African Thoughts on Intimacy

In the Western experience, everything is fire to feed capitalism, so even bodies are consumable. There is a thirst for the other's body to be reduced only to the aesthetic level. The attraction is no longer sensory and becomes an advertising trap. Relationship apps that won't let us lie. The elected attractive and beautiful social personality becomes the most coveted commodity and everyone else pays the price.

Western white society encourages relationships to be reduced to this emotional garbage to maintain the system of oppression of bodies. So, while some people feel shame, insecurity and low self-esteem, those who fit the system, enjoy.

But let's pretend for while that the paradigm is not the Eurocentric. Instead, we pretend a Africanity view. Healthy bodies meet like a dance where seduction and sex become expressions of healing and vitality.

Professor Sobonfu Somé, born in Burkina Faso, an African country located in the West of the continent, wrote “The Spirit of Intimacy” where she looked at intimate experience and ways of having relationships based on ancestral African thoughts.

The book makes a comparative analysis of the Western and African experience to demonstrate that if today we are living in an unprecedented, hopeless emotional drought, gripping by hatred and control, society was not always like this.

In an excerpt from the book she shares: “The Dangara people do not have a specific word to refer to sex. We express the concept of sex as traveling with someone. The person doesn't want to have sex with the other; she wants to go somewhere”.

In another passage she adds: "when two people share a balanced and spiritual intimate life, they have the power to increase the healing energy of everything around them."

If for the West, religiosity means castration and sexual demonization of any matrix that does not match hegemonic fundamentalism, the author shows us that African spirituality has deep respect for sexual intimacy as part of the cycle of life, where bodies, especially female, do not have to be hidden.

The author elucidates that negative thoughts are a dangerous poison to navigate in the intimacy journey. She stands that sex is not meant to bring a sense of confinement. Conversely, it's about evaporate the conscious.

The essay indicates that where affection is found, it is not necessarily where affection is sought, since we are not even taught to understand what are the healthy ways to have intimate relationships.

The book is an invitation to reflect on the toxicities caused by the Eurocentric hegemony that censors our expressions so that sexuality is not treated in a natural, frank, vital and sacred way.