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‘Our sexual revolution is being blogged’

One of the most popular shows on Ghanaian television in the 80s was Obra. A common scenario in the show was that a young teenage girl would get involved in a relationship with a man and inevitably fall pregnant. This would lead her to drop out of school, the man who had impregnated her would abandon her, the young girl would become an embarrassment to her family, and the rest of her life would be a misery. Whenever we watched this happen, my mum would turn to me and say: “You see what happens when you mess around with guys?”

That was the type of sex education I received growing up in Ghana. Sex as taught to my generation of Ghanaian girls was always ‘bad’, and only ‘bad’ girls had sex before marriage. At the boarding school I went to there were always rumours about the girls who apparently had sex – they were called names like ‘Kaneshie mattress’, suggesting anyone who lived in that area of Accra had slept with them. I myself always believed these rumours about the ‘bad’ girls. How could you doubt stories told with such confidence? It was only when rumours about my own sexuality reached my ears that I began to question these myths.

After a growth spurt one summer holiday, I returned to school with gigantic boobs. One day while walking to my dorm, I overhead a group of girls chatting. “Have you seen Nana Darkoa’s breasts? They have gotten so big. It means she had sex during the holidays,” one of them said. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the following summer a male friend of mine told my boyfriend that he had “fucked me in the gutter by my house”. That was when I stopped believing the ‘bad’ girl myth.

Fast forward to my early 20s. My knowledge of sexuality hadn’t improved greatly. Yes, I had been sexually abused as a child. Yes, I had kissed girls in my boarding school. Yes, I had kissed a boy for the first time in the summer before my O-levels and gone on to kiss two other boys that same summer, but I still knew nothing about sex and sexuality. Until I went to university abroad I had no idea that girls who kissed girls were called lesbians. In my boarding school we called our girl lovers ‘dears’. (Not everybody who had a dear had a sexual relationship with their dear. Having a dear implied an added closeness and relationship with a certain girl/young woman. Your dear, for example, could be a fellow student in your year or a senior who had propositioned you).

I was an avid reader of romance novels while growing up. I would wrap the salacious covers of Mills & Boon, Harlequin and Silhouette novels with old newspaper and read furtively in between classes or in my bed at night. These novels taught me that women could have unimaginable pleasure when tall, dark handsome men ‘took’ them, but they didn’t break down how exactly this happened. When I was 20 and living abroad with my best friend, she seemed wildly mature to me because she was sexually active with her boyfriend and would walk around our shared flat naked. One day she asked me if I ever masturbated. I was beyond embarrassed. She used to tease me that I was going to remain a virgin until I turned 30. When I met my future husband two months shy of my 23rd birthday I knew instantly that I wanted to have sex with him. That was when the process of learning about sex and my own sexuality began. It is an ongoing journey of sexual self-discovery.

Starting Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women in 2010 has been an important part of documenting my own sexual journey. The blog has created a space for African women to learn from and share our stories of sexual agency and the horrific experiences of abuse and sexual assault that have attempted to take away our power.

(Screenshot)

I was inspired to start the blog after a life-changing holiday to Axim in the western region of Ghana. I was with a group of three other African women. One evening while lounging around the beach we began a frank and open conversation about sex, which continued throughout the holidays. We talked about our sexual experiences, reminisced over past relationships, recounted good and bad sex, and shared our fantasies. I was buzzing with excitement when I got back and rang my best friend in the US.

“Malaka, I’ve just come back from holiday and I had the most amazing time talking about sex. I think we should start a blog about African women and sex.”

“Ha! Its uncanny you should say that. I was just thinking of writing a book called ‘Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women’. If only people really knew what went down in our bedrooms.”

We split our sides in laughter. We laughed because we knew that the images people had of African women’s sexuality were myopic. We recognised that people saw us as victims of female genital mutilation and sexual subalterns or, on the other extreme, as over-sexualised women with extra-large genitalia to boot. We laughed because we knew our stories were more diverse than the outside world knew. We laughed because we knew we were continuously negotiating our sexual agency, while battling with the traumatic effects (in some cases) of child sexual abuse. We laughed because this was our opportunity to tell our own stories.

