At An African City’s
Season 2 launch event in Accra in January, there were audible gasps from the
crowd at the frank, no-holds-barred dialogue, and revealing sex scenes. But
there’s more to the web series than its shock value. The show is a space for
urban African women to navigate evolving beliefs between tradition and
contemporary life in a rapidly changing society.
HBO’s Sex and the City is An African City’s inevitable point
of comparison for many viewers. A decade after Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and
Samantha bid us farewell, women still engage in spirited cocktail party
conversations over which character they most identify with—the modern
equivalent of a Myers-Briggs test.
Sex and the
City was symbolic of contemporary debates
about womanhood, and challenged the status quo. But the question remains—whose
status quo? In arts and culture, the African woman is frequently represented as
an object—a primeval Eve with scarifications and bare breasts, a breeding
machine, or a sexualized spectacle akin to Hottentot Venus. In the news, she is
a victim or a refugee. While these images are undoubtedly true, they are
incomplete.
Until 2014’s
arrival of An African City, the urban African woman lacked a pop cultural
touchstone that could similarly create a new language to discuss their
experiences from career to friendship to romance. Because of its web series
format, An African City succeeds
where Sex
and the City fell short, combining unabashed conversations about
womanhood with global representation.
While it
fulfils a critical role in the cultural landscape, An African City is far from a panacea. Despite its
mixture of satire and sincerity, some storylines verge on the absurd and the
chemistry of the girl squad is occasionally lacking. Yet its refreshing voice
and honesty sometimes matters more than its delivery.
Building on
the narrative style of its American inspiration, An African City episodes begin with voice-overs by
protagonist Nana Yaa (played by the talented Maame Yaa Boafo) and flits between
scenes of the daily life of her circle of friends, including brazen and
outspoken Sade, conservative and romantic Ngozi, pragmatic Zainab, and the
ambitious and beautiful Makena.
Each woman
plays an allegorical role in the continuum of modern African womanhood.
Irreligious Sade unapologetically rejects her religious upbringing with her
pastor father while Ngozi embraces the African church’s emphasis on sexual
conservatism. Makena and Zainab struggle to navigate the difficulties of
surviving in the sink-or-swim Accra business world without relying on men.
Given this diversity of characters, it’s not surprising that the series
immediately created buzz as women across the continent, especially in Africa’s
sprawling urban megacities, found a little bit of themselves in each of the
five women.
The show
explores the tensions between second-wave and third-wave feminism. The former
focused on independence and egalitarianism, and the latter embraced femininity
as a tool of agency and empowerment. In exploring where these concepts of
modern-day womanhood clash and overlap, An African City’s strength lays in
its embrace of each woman’s lifestyle as a valid choice—its acknowledgment that
the path to happiness in love and life is complex. Although they want different
things and walk different paths, these women do not apologize for success or
their sensuality. Ngozi wants marriage and commitment, while Zainab, focused on
her career, could care less.
As the
character that most navigates extremes, Sade (played by Nana Mensah), who often
draws comparisons to her libertine American counterpart, Samantha, is a
representation of the push and pull of the Africa of the past and present. A
Harvard Business School graduate, Sade is the marketing manager of a prominent
Accra-based bank, yet still enjoys coaxing gifts out of her male companions.
Admittedly and unabashedly sexually confident, she evades the negative barbs of
being labelled a whore because her self-love is not predicated on the attention
of men.
On its face,
this behaviour might appear as a contradiction, but to Mensah, it’s a
subversive act. “In many traditional African cultures, men and women have
different kinds of capital—sexual and financial,” she tells Okayafrica.
“The woman is
in peak possession of her sexual capital at a young age, when perhaps she doesn’t
have access to vast resources while the older man is the one with assets. Sade
recognizes this and decides to cash in her sexual capital into actual
capital—almost like a retirement plan. I don’t agree with that choice
personally, but I appreciate the logic behind these choices,” she says. Sade’s
choice to embrace her sexuality is at once at capitalist pursuit, but also an
act of liberation from her religious upbringing and societal expectations.
