take myself on a personal retreat, to write, read, and rejuvenate for the year ahead. My friend the writer Ayesha Harruna Atta opened her home to me, and my days consisted of waking up early to write, conducting virtual interviews, and allowing myself to get lost while exploring the nature reserve and beaches of Popenguine.

  In Senegal, like in many other countries where I find myself, I have an almost ready-made African feminist community. One day, a Kenyan friend told me that she was going to visit a compatriot who had moved to Senegal and was now in a polygamous marriage and in need of finding a community of sister friends. I was intrigued, and I, my friend, and two other women made the hour-long trip to the town where Nura now lived.

  Over water and pineapples, Nura shared with us snippets about the romance that had led her to get married and move to Senegal at the age of forty-two to start a new life in a country where she had no friends, and did not speak Wolof, the dominant language. She was living in a flat owned by her sister-in-law, and in a few short weeks was going to move to the house where her husband lived with his other wives. She was keen to build a healthy relationship with the other women her husband was married to. I initially interviewed Nura before she moved in with her husband, and reconnected a few months later to find out what life was like in a polygamous household.

  I was especially curious to find out what Nura’s experience of polygamy was like because my parents were also in a polygamous marriage. Even though polygamy is legal in Ghana, over time it has acquired a tinge of illegitimacy due to the dominance of Christianity, which promotes heterosexual monogamous marriage as the only valid relationship structure. Yet polygamous practices are dominant in the country. My friend Kobina Graham coined a word, “fauxnogamy,” to describe a practice where married men in relationships that are meant to be monogamous have multiple relationships without taking on any of the responsibilities that come with being legally married to multiple women.