And that’s exactly what Adventures has succeeded in doing. The blog, which receives about 35 000 visitors a month, is a safe space for African women to share experiences around sex, sexuality and relationships. Many contributors remain anonymous because of the social censure that surrounds women who express their sexuality openly. Readers have told me that Adventures has enabled them to have open conversations about sexuality that they were never able to have with parents, friends or in school. At Ghana’s first Social Media Awards in March, Adventures scooped awards in the categories of ‘best overall blog’, and ‘best activist blog’. I felt especially proud that people recognise that providing a safe space for African women to talk about their sexualities was an act of activism.

African women across the continent and diaspora have boldly taken ownership of the site and share their stories of sexual fantasy, sexual experience and sexual abuse. The site’s policy has been to focus on women’s stories, while allowing the occasional contribution from African men. Roughly 60% of our readers are women while 38% are men and 2% identify themselves as transgendered. One of the most popular posts on Adventures is on how to pleasure a woman orally, written by a male contributor. There are other posts that have aroused anger and sadness and highlighted the need for supporting survivors of sexual abuse. These stories and the large number of comments they inspire show that comprehensive sexual education is important not only for women (and men) to gain bodily confidence and an understanding of their right to sexual pleasure, but also so that children do not grow up with a sense of shame around sex, which can lead to silence when sexual abuse occurs.

The fact that most of the stories on Adventures are based on women’s personal experiences refute popular myths such as homosexuality being a Western import. Here’s one comment from a reader:

It’s very refreshing to find like-minded individuals who speak so freely and openly about homosexuality. I think I’m bi-curious. I have crazy girl crushes and love lesbian porn. Having never been off the shores of Ghana, you know the general perception about these things, so I’ve never really talked about it to anyone .

Now run and go tell that to the African conservatives who claim that homosexuality is un-African.

One of the most popular contributors to Adventures goes by the moniker Voluptous Voltarian. She shares:

The reason why I started reading and writing for Adventures was because the very first comment I read was from a man. I realised that Adventures had created a space where African women and men could have an honest conversation outside of a regular face-to-face context where negotiations about sex can be very conflicted and transactional. I think that’s the real revolution. Adventures provides the space for people to work through this conflict, and for people to be their better healthier sexual selves.

Personally, I am still working on being my best sexual self. I choose to do this openly in a world that still judges women for the sexual choices they make; in a world where calling a woman politician a ‘prostitute’ does not provoke the kind of widespread criticism I hope it would. I do this in a country where the Ghana Journalists Association recently exhorted journalists to adopt an anti-gay stance in their work. As a single African woman I choose to blog openly about my sexual life in order to create community with other African women who were also told that having sex outside of marriage would automatically lead to pregnancy, familial disgrace and a subsequent life of ruin. Today it makes me incredibly proud that our sexual revolution is being blogged.

Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah works as a communications specialist at the African Women’s Development Fund, is co-owner of MAKSI Clothing and curates the Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women blog.

11 years ago

Learning to be Ethiopian again

“I want to go to Holland or to England because it’s clean and beautiful there,” said my 11-year-old sister Lidya, who has never traveled outside of Addis Ababa or owned a television. Looking out of the taxi’s window I can see that city streets are not too clean, drivers throw garbage out of the window, men pee wherever they feel like peeing and it’s okay for anyone to pick their nose, publicly, for minutes, and shoot little snot balls up in the air. Still, I tell Lidya that Holland is really not that much cleaner or more beautiful than Ethiopia.

“It’s just cold,” I say.

“How cold?”

“Too cold.”

I don’t want to admit to her that streets in the Netherlands might be cleaner because I’m trying to make this country my home again. One year ago, I moved back to Addis Ababa after finishing my postgrad degree. I lived in the Netherlands for 23 years before this, after being adopted by a Dutch family when I was four. I grew up learning how to speak Dutch instead of Ethiopia’s national language Amharic. I watched Dutch cartoons like Fabeltjeskrant instead of listening to the local radio shows my friends tell me about. My favorite food was Wentelteefjes (the Dutch version of French toast), and I almost forgot the taste of Ethopia’s traditional dish, injera (flatbread).

I’m often complimented by strangers for returning ‘home’ – and Addis does mostly feel like home especially when I’m surrounded by friends. I came back to discover what my place of origin is; to see if I was still Ethiopian despite growing up abroad with a European family. And, of course, to see what type of family I would have grown up with had I not been adopted.

