Serena Dankwa's Knowing Women, a fascinating exploration of African women's same-sex intimacies in Ghana, starts off by reminding us to ‘“free our imaginations” in order to “make new exciting things”’. These were the late Binyavanga Wainaina's words, and, in the true spirit of his premonitions, the ‘knowing women’ Dankwa describes in Ghana do exactly that. Dankwa captures these women's lives in a multitude of spaces, public and private, and invites the reader to enter a world where the space for ‘new exciting things’ is created. In this world, friendship is open to all interpretations. There are what might be called ‘friends with benefits’ in other settings – and these benefits are endless. At the same time, the deep sense of sharing and ‘doing everything together’ tips the friendship scale to other limits – veering towards siblinghood, mother and daughter relations and other precarious relationships that demand no other words. Dankwa is right to ‘mobilize friendship as a conceptual tool’ (p. 43) as the potentials of friendship allow for all possibilities. However, while a useful and significant device, there are obvious challenges with friendship even in the context of Ghana and in Africa generally.
In the first instance, friendships exist also within the frame of LGBT issues and queer existence in Ghana. While Dankwa does not rely too much on LGBT identities and language, these same-sex intimacies and desires cannot completely escape the Western frame of same-sex sexuality and gender identity. As Dankwa asserts: ‘global LGBT initiatives have prioritized male homosexuality and activism in a way that renders illegible tacit forms of queer resistance, including Ghanaian women's culture of indirection’ (p. 48). This form of activism, and the silence in women's voices, is a result of a workshop from a European donor, an international intervention not uncommon in many African countries.Footnote 8 The ‘noise’ that comes with this version of activism requires certain declarations and ‘privacy’ to be made public through ‘the performance of the lesbian self’ (p. 74). This goes against the value and inventiveness of ‘knowing women’ who create contextually relevant expressions of their existence. How is friendship a useful tool in engaging with the demands of LGBT activism and the need for naming and labelling? Can friendship and LGBT activism seamlessly coexist or is a tug of war inevitable?
The second aspect of friendship pertains to its locatedness and queerness, particularly in relation to spaces and love. The bathhouse, as an erotic space for women, offers theoretical potentials. Practices of caring, touching, kindness, assistance and sharing water form part of everyday expressions of love in this space. Dankwa suggests that these practices queer this space ‘through repetitions and resignification’ (p. 111). In this space, however, only two women are generally involved. Yet love, as Dankwa argues, ‘is much more than a twosome’ (p. 216). The relationship between love and the bathhouse, which are both ‘queered’ through relatedness and defamiliarization, needs further interrogation. If the bathhouse makes possible the expression of ‘provider love’ (p. 217), how is this space different from other intimate or domestic spaces such as the kitchen, where the same form of love is expressed? In relying on the notion of queerness, is it possible that the potential for theorizing the everydayness of the bathhouse and its related practices is foreclosed? Rather than the space being queered by love, perhaps its multiple possibilities and opportunities suggest that the bathhouse is already a queer space. Could this be a useful point of departure?
The third aspect related to friendship pertains to sugar motherhood and its framing as part of ‘queer family networks’ (p. 219). Queer kinship and the idea of a chosen family affords different types of family structure and collectives that are not reliant on marital ties or genealogical relations. The sharing practices and networks of friendships of ‘knowing women’ go beyond the notion of the chosen family. The attachment to this queer frame of family appears to be limiting in the context of the women in Ghana. Sugar motherhood, as a sort of motherhood, extends the notion of provider love. However, this extension is foreclosed by the need for these relationships to be ‘disguised much more carefully’ (p. 269). How, then, can we make sense of sugar motherhood as motherhood when it requires negotiations with genealogical motherhood or heteronormative expectations? Might there be a need to challenge conceptual assumptions about motherhood in the African context?
We could take a leaf out of the pages of these ‘knowing women’ and attempt to live our lives on our own terms, without the limits of trying to fit into frameworks and paradigms that reshape our existence. Through these women's voices and lives, Dankwa delivers a rich, excitingly messy, perfectly wayward and full life of African women's genius.
