Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah: Time to be conscious about pleasure
Talk about pleasure and Nana Darkoa Sakyiamah will definitely come to mind. She has for years given voice to African women when it comes to sexual pleasure and sexuality. She speaks to Inspiring Open’s Betty Kankam-Boadu on her journey to feminism, writing, and sexual liberation advocacy.
Talk about pleasure and Nana Darkoa Sakyiamah will definitely come to mind. She has for years given voice to African women when it comes to sexual pleasure and sexuality. She speaks to Inspiring Open’s Betty Kankam-Boadu on her journey to feminism, writing and sexual liberation advocacy
Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah’s name has long resonated with feminism and matters of sex, and it’s because she has made it her life’s mission to ensure that as many people especially African women can open up to pleasurable experiences.
Sexuality is a very controversial topic in Ghana and in Africa generally, making it harder for those who dare to touch on the topic. Nana Darkoa, though, has been consistent with her advocacy.
As a writer and a storyteller, her stories have been published in ‘It Wasn’t Exactly Love’ and ‘The Pot and Other Stories’. Some of her articles and opinion editorials have also been published by the Guardian, Open Democracy, and Essence.
“It was only in 2012 that I started to think of myself as a writer, because I attended the … At the time it was called the Farafina Writers Workshop, which was a workshop initiated by the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and it was going to that workshop that made me feel confident enough to actually be like, ‘Okay, this is something I really want to do, I want to pursue writing as a craft,’” she said on the Inspiring Open podcast.
“But when I was a child, I loved acting. That was the thing I used to do, I would act in school plays, I would write school plays, I would direct the school plays, and I really wanted to be an actress. There was a time when I vaguely wanted to be a lawyer.”
Nana Darko may not have thought of being an author, but she has been successful at it since taking the craft seriously. And almost every step she has taken in her career seems to have prepared her for who she currently is.
Her catalogue includes managing a women’s rights and media project at the Guardian and at the women’s fund, Mama Cash. She also had a stint with the African Women’s Development Fund in Ghana as their communications specialist and, when she lived in the UK, worked as a leadership trainer, facilitator and coach for the Metropolitan Police Service.
Currently, though, she is the director of communications and tactics for the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID).
“I was the first black leadership trainer, I was the first black African Leadership trainer, I was the first black African woman leadership trainer,” she said of her time at the Metropolitan Police Service.
Born in the UK but raised in Ghana, Nana Darkoa has always had activism in her veins. Ever since she stumbled on cultural studies and the Feminism Theory, she has never stopped reading about them,
“When I was 19 and I was studying for my first degree, one of my courses was cultural studies,” she recounts. “And feminist theory was a part of that. So I read books by people like Bell Hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Alice Walker. And for me, it was like somebody had turned on the lights, you were sitting in darkness and somebody turned on the lights, and now you can see everything clearly. Everything those feminists said made sense to me.”
Nana Darkoa describes herself as an “African feminist” who channels her time and resources into creating content that tells stories of African women’s experiences around sex, sexuality, and pleasure.
She is the author of the ‘Sex Lives of African Women,’ a book that celebrates African women’s journey toward sexual liberation. She is the co-founder of Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women, an award-winning website, podcast, and festival that publishes stories of African women’s sexual experiences.
Nana Darkoa has been blogging about sex for over a decade now and she believes it is a topic that attracts readers if written well and.
“I would say it [her blog] was readily patronized,” she said. “Because the stories were interesting and they were regular. But yes, of course, sex sells. I mean, we don’t have enough knowledge about sex.
“So when you’re writing about sex, and you’re writing about sex in a way that people can access, they have their questions answered, they’re going to read it, they’re going to consume that information because there’s such a dearth of comprehensive knowledge about sex. Yeah, so the blog got lots of readers very, very quickly.”
She sees Africa as a continent with a lot of religious fundamentalists who try to whip up hysteria around sexuality and who try to pretend that Africans only have one sexuality – an idea that she believes is completely false.
Nana Darkoa is also an advocate of openness. Asked what being open means to her, she said: “I think it means different things, I think it means making knowledge as accessible as possible. Preferably free, or a lot of it free. I think it means having it available in multiple formats, in multiple languages.
“I want the conversations to become more open, with another theme of being open. No, I really want us to be more open-minded. And to allow ourselves to unlearn some of the things we’ve been taught by our society, and by our parents.
“Allow ourselves to relearn, to educate ourselves, to listen to people who may be different from us and may have different experiences. Yeah, just have an open-minded approach really toward sex and sexuality. Even for ourselves as individuals. I think it always starts with the self.”
Nana Darkoa takes pride in the fact that more women are now able to open up about their sexual experiences. “That’s the focus for me on pleasure. The trauma will be there. You don’t need to be searching for it. But you need to be conscious of pleasure, or you need to invite it into your life and stay open to those possibilities.”
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