Young boys playing soccer on the streets of Addis Ababa. (Reuters)

Strangers ask me daily what happened to me when they notice I don’t speak Amharic. I’m learning though – there’s an alphabet poster stuck to the wall in my home, which has earned me the nickname “Amharic baby” from Lidya. I’m still getting the hang of proper greetings in formal settings and the rules and customs around social interactions.

People usually feel pity for me because I wasn’t raised here and didn’t absorb the culture and language. So I’ve made an effort to behave like a proper Ethiopian girl by wearing my hair straight these days (I used to be pro-Afro) and listening politely to my mother’s pastor who hopes to find me a suitable fiancé. (I’m not too sure if I want to get married, and I feel the pastor is intruding in my personal life.)

Celebrating the return of the lost daughter must seem like a major disappointment for my Ethiopian mother. I cannot imagine what her community says about me. Although she is very sweet and calls me daily – something I have never done with my Dutch mother although I don’t doubt the relationship I have with her – I don’t feel we have anything in common to build a relationship that resembles anything close to a mother-daughter bond. She thanked heaven endlessly for “bringing me home”, but now we don’t see eye-to-eye on religion, the amount of times I visit, and almost any other decision I make in my life. Adoption didn’t turn me into the kind of girl she imagined, and that’s a disappointment.

I decided not to stay with my Ethiopian family when I returned as I’m more comfortable living on my own. I’ve been doing it since I was 19. Despite not being married, I moved in with friends who happened to be guys. Another disappointment.

Lidya, too, is not impressed with my lifestyle. She sends disapproving looks my way whenever I mention going out for drinks with friends, and questions why I’m not religious. Last Friday, I fetched her from the church compound for lunch. My mother doesn’t allow her to eat burgers so I whenever I take her out I let her order whatever she wants. This time, while waiting for our food, she asked me why I only go to church when the service is about to end. I told her I’m not too sure about God – and got another disapproving look, followed by an explanation that this happened to me because I was raised in Holland. Had I stayed in Ethiopia, she assured me, I would have been a decent church-going girl.

One year on, I’ve realised that I’m an Ethiopian that sees most things through the gaze of a non-Ethiopian. Small things remind me of this, like being asked what the breakfast dish firfir is, and getting it hilariously wrong.

But I do feel at home and I don’t complain about Ethiopia like the expats do. However, I also hate the frequent power cuts, the slow network connection that means I can’t waste hours on YouTube, and that there isn’t a range of 35 toothpaste brands to choose from.

My gaze is changing, slowly but surely. When friends from abroad came to visit me here, we end up arguing about the stereotypical and judgmental statements they tend to make about Ethiopia and its people. They don’t know enough to say the things they do.

I’ve decided to stay, not just because I found a great job, or because I’m no longer judged by my skin colour or because I’m still dealing with an identity crisis or because I want to discard my Dutchness. I want to make this country a part of me. I’m curious about how long it will take before I’m Ethiopian enough for Lidya to stop calling me “Amharic baby” (maybe when I start taking my language course more seriously?). One day I want to be able to say I’m Ethiopian with the same confidence with which I say I’m Dutch.

Marthe van der Wolf is a journalist based in Addis Ababa. She holds an M.Phil in African Studies from the University of Cape Town.

11 years ago

What the hookah is socially acceptable anymore?

Ugandans love a good party, every day of the week, till all hours of the morning. We weren’t crowned number 8 in the World’s 10 top drinking nations for our conservative ways. Here in Kampala we tend to embrace a novelty or fad with extreme enthusiasm until we are bored stiff of it. Dance floor smoke machines were once the in thing – we’d literally be choking as we danced at different venues, each trying to outdo the other, until we eventually tired of it, or suffocated. The latest fad is smoke of a different kind: shisha.

The first time I saw a hookah pipe in Kampala, I was warned that it was drugs. Many people probably had the same perception, and believed it served religious and cultural purposes that weren’t our own. It took a while for the trend to take off last year but once it did, it was big.From restaurants to cocktail bars, private parties to clubs, pipes are almost always on standby. It’s good business for the night spots, and the ‘shisha guys’ earn a decent livelihood from it. At a standard and affordable price of $6 per hookah, establishments are less interested in capitalising on shisha profits than they are in buying patrons’ time. Keeping us there for hours equals more spend at the bar. Ka-ching!

At first I was allured by the novelty, especially because it was available at home and not just abroad, but the excitement has since burnt out for me. All anyone seems to care about is shisha. Well, that and how an hour-long shisha session is as harmful as smoking a hundred cigarettes.

(Pic: Flickr/Ian Lloyd)

Smoking shisha in public goes against what’s accepted in our social culture, especially for women. Despite the stigma associated with women smoking cigarettes in Uganda, shisha is a firm favorite with the ladies. It’s obvious to me why it’s socially acceptable, or at least somewhat socially acceptable. Smoking shisha serves as an extension of the modern African woman’s liberation – freedom of choice combined with a dose of rebellion while still fitting within the boundaries of the acceptable. Women are not smoking locally made Rex cigarettes while cheering on the Gunners; they are peacefully and calmly smoking the fruits of mother nature. Mint, berries, grapes and apples; so very demure, acceptable, pretty and fragrant: the definition of an acceptably perfect East African woman.

Other than shaking it on the dance floor, I don’t know another way women and men can acceptably be so socially intimate with each other. Shoot me now for going against anti-smoking campaigns but isn’t there something sexy about smoking? Not the lung cancer, addiction and bad breath of course, but as she inhales deeply with her well-groomed painted red nails, the smoke screen against her pretty face, a woman has a certain je ne sais quoi about her. If there wasn’t a ban on tobacco advertising in many countries I’m sure we would be seeing this kind of imagery more than we do now because it is alluring. Kampala’s upscale bars and clubs are filled with corporate women, drink in one hand and pipe in another, sitting among their male colleagues, passing the pipe from person to person. Not so long ago I learnt that in Kampala-shisha-slang lingo, the plastic mouthpiece is called a condom. I rest my case.

With hookah pipes starring in every other Facebook picture of a Ugandan nightclub or social event, I don’t see the fad going anywhere anytime soon. This 400- year-old trend has modernised itself within popular culture, not just in Kampala but throughout the world.

While there’s a need to highlight the dangers and effects of shisha, it doesn’t help that our local journalists and health care professionals are a bit over the top with their attempts.

“Uganda will fall into an abyss because of evils like shisha, homosexuality and other emerging moral upheavals…” Dan Kimosho, public relations officer at National Medical Stores, recently wrote.

Okay, then.

They may be coming from a good place but hookah is not a gateway drug to crack and prostitution. The most recent media hysteria is that smoking shisha will cause failure to conceive in Ugandan women. Is now a good time to bring up our over-population crisis and extraordinarily high fertility rate? Probably not. What health care professionals, media and government should focus on is providing accurate information and adjusting regulations so that they tally with general smoking legislation on health, safety, licensing and age limits. Then us big girls and boys can choose to fall into the abyss of evil armed with facts and figures. What is socially acceptable anymore? Looking around Kampala’s nightlife scene, I see a lot more to be concerned about than hookahs – and the starting price is apparently the same as a round of shisha.

Melinda Ozongwu is a writer based in Kampala, Uganda. She writes television scripts and regular opinion pieces on the subtext of urban culture in African countries. Her blog SmartGirl Living is a cocktail of thoughts, recipes and advice for the modern African woman. Connect with her on Twitter.

11 years ago

Celebrating natural hair: The Coiffure Project

Baltimore-based photographer Glenford Nunez‘s latest project was inspired by his assistant Courtney who wears natural hair. He started photographing her with his cellphone and accumulated a small body of work that he then turned into a book of natural hair portraits.

Nunez on a shoot. (Pic: TYP Photography Studio)

Nunez is one of many photographers documenting a growing trend and pride in natural hair. Other projects worth checking out are Michael July’s coffee table book dedicated to the Afro and Nakeya B.’s “The Refutation of Good Hair” series with models eating handfuls of Kanekolan hair.

(Pic: www.nakeyab.com)

Nune’z mobile pics of Courtney led to the creation of the The Coiffure Project in which he showcases the beauty of natural hair on women of all shapes, colours and sizes. All his photos below are courtesy of TYP Photography Studio.

