Feeling and Finding: Reading The Sex Lives of African Women

As Mazibu describes the book in her review, Sekyiamah’s The Sex Lives of African Women brings together interviews with women from 31 countries and is organized in three sections—“Self-discovery,” “Freedom,” and “Healing”—to explore how sex, relationships, and desire unfold under different conditions. Mazibu’s essay is both a review and a deliberately situated act of reading. She does not hide behind the position of a neutral reviewer: she names herself as a queer, polyamorous, pansexual African woman and allows her own experience to encounter the book’s narratives. This disclosure does not make private experience a substitute for analysis. It lets readers see that who is reading, and from where, shapes which experiences become intelligible and whose voices have long been muted.

The essay’s strongest claim is that desire and sensual knowledge count as knowledge. Public narratives often reduce African women’s sexuality to reproduction, disease, violence, or supposed cultural backwardness; speaking about pleasure and autonomy can be constrained by patriarchy, anti-Black racism, conservative religious discourse, and social stigma working together. Mazibu finds not one “African female sexual experience” in Sekyiamah’s collection, but accounts of women navigating limits, naming relationships differently, and claiming space to speak. She attends, for example, to Helen’s exploration of BDSM, polyamory, and queer identity after years shaped by motherhood, and to Keisha’s gradual recognition of her attractions against a Catholic upbringing. These are not stories offered for voyeuristic consumption: they place intimate life at the intersection of agency and social conditions.

“Freedom” does not mean that public identity erases danger. Mazibu sets the book’s accounts of queer intimacy alongside her own vigilance about violence in South African public space: legal protection and a progressive constitution do not automatically make holding hands, being seen, or voicing desire safe. This avoids treating visibility as the sole measure of liberation. For some, silence is imposed by external threat; for others, deciding when to be visible, with whom to be intimate, and when not to explain oneself is also a way of navigating risk. Agency appears both in expressing desire and in assessing danger, setting boundaries, and choosing when disclosure is not owed.

The third section, “Healing,” is read as slow and uneven rather than a story in which pain is simply overcome. Mazibu considers how sexual violence, emotional trauma, grief, and relationship harm persist in bodily memory; she suggests that rebuilding self-worth and choosing trusted intimacies can be part of healing. This reading resists turning accounts of trauma into proof that suffering inevitably produces growth, and it does not reduce self-care to a responsibility individuals must bear alone. Neither the book’s narrators nor the reviewer represent all African women. Their importance lies in allowing desire, fear, pleasure, faith, and scars to coexist rather than be displaced by a single story of victimhood or triumph. Read alongside FemRes’s The Sex Lives of African Women, the contrast is useful: the book gives many narrators space to speak, while this review shows how one reader encounters, answers, and makes meaning with those voices.

Source. Sihle Tshangela Mazibu, “Feeling and Finding: An Exploration of the Self, Sensuality and Sexuality for African Women in Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah’s The Sex Lives of African Women,” Feminist Africa 6(2). The journal page provides the full review.