This New Surfboard Company Wants More Women to Hang 10 on Senegal’s Famous Shores (OkayAfrica)

As I researched Côte d’Ivoire's West Factory, I became increasingly intrigued in West Africa's surf culture. I take that curiosity about surfing to Senegal, home to West Africa's best waves, to speak to Walid Moukadem, owner of the newly launched MCXNboards, and Khadijou Sambe, one of Senegal’s first and only female surfers. Check out the story here and find the full article below:

“Surfers in Senegal are one big extended family,” Khadijou Sambe, one of Senegal’s first and only female surfers, says. In the conservative, predominantly Muslim country, Sambe is an anomaly in a sport on Dakar’s beaches.

Since the premiere of the 1960s surf cult classic, Endless Summer, Senegal’s swells attracted a growing number of surfers. Similar to other growing surf hotspots like Côte d’Ivoire, expatriates and tourists dominate Senegal’s surf community. In recent years, however, more locals are hitting the waves. Now, Sambe and Walid Moukadem, owner of the newly launchedMCXNboards, are partnering to change the face of Senegalese surf through an inclusive, homegrown model.

While Senegalese women may watch surfers from the shore, they rarely take to the water themselves because of cultural taboos. Sambe grew up in Lebou, a fishing village in N’Gor, a tiny island made famous through Endless Summer. She started surfing after she met surf instructor Pape Sambe Ndiaye.

“When I told him that I wanted to learn to surf, he looked at me a bit strangely and asked if my family knew what I was doing,” Sambe says to Okayafrica. “He asked me to have my parents fill out a registration form and told me I could start to learn as soon as they signed the completed form. I knew that my family would disapprove—they didn’t think that surfing was for girls—so I took the form home and filled it out myself.”

Ndiaye offered free lessons to Sambe and some other local teenagers, but the girls in the small class were soon forced to give up surfing due to familial pressure. Sambe managed to fly under her own family’s radar for years by sneaking out of her window to go to the beach—until she got caught.

After giving up surfing briefly in 2013 to keep the peace at home, she decided to return to the water and joined the team at Malika Surf Camp, one of Senegal’s top surf schools, first as the manager of the surfboard rental shop and now as an instructor.

At Malika, Sambe met Moukadem, a Lebanese-Senegalese businessman-turned-entrepreneur. Moukadem began surfing at 2014 at the encouragement of his wife, Katie, and immediately fell in love with the sport, but plateaued in development without access to better boards

“When you a surf with a board that is adapted to your size, level and local surf conditions, you can progress much faster,” he says. “Unfortunately, there weren’t any shapers in Dakar at that time. So, I had to buy an imported board. I’ve seen many other people who end up using or buying boards that are not well-suited for them, and they often become frustrated that they don’t progress in their surfing. Having the right board can make all the difference.”

At first, Moukadem only repaired his own boards, but eventually learned to shape boards himself—even painting designs on them. In 2015, he trained with Alvaro Fernandez, founder ofRodiRide boards, to further develop his skills. After his training, he came back to Senegal, turned his garage into a fully equipped professional shaping room, and launched MCXNboards