The Sex Lives of African Women

Starred review from January 10, 2022
Ghanaian activist and blogger Sekyiamah debuts with a dazzling series of soul-searching and taboo-breaking conversations with women throughout Africa and the diaspora about relationships, sex, and identity. Her profile subjects (no last names given) include Nura, a Muslim woman struggling to adjust to her polygamous marriage in Kenya; Estelle, a young British woman of “mixed African and Arab heritage” who leaves her marriage to pursue polyamory; Amina, a queer feminist activist living in Egypt; Kuchenga, a Black trans woman and sex worker who calls her attraction to cis straight men “a curse”; and Miss Deviant, a 52-year-old dominatrix in South London who makes her rich, white male clients “perform acts of service for their wives and partners.” Interweaving autobiographical details with her subjects’ complex, category-defying personal histories, Sekyiamah charts the “journey towards sexual freedom and agency” through self-discovery, defiance of cultural norms in favor of authenticity, and reckoning with the traumatic legacies of rape, abuse, and genital mutilation. Though many of the interviewees acknowledge their unhappiness, the overall tone is hopeful, resilient, and accepting. Marked by the diversity of experiences shared, the wealth of intimate details, and the total lack of sensationalism, this is an astonishing report on the quest for sexual liberation.

February 15, 2022
In this sweeping study of love, sex, identity, and desire, Ghanaian feminist writer and blogger Sekyiamah explores the lives of remarkable Black and Afro-descendant women. Developed from her blog, Adventures From the Bedrooms of African Women, and 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," the book uses memoirlike interludes of the author's romantic history to frame these 32 stories. Throughout, the women present intimate, confessional material, and the text shows a diverse spectrum of life experiences: straight, queer, cis, trans, Christian, Muslim, monogamous, polyamorous, wealthy, and poor. Readers follow along as the women experience empowerment, heartache, pleasure, desire, abuse, and love, moving across the African continent and throughout the diaspora. With Sekyiamah as our guide, we fly around the world experiencing an appropriately varied selection of intimate stories, expanding our hearts and minds. Among others, we meet Nura, who was planning to move into a 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"; Helen, who describes herself as "a married polyamorous pansexual African woman"; Salma, "a well-known poet, writer, and media personality with roots from Egypt and Ireland" who acknowledges "how being in a bad relationship robbed her of her voice for far too long"; and Alexis, an Afro-Caribbean "Black queer feminist" who shares the joys of "finding love in her sixties, the importance of self-pleasure, and the role that the erotic, and a love of food, plays in her love life with her partner." The author allows each woman to speak for herself, an approach that captures the immediacy of the experiences but occasionally makes the book feel like a collection of testimonies. Nonetheless, Sekyiamah highlights a dynamic chorus of voices that often go unheard. An ambitious, moving account of women controlling their bodies and their destinies.

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