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Published Mar 2022
304 pages
Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion
Publication Information
A conversation starter like Three Women but centering the experiences of women of color: a mellifluous chorus celebrating the liberation, individuality, and joy of African women's multifaceted sexuality.
Thanks to her blog, Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women, Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah has spent decades talking openly and intimately to African women around the world about sex. For this book she spoke to over 30 African women across the globe while chronicling her own journey toward sexual freedom.
We meet Yami, a pansexual Canadian of Malawian heritage, who describes negotiating the line between family dynamics and sexuality. There's Esther, a cis-gendered hetero woman studying in America, by way of Cameroun and Kenya, who talks of how a childhood rape has made her rebellious and estranged from her missionary parents. And Tsitsi, an HIV-positive Zimbabwean woman who is raising a healthy, HIV-free baby.
Across a queer community in Egypt, polyamorous life in Senegal, and a reflection on the intersection of religion and pleasure in Cameroun, Sekyiamah explores the many layers of love and desire, its expression, and how it forms who we are.
In these confessional pages, women control their own bodies and pleasure, and assert their sexual power. Capturing the rich tapestry of sex positivity, The Sex Lives of African Women is a singular and subversive book that celebrates the liberation, individuality, and joy of African women's multifaceted sexuality.
"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...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." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"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." - Kirkus Reviews
"Talking about sex is still taboo in most cultures and communities and these personal stories reveal a mind-blowing variety of sexualities, sex lives and relationships." - The Times (UK)
"A book like none you will have read before...With sensitivity, this book has facilitated astonishing breaking of silences...Sekyiamah has delivered an extraordinarily dynamic work, true to her own precept that 'Freedom is a constant state of being...that we need to nurture and protect. Freedom is a safe home that one can return to over and over again.'" - The Guardian (UK)
This information about The Sex Lives of African Women was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah is a feminist activist, writer and blogger. She is the co-founder of Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women, an award-winning blog that focuses on African women, sex and sexualities, and she writes frequently for the Guardian, Open Democracy, and elsewhere. She works with the Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID) as director of communications and tactics. She lives in Accra, Ghana.
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