Historically, African women have found conversing about sexuality problematic. From youth, sexual stimulation has often been discouraged in African societies. Africans are taught that marriage is pivotal despite the alarming number of them raised in alternative families. To be frank, African sexuality is more so male sexuality, patriarchal ideologies about gender roles and dynamics pervading the continent. The female body exists to serve male interests in many African contexts. 

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Ghanaian feminist, Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah, inspires African women to go on sexual journeys in societies that often repress and discourage such exploration. AMAKA had the pleasure of sitting down with Sekyiamah last year to discuss the documentation of African women's sexcapades. Returning post-book launch, The Sex Lives of African Women author shares raw viewpoints from over 30 women on sex, sexuality, and relationships. These women's diverse anecdotes about monogamy, polyamory, celibacy, being LGBTQIA+, and more have been collected over the course of six years and serve as a means for readers to unlearn the societal norms and religious edicts imposed upon them. Nothing is off-limits in the book's quest for sexual freedom. 

Tell me about yourself.

I'm a person who does many, many things. The identity that is most important to me is my identity as an African feminist and activist. It informs everything I do, from voter rights to what I choose to do for a living such that I can make an income; it informs the people I surround myself with and the communities I co-create and dedicate space and energy to. For me, feminist activism is really about recognising the systems in our world that are unfair and recognising that those systems are created by human beings, and if unfair systems are created by human beings then they can also be dismantled. People who want a better world can create that better world and exist in those better worlds, even if it's only within our own sort of communities. So that [the above] really informs everything I do - from the book I just wrote to Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women, which I co-created with my best friend, Malaka Grant, to working for the Association of Women's Rights and Development as their Director of Communications and Tactics to so many feminist groups I've created over the years or am actively a part of. That's me in a nutshell.

 How has your background informed your work?

I did my first degree in communications and cultural studies; though I've always really been interested in communications, I knew nothing about cultural studies. Through cultural studies, I got introduced to feminist theory. At the time, I was a young Ghanian girl who had just moved to the UK. I was introduced to the works of people like bell hooks and Michele Wallace, and Patricia Hill Collins, and my mind was blown because they were explaining things to me that I had sort of wrestled with as a young child, like 'Why are you not helping me in the kitchen?', and all of these kinds of things I was taught as a child that irritated me but that I had no language for. Suddenly, I had language for them, and I also had the language to sort of rethink some of my experiences, including my experiences with girls and boarding school and looking at that with a different lens of sexuality.

I was also in the UK being confronted by racism in a way that I hadn't been fully aware of, especially as a privileged, middle-class Ghanaian woman. I was confronted with hurdles around race, gender, and sexuality. The systems around the above worked in a way that I hadn't previously thought about. My experience really changed the course of my life. It changed what I went on to study; I was interested in studying more on gender. Subsequently, I started working and volunteering for an African women's NGO that was based in the UK. I went to their leadership courses, and I met other activists who are still my friends today. 

Tell me about your blog, Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women.

Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women started off as a blog, but we now occupy many spaces. My best friend, Malaka Grant, and I came together and decided to create this blog where we would share stories of women's experiences with sex. We started to encourage other African women to share their own stories, and the blog took a life of its own. We've now created new and exciting arms of the business. We have a live festival, which we've done now for the third year in a row, and in year one and year two, there were physical events in Ghana, and this year, because of the increased homophobia against queer people and because a significant proportion of our audience are [sic] queer people, we decided to just have the events as virtual. It was the first time we explored virtual reality as a way to bring people together while ensuring their safety. We're also working on a podcast exploring sex and sexualities that will hopefully come out at some point next year. We also started some writing fellowships because we wanted our platform to be a place for people to grow their chops. We want to create a structure where we can support people who write about sex and sexuality because we think it's politically important to do so within a framework where we can provide them with opportunities to learn from other content creators and to share their thoughts.

What inspired your desire to speak so candidly about sexuality as it pertains to African women?

Once I had the eureka idea of 'Oh, my God, I want to start a blog about sex and sexuality,' what came next was obvious. This work has political effects, and the government is trying to legislate who we sleep with and who we love, so we have taken back control, and we have taken back our power. What's been nice is that African women own the space for the blog and actually share their own stories. The stories I see on the blog reflect the diversity of African women's sexuality that I don't really see reflected in mainstream media, so I wanted to contribute to complicating the stories of African women's experiences around sex and sexualities. For me, one way of doing that was through a book. With a blog, you are kind of limited in terms of content and stories for each person, and I thought to just interview people and then tell their stories in the form of a book. My work on the blog made me realise there was space for a book on the subject, and I wasn't aware of many or any books that existed that were doing what I wanted to do. 

Do you hold there are historical implications as to why sexuality has been repressed in our societies?

Yes. We cannot overestimate the impact of colonisation on the continent and [its impact on] African women's experiences of sexuality. We know that, at least in the country where I come from, Ghana, the British imposed Victorian standards of morality and their own ways of understanding families and what was appropriate or what was not. The monogamous family is not a Ghanian construct. In traditional Ghanaian society, there are more diverse and acceptable ways of having a family, which includes a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter living together raising children or what we know more commonly as polygamy - a man with multiple wives. I, myself, come from a polygamous background. Maybe there's also [a] sort of reclaiming that we can do to the narrative of polygamy, but I can see how women can have a lot more space and freedom and independence in polygamous marriages than what's possible in monogamous marriages in Ghana. The reality is also that monogamous marriages in Ghana are usually not monogamous; It's just a woman who's meant to be faithful. The British came here and imposed certain colonial standards on us, which included homophobic rhetoric and law. Today, we see how those colonial laws are being exploited, as I'm sure you're aware of the anti-LGBTQ bill that's currently being discussed in Ghanaian parliament. 

There's been lots of research which shows that traditional African societies were more tolerant and diverse around things like sexuality or at least did not try to criminalise people who have different sexualities, and there were many ways that people expressed gender. Ancient times weren't utopic but also were not what we have now. So yes, colonial far-right evangelicalism, which to me is just a form of Neo colonisation, changed our societies.  

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How did you get more than 30 women to open their most intimate selves to you?

I suppose I have been doing this work for 12 years. Because of this blog that I have, people were actually already coming to me to ask me questions about their sexuality, and so the very first person I interviewed was because she slid into my DMs because she was confused as to whether she was bisexual or lesbian and wanted my advice. Because I've done this for a while, there's a unique way in which people trust me. I also think people trust me because I've been open and honest about who I am by sharing my own personal experiences. We don't really have very many public conversations about sex and sexuality, and people are actually really, really keen to have them, so when you invite them to have a conversation, and they feel that you're not going to tell everybody their business, then they are actually willing to speak. I think I could have interviewed 100 people but just had to stop because of time.

I recognise that there are Africans who are separated from the continent because of colonisation, slavery, and migration, so I interviewed people from everywhere: Scotland and Nigeria and Costa Rica. I interviewed women who are Ghanaian, Lebanese, Syrian, from Zimbabwe, from South Africa, and from Rwanda… 

Your book is full of stories ranging from polyamory to polygamy to divorce to BDSM. Is there one that most moved you?

A story that I find personally inspiring is Helen Banda's story. Her story shows it's possible to change the state of the relationship that you find yourself into one that allows you more space and freedom to navigate and to explore. There's this idea that who you are at the start of a relationship is who you need to be throughout the relationship, which doesn't allow for the way people change and grow. What I loved about Helen is that she and her husband had been in a monogamous relationship for ten years, and they had been curious about opening up their relationship, and they decided to go for it. They did it in a way that seemed to me to be really fair. They have two children, including a child with special needs, and they would take turns going on dates and that really allowed both of them to explore individually as well as as a couple. In a way, it came across as a utopian picture of polyamory, and I liked it.

What lessons do you want to impart to your readers?

I want people to know that sexual freedom is possible and, obviously, that sexual freedom is also very personal and looks different for everybody. In my book, there are stories of people choosing to do 1000 days of celibacy and that for somebody was personal sexual freedom—being able to step back and sort of figure out who they are and how they'd been in different types of relationships to get to know themselves better and to practice self-pleasure. When I say I want people to find sexual freedom, I want people to know that sex is not limited to penis and vagina sex. There are so many ways to think about sex, and we really need to broaden our understanding of what sex is, and we also need to recognise that pleasure is political. It is political for us as women to find joy in our bodies, to see our bodies as belonging to us, and for us to know that we can move in the world the way we want to move in the world. We can figure out ways to be happy and content in our respective communities. We should actually take ourselves on a journey to figure out who we are because the world tries to tell us from a very young age, 'This is where you should be.' People need to give themselves the space of time to figure out who they are. I'm trying to give myself space and time, and writing about sex and sexuality is part of the way that I do it. I'm not like trying to come out like a guru. These conversations are part of my learning journey, and I hope this learning can also inspire other women on journeys.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.