The Sex Lives of African Women: Self-Discovery, Freedom, and Healing

fauxnogamy,” to describe a practice where married men in relationships that are meant to be monogamous have multiple relationships without taking on any of the responsibilities that come with being legally married to multiple women.

What I have learned over the years is that you don’t discover yourself by sticking to well-trodden paths. You discover yourself by embarking on your own personal odyssey, which is experienced differently by everyone.

for example, about navigating freedom and polyamory in conservative Senegal, or resisting the erasure of lesbian identity and finding queer community in Egypt in the midst of a revolution. African women grapple with the trauma of sexual abuse, and resist religious and patriarchal edicts in order to assert their sexual power and agency.

Many women lose all the privileges of a free woman when they get married and what they gain is nothing compared to what they lose.

We achieve freedom when we let go of the weight of societal expectations, and when we find our people – those who love us, care for us, and hold us up when we start slipping.

I feel most free when I am myself, stripped of all pretences, lounging naked on my bed, my boobies freely rolling to wherever they choose to land, my belly relaxed and soft, my thighs apart, my hands wherever they may choose to lie. With no one around me, I am my most free self.

I’ve learnt to ask myself every day, Are you happy today? And if the answer is no I make a change.

Today I feel like my best sex life is being lived in my imagination. I’m a lot more free in my mind than I am in my body. I dream and fantasise a lot but I don’t necessarily create the kind of experiences that would allow me to enjoy the feelings that I think about.

I have learned over time that relationships require work. When you’re younger, you have a sense of love as being magical and so relationships happen in that particular space of magic, and it’s easy to feel that’s all one needs, but now I know that relationships require work, and constant work. The desire that is in the relationship also needs to be nurtured, and thought about, and reentered and reimagined.

I spent years avoiding sex with guys because I didn’t want anyone to gossip about me. I wish I had realized sooner that no matter what I did guys would claim to have fucked me every which way under the sun.