In Ghana, women are leading a feminist revolution

More than a year before the Me Too movement prompted debate and reckonings around the world, Nana Akosua Hanson (31) had already started her own movement; teaching students in Ghanaian high schools and universities about consent. The idea for her workshops was prompted, she says, by a high-profile case where a media mogul allegedly raped a 19-year-old. In the aftermath, there was considerable victim blaming and slut shaming. “There were so many discussions ... The major discussion seemed to be why was she at a hotel in the first place.”

Hanson became frustrated. Before this, all of the sexual education she knew about in schools focused on either how not to get pregnant or how not to get HIV. She wanted to teach young people about consent.

Sitting in a coffee shop in the Ghanaian capital Accra, Hanson — an activist, feminist and media personality — explains what happened next. In 2016, she founded a youth-led non-profit called Drama Queens, a “feminist, queer, pan-African” organisation. As part of it, she created a workshop called “Let’s Talk Consent”, which ran in high schools and universities. It involved conversations around different scenarios, such as the importance of ongoing consent, and what happens when a woman says she wants something and then changes her mind. “Most of the time all of this information was very new for people.”

Discussions about consent trended on Ghanaian Twitter for three days, “and that was a conversation that was never being had [before],” she says. The main struggle was getting permission to enter schools and even then certain school authorities specifically asked them not to mention LGBT+ relationships. “There’s a way you can talk about things and let the person know that if [they] want to come and talk to me outside, we can talk about that,” she says.

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This was just one of what is a long list of efforts that Hanson has been involved in to break barriers around how women are treated and sex is spoken about in Ghana, a west African coastal country of roughly 32 million.

She presents a week-nights radio show from 7-10pm, which airs on Ghanaian radio station YFM, and is centred on urban music and pop culture. Hanson imagines the show as “therapy after a hard day at work”, but also uses pop culture — such as examining the relationship between rapper Kanye West and his ex-wife Kim Kardashian — to teach people about women’s rights while they are relaxing. Her listeners have christened her the “queen of evening radio”.

Hanson is an accomplished actor and writer; her published short stories include one entitled “Love is a two-letter word: Me”. She is also the creator of a graphic novel series, Moongirls, an “Afrofuturistic” story of “four African Super-sheroes” with magical powers, three of whom identify as bisexual, pansexual and queer, who are battling against a fascist, patriarchal order named the Seti.

The series “tells the story of Africa: they are solving problems of corruption, rape culture, homophobia, religious patriarchy, [and] environmental issues”, says Hanson. She hired writers and an animation studio to work on the series, and they release one chapter a month, making it free to download online, and funding it with money from a grant. “It would be good for film,” she suggests. “The next big Netflix blockbuster.”

In 2016, Hanson was chosen for the Mandela Washington Fellowship, one of a few dozen people invited on a six-week leadership training course in the US, with the chance to meet then president Barack Obama. The best part, she says, was sharing knowledge, tactics and advice with other Africans from across the continent. But her time in the US also forced some harsh realisations about how Africa is regarded in other parts of the world, and the challenges that creates for African feminists.

“The global look on Africa [is] as this Third World country ... [they consider] the whole continent as a country,” she said. “That global rhetoric means that African women’s voices are smaller, African women are seen as smaller players ... The nuances of our specific struggles are missing on a global scale.

“I call myself an African feminist. We believe that before colonialism, before invasions in our countries, there was a long history of women leaders; women being active participants in politics and society ... Ghanaian women were traditionally not at home, they were in the market places. We have queen mothers, we have heads of families who are women.”

Hanson was in primary school, she says, when she read The Dilemma of a Ghost, a 1965 play by Ghanaian writer, former education minister and prominent feminist Ama Ata Aidoo, who is now 80. “That was the first time I really got to see a feminist lens looking at Ghana.”

In her home country, she says, there is still stigma associated with being a feminist in some circles. There is also pressure on Ghanaian women to conform in various ways, including by getting married, meaning many end up unhappy. “They are getting a societal push so it’s not necessarily about pleasure in a marriage ... I know a lot of people my age who decided to couple up [and] settle down, because of these societal pressures, to the wrong person. Then you have to deal with them complaining,” she says.