11 years ago

A new road for Ethiopia’s ancient salt trade

Abdu Ibrahim Mohammed was 15 years old when he began trekking with caravans of camels to collect salt in a sun-blasted desert basin of north Ethiopia that is one of the hottest places on earth.

Now 51 and retired, he has passed his camels to his son to pursue this centuries-old trade in “white gold” from the Danakil Depression, where rain almost never falls and the average temperature is 34.4 degrees celsius.

Sulphur and mineral salt formations are seen near Dallol in the Danakil Depression, northern Ethiopia. (Pic: Reuters)

But the tradition of hacking salt slabs from the earth’s crust and transporting them by camel is changing as a paved road is built across the northern Afar region.

Although the road being cut through the Danakil Depression is making it easier to transport the salt, the region’s fiercely independent local salt miners and traders are wary of the access it might give to industrial mining companies with mechanised extraction techniques that require far less labour.

“Most of the people who live here are dependent on the salt caravans, so we are not happy with prospective salt companies that try to set up base here,” said Abdullah Ali Noor, a chief and clan leader’s son in Hamad-Ile, on the salt desert’s edge.

“Everything has to be initiated from the community. We prefer to stick with the old ways,” he added.

Thousands of camel herders and salt extractors use traditional hoes and axes to carve the “white gold” out of the ground in the Danakil Depression.

Many of the salt diggers live in Hamad-Ile and hire out their services to different caravans. The work, however exhausting, still draws thousands onto the baking salt flats.

“You forget about the sun and the heat,” said Kidane Berhe (45), a camel herder and salt merchant. “I lost a friend once on the salt desert because he was working too much with no protection from the sun. Eventually he just collapsed.”

Once workers find a suitable place to mine salt, they extract, shape and pack as many salt slabs as possible before starting their two-day journey to the town of Berahile. (Pic: Reuters)

The tarmac road will link the highland city of Mekele with the village of Dallol in the Danakil Depression, a harsh but hauntingly beautiful geographical wonder of salt flats and volcanoes once described as “a land of death” by the famous British desert explorer Wilfred Thesiger.

The road has cut from five hours to three the drive from Mekele to Berahile, a town two days’ trek by camel from the Afar salt deposits that one of Ethiopia’s main sources of the crystalline food product.

New roads like these are gradually helping to transform this landlocked Horn of Africa state, which has a unique culture and history but has been racked by coups, famines and droughts, into one of the fastest-growing economies on the continent.

As Africa’s biggest coffee producer, Ethiopia’s economy remains based on agriculture, which accounts for 46% of gross domestic product and 85% of employment. But its nearly 94-million population – the second biggest in Africa – is attracting the attention of foreign investors hungry for new markets.

Access to market
Further south in the Danakil Depression, at the salt reserve of Lake Afdera, industrial salt production is already underway.

A company named Berhane and Zewdu PLC came to the desert plains near Hamad-Ile in 2011 aiming to produce salt there, according to Noor.

Clan leaders saw the threat to their ancient trade and lined up to oppose the project. Fearing sabotage of its equipment, the company left the following year, local people said.

But Noor still welcomed the new road.

“The new highway will give easy access to the market, which will bring benefits and development to this region,” Noor said.

The development he talks of is visible in Berahile, where caravans from the salt pans come to drop off their cargo so it can be transported to the rest of the country. Most residents are involved directly or indirectly in the salt business.

Telephone and electricity networks have been extended to the town over the past four years, a new Berahile Salt Association was established in 2010 to facilitate trade and a recently built salt store is now the biggest construction in town.

“Thousands of people benefit from this work as the salt here is exported throughout the country,” said the head of the association, Derassa Shifa.

A man prepares bars of salt to be sold in the main market of the city of Mekele, northern Ethiopia. (Pic: Reuters)

For now, tradition and modernity co-exist – the organisation buys salt from the caravans that make the four-day trek to the salt flats and back, then sells it to merchants who carry it away by truck.

The salt blocks, which were once used as a unit of money, are sold across Ethiopia, many of them to farmers to provide their animals with essential minerals. Ethiopia has the largest livestock population on the African continent.

Siegfried Modola for Reuters.