Showcasing
sexuality on screen is nothing new, but portraying it through the female gaze
still remains a novel concept in film and television. Laura Mulvey’s pioneering
1973 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” introduced new feminist
discourse into film studies in its psychoanalytic analysis of how women are
portrayed as passive subjects of the male gaze in the Western world.
Mensah agrees
with this view, and thinks that is still particularly relevant in Africa’s
nascent film and television industry. “A lot of times, sexuality is not shown
at all or it’s a 1960s Hollywood portrayal where you see the lead-up and
nothing else. Whether it’s in the U.S. or in Nigeria, film and television tends
to show sexuality through the male gaze. The actress is there for the visual
consumption of male viewers, male directors, male writers, and male co-stars.
Now you have directors and filmmakers like Nicole Amarteifo, who directs An African City,
and Leila Djansi, who are showcasing sexuality from a female perspective and
showing female pleasure,” she tells us.
In the eyes of
Maame Adjei, who plays Zainab and serves as one of the show’s producers, there
are “myriad of reasons Africans tend to shy away from the conversation of sex…
[but] the fact is young African women have sex.” She says, “sex is a human
trait and a uniting factor and it’s a great way of telling nuanced stories
because no matter who you are or where you’re from you understand the concept
and complexities of sexuality.”
While some
might claim MTV’s Shuga as the first television show to
grapple with tough questions about the evolving nature of sexuality in Africa’s
metropolises, Varyanne Sika, founder of The Wide Margin, an online journal
of African feminist thought, finds that An African City is distinct fromShuga because it refrains from moralizing
the protagonists’ sexuality.
“I created the
show to highlight women who own their sexuality and sensuality—even if one of
the characters, Ngozi, refrains from sex she is still owning her sexuality,”
Amarteifo tells us. “And I wanted a show like this because for centuries women
have been told that sex is not for them. Women have been sex-shamed for far too
long. Sometimes men sex-shaming women, sometimes women sex-shaming other women.
My show, itself, is a message: we will not be sex-shamed.”
Despite
accolades and widespread media coverage for its refreshingly progressive take
on African sexuality, An African City, like its American
inspiration, has garnered some criticism for its focus on the lives of middle
and upper class women. According to Sika, “urban life is reshaping the
perception of African femininity along the lines of the usual rural and urban
differences… affording some of those living in cities many opportunities for
social, economic and cultural self-advancement which they otherwise wouldn’t
have.”
While black
women often speak of the importance of intersectionality, interpretations
frequently center on race and gender, rather than third critical paradigm of
class. In One Dimensional Woman, feminist
scholar Nina Power writes, “if pop culture’s portrayal of womankind were to be
believed, contemporary female achievement would culminate in the ownership of
expensive handbags, a vibrator, a job, a flat and a man.”
With its
exclusive focus on an elite, educated group of Ghanaian women, An African City shies away from broad representations
of African women in its efforts to dismantle “the single story.” But in this
attempt, does it create a single story of its own? In the same way that critics
charged Lena Dunham’s Girls for lacking racial diversity and showcasing topics
only relevant to a narrow slice of American life, An African City could
similarly be dismissed as a narrow, elite feminist fantasy.
Even those in
positions of privilege across the continent need only step outside their door
to be robbed of the illusion of their palatial oasis. In Accra, you can step
outside a mega-mansion only to be confronted with the stench of an overflowing
gutter or a street riddled with potholes. These realities directly conflict
with the glamorous, fanciful life that An African City attempts
to show.
The parallel
society of lavish luxury that persists aside the hellish realities of slums
like Sodom and Gomorrah speaks to the growing income inequality in countries like Ghana. As we indulge
in this bourgeois tableau of urban African life, we risk forgetting that
independence of Nana Yaa, Ngozi, Zainab, Makena, and Sade is a rare privilege
in a world in which African women experience fear more than freedom. Indulging
in a guilty pleasure of An African City should not obscure the real problems
impeding African women’s liberation.
Credit: Akinyi Ochieng