She lists a range of issues Ghana’s feminists are battling, including a lack of representation in parliament. The country has been working on an Affirmative Action Bill for nearly eight years but it still hasn’t become law, because of what activists say is a lack of political will. Out of Ghana’s 275 parliamentarians there are only 40 women, an increase from 30 nine years ago.

Like most countries in the world, Ghana has a problem with sexual violence. “Marital, children, in relationships ... in schools and high schools, in universities. Because women’s bodies are seen as property. Sexual harassment is very common here, it’s okay for [a man] to be able to heckle you,” Hanson says.

But right now, she continues, “queer, bi, [and] trans women are currently in the most danger”. Their situation has been worsened by the influence of American evangelical groups, as well as a collection of religious Ghanaian groups, Hanson says. In 2019, US Christian right coalition the World Congress of Families (WCF) held an African regional conference in Ghana, after which activists said there appeared to be a rush to push through anti-LGBT+ legislation. A new Bill, introduced last year, could see people sentenced to up to 10 years in prison for advocating for LGBT+ causes and as long as five years for “hold[ing] out” as being gay, lesbian, non-binary or transgender, or undergoing or performing surgeries for gender reassignment.

Historically, Hanson says, some Ghanaian feminist organisations avoided taking a stance on LGBT+ issues, but now they’re acknowledging the links. The same organisations pushing the anti-LGBT+ Bill have also objected to sex education being taught in secondary schools, saying new guidance introduced by the Ghana Education Service in 2019 was part of the “LGBT agenda”, despite none of the modules explicitly covering LGBT+ issues. The guidance, designed by the UN and the Ghanaian government, was aimed at giving students “accurate and reliable information on sexual rights and reproductive health” and “nurtur[ing] positive attitudes, open-mindedness, respect for self and others, non-judgmental attitudes and a sense of responsibility concerning sexual and reproductive health issues”.

Hanson advocates for African women to be open about their sexual experiences. As a co-director for the Adventures Live festival, she facilitated panels such as “Polyamory — The Myths and Misconceptions”. Other discussions had titles such as “Raising kids without sexual shame” and “Kink and BDSM.”

She praises Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women, a blog started in January 2009 by fellow Ghanaians Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah and Malaka Grant. The site’s description says it was created because they noted “a serious lack of relevant and useful information about the sexuality of African women” and wanted “a space for African women to share tips, experiences and more”. It has sections on sex education, orgasms, erotica, heterosexuality, lesbianism and relationships, among others. There is even a section called “abstinence”, with an article titled: “Church ruining your sex life?”

Hanson remembers discovering the site and scouring every post. “It was my first time ever finding this space where African women were so open about their sexuality,” she recalls.

Sekyiamah turned the blog into a book, The Sex Lives of African Women, published by Hachette last year. It includes accounts from more than 30 women in Africa and the diaspora, ranging from a Muslim convert recounting her experiences as the second wife of a conservative Senegalese man, to a lesbian searching for a queer community in Egypt. “Speaking in public about a subject which is often deemed taboo — especially in the part of the world where I originate — is a political act,” Sekyiamah wrote in the introduction.

There are other online spaces Ghanaian women use to share their experiences. A Facebook page called Our Collective Vagina, which says it is “here for the outcasts, the outliers, the ones they call unruly, the ones they call witches”, was set up four years ago by Ghanaian journalist Maame Akua Awereba (32), and has nearly 17,000 followers. Another Awereba-run page, Dear Survivor, enables victims of sexual violence to share accounts anonymously, while calling out prominent figures who say questionable things about women’s rights or the treatment of women. It has nearly 6,000 followers.

Providing women with “additional information” and giving them an education is “liberating”, Hanson says. “We’re fighting for freedom ... To be a Ghanaian is to be a freedom fighter. Freedom is a complex thing. That’s why everything I do is trying to let everyone be their freest selves, to coexist peacefully with others. It drives everything.”