Author / Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah

Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah has a face that smiles at rest. When she is speaking, it is with a constant grin, one that only falters when she talks about some of the difficult circumstances she and other African women have gone through in their quest for sexual liberation. She speaks to me from her home city of Accra, Ghana, where she says “no one is surprised” that she has written a book about sex

Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah speaks with Christiane Amanpour about her book “The Sex Lives of African Women” and why she found that some of the older women she interviewed “had the best sex lives.

“The Sex Lives of African Women” explores women’s experiences, in their own words, helping foster “a sexual revolution that’s happening across our continent.”

The idea was born during a beach trip in Ghana, when Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah noticed that the conversation among her friends kept turning to one issue: sex.

The Sex Lives of African Women wouldn’t exist if my best friend Malaka Grant and I had not created “Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women.” For over a decade I have been encouraging African women to share their experiences of sex and sexualities, and in that time I learnt just how dynamic, complex and fascinating our experiences are.

After only a few years of writing Going Places, a group of Kenyan journalists invited me to give them a talk. I began by asking them why they had invited me. They were professional and trained writers and I was a part-timer and amateur. “We want to know how you get your stories,” one of them said. “I mean, when I go to a sports bar I have a drink, chat with friends and watch a match. The other day you went to a sports bar and came away with a story.

From writing, acting and directing school plays as a teenager, Nana Darkoa learnt to speak up about pressing societal issues. At 16, she knew she wanted a career in communications and she sought it. Along the line, she found feminism and learned that personal issues are just as political as societal issues.

I first came across the work of bell hooks when I was nineteen years old. The year was 1997, and I had just moved from Ghana to the United Kingdom to study for a degree in Communications. For the first time in my life, I was living separately from my close-knit nuclear family, and while on one hand I was exhilarated by my newfound independence, on the other I felt challenged by the society I was now living in. In my imagination, the U.K. had always been a magical place.

The Sex Lives of African Women uniquely amplifies individual women from across the African continent and its global diaspora, as they speak of their diverse experiences of sex, sexualities and relationships…

Author and blogger Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah spoke openly and intimately with African women around the world about their diverse experiences with sex, sexuality and relationships. In her book The Sex Lives of African Women, she recounts their extraordinary stories while describing her own journey to sexual freedom.

Ghanaian author Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah is in Kenya to promote her latest book, ‘The Sex Lives of African Women’.

In this book, Nana interviewed different African women in Africa and the diaspora. She told the diverse stories of their sex lives and explored self-discovery, freedom and healing. In doing this, she inspired readers to push their boundaries and live outside the box of societal standards and truly liberate themselves and celebrate sex, sexuality and womanhood.