Feminist author Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah, Nairobi, Kenya, May 3, 2022. KHADIJA FARAH/NYT-REDUX-RÉA
Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah's boldness is evident from her book's title, The Sex Lives of African Women, whose French translation, La vie sexuelle des femmes africaines, was published on March 12. At first, one might expect a presumptuous or reductive manifesto. But instead, as readers dive into the intimate stories of 31 women who confided in the 48-year-old Ghanaian author, it becomes clear that the book opens new horizons. All the featured femmes are from the African continent – from Egypt to South Africa – as well as from diaspora communities in North and South America, the Caribbean and Europe. These first-person accounts, told without filters, leave readers stunned, amused and often unsettled.
"I was personally just tired of seeing the same old stories being told about African women's sexuality (...) in Western media," explained Sekyiamah, whom we met in mid-April at a Paris café. When she saw "a story about an African woman's sexuality or reproductive health, it was assuming that she was a vector of a disease like HIV and AIDS. It was a story about African women being constantly pregnant. It was a story that always cast us as passive victims."
