My Sexual Freedom Odyssey: What Ancient African Wisdom Teaches Us About Pleasure Today
By speaking to women across the continent, I discovered how reclaiming pre-colonial rites and rituals can help us find joy in our bodies. In the kitchen of my Airbnb in Dar es Salaam, I stripped down to my underwear and wrapped a colorful kanga cloth around my hips. It was day three of my dance lessons with Zaishanga, but I was showing no improvement. Zaishanga, or Auntie Zai as I called her, is a traditional sex educator, known locally as a somo or kungwi. She told me that learning to dance seductively would ensure that, "no man would ever want to leave you, unless you want him gone." I never did master the dance, and I really don't care much if a man chooses to leave me, but my time with Auntie Zai was enlightening.
The Revival of Kitchen Parties and Traditional Sex Education
Dance is just one of a range of seduction tips and tricks that Zaishanga teaches at her "kitchen parties." She also counsels women on how to maintain a healthy marriage, and gives advice on the importance of self-care, and the need to maintain a standard of beauty and style. These gatherings, where experienced older women – aunties, big sisters, grandmothers – share advice with brides-to-be are rooted in traditional rites of passage into womanhood that date back centuries. But like many African traditions reshaped by the twin forces of colonisation and modernism, kitchen parties have become increasingly tame – or "too western" as Zaishanga puts it. She remembers her experience as a teenage girl when she learned the art of touch through massage, and the beauty ritual of removing pubic hair with hot ash, as part of her own journey into womanhood. Now, she scoffed, women are literally being taught how to make tea.
It was the tempering of the original spirit of kitchen parties that prompted Zaishanga, 53, to start her own, charging women 5,000 shillings (about £1.50) to attend. Zaishanga has worked as a somo for more than 30 years, and claims to have saved many marriages. She has become increasingly well known in Tanzania, and has been a guest on radio and TV shows offering tips about sex and sexuality. Her dream is to build a global profile like Oprah Winfrey's, teaching millions of women about sex.
Documenting Sexual Freedom Across Africa
In my first book, The Sex Lives of African Women, I documented the desires and sexuality of African and Afro-descendant women through more than 30 personal stories. Women of all ages, and across the spectrum of gender identities and sexualities, shared their intimate experiences, but it was the accounts from older women, and queer people, that made the biggest impression on me. Their lives seemed to epitomise sexual freedom – which I define as feeling at home in your body, being secure in your sexuality, and having the space to explore, and express your desire with other consenting adults. I thought long and hard about these women and how others could discover sexual freedom on their own terms. Then I had a eureka moment. I would travel throughout Africa speaking to women to find out how ancient wisdom, passed down the generations through rites and rituals, can help us find joy and freedom in sexual practice today. What I discovered on that odyssey is chronicled in my new book: Seeking Sexual Freedom: African Rites, Rituals and Sankofa in the Bedroom.
Applying Sankofa to Reclaim Pre-Colonial Practices
Sankofa is an Akan philosophy which literally translates as "go back and take it." In adinkra, a visual system of language, it is represented as a long necked bird looking backwards, or two curved lines which stylistically form a heart. In applying sankofa to pre-colonial rites and rituals we can reclaim them, and infuse them with feminist principles and energy. I call this "feminist sankofa." In Ghana, where I live, I witnessed dipo, a rite of passage for young Krobo women. I watched girls parade through the central avenue of Krobo Odumase, a mid-sized town in the Eastern Region, with shaved heads, their bare chests adorned heavily with stacks of beads. Even more rows of beads held their subue (an undergarment) in place. Later on, I learned that wearing a subue is thought to make sex better because it keeps your genitals warm.
The colours of the beads the girls wore during the ceremony communicated different messages. White beads stood for purity, yellow signified maturity, and blue represented being valuable. The girls I saw in the procession shone brightly, skin gleaming with shea butter under the midday sun. They walked gracefully, balancing pots of water on their heads while taking dainty steps through the crowds of people who had come to witness the event. In the past, families would choose wives from the women who had successfully undergone the passing out rituals. To some, the dipo ritual may come across as regressive. One young Ghanaian woman explained that although she had been initially reluctant to participate because she was uncomfortable with the idea of exposing her breasts in public, she felt proud when at the end she was adorned with beads, carried on the shoulders of her male relatives, and celebrated as a fully fledged Krobo woman. When I asked her what she gained from taking part in dipo, she said, "learning how to get along with other people," because during her weekend of initiation rites she lived communally with other girls, and was taught how to perform certain household tasks.
The Importance of Belonging and Feminist Puberty Rituals
Dipo – much like other African rites of passage – is a formal acceptance into womanhood, but also a chance to make connections. This sense of belonging is key to so many practices that mark the transition to womanhood, as Nkiru Nzegwu, a Nigerian artist, philosopher and academic wrote in her essay, Osunality: or the African Erotic. "Notwithstanding the variations in detail and duration of seclusion, the schools created spaces for women to transmit Indigenous ideas on sexuality and pleasure, and to fashion a group identity and a unifying female-identified consciousness." Many of these traditional "schools" no longer exist in the ways they did in the past. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because these spaces also reinforced traditional notions of patriarchy, and in teaching young girls about heteronormative sex designed to please men. And yet, a crucial thing that the schools enabled was dedicated space and time to learn about bodies and pleasure. Talking openly and honestly about bodies, sex and sexualities feels increasingly important as politics leans more towards the right, the rights of women, transgender and gender non-conforming people are rolled back, and anti-rights groups campaign against comprehensive sex education.
One of my dreams is to create a feminist puberty ritual where young girls such as my daughter get to learn from other women about what they can expect to experience as teenagers. At my dream feminist puberty rite, mentors assigned to teach girls about sex would focus on the incredible ability that our bodies hold to give us pleasure – for our own wellbeing – and not as a tactic to attract or keep men. Teaching girls openly and honestly about sex also means telling them that our gender and sexual identities exist on a spectrum. According to Amnesty International, 31 countries out of 54 in Africa have banned consensual same-sex relationships. But I met many young people who resist homophobia, and are reclaiming traditional rites, rituals and spiritualities as a way to affirm their gender and sexual identities. Chido, who identifies as "a Black queer being whose heritage is partly from the Honde Valley in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe," says they see a clear connection between their ancestral practices and how they choose to live now as a gender non-conforming person. "People say these things are unAfrican but I can trace this back in my family 200 years. It is not something foreign I am latching on to. I am holding on to my lineage."
Pleasure as a Birthright and the Future of Sexual Freedom
Adeola, a practitioner of Isese, an African traditional religion, told me that the pantheon of African gods and goddesses manifest in different genders, forms and shapes. And if our gods can be multidimensional shape-shifters, why would we be any less? Pleasure is our birthright. We are all entitled to feel joy in our bodies, and to access and delight in our erotic power. No matter our ability, gender or sexuality. My journey across the continent affirmed to me that we can take inspiration from our African ancestors and make space and time to treasure sexuality and live more pleasurable lives today. Seeking Sexual Freedom: African Rites, Rituals and Sankofa in the Bedroom, by Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah, is published in the UK by Dialogue Books on 12 March and in the US by Atria Books on 5 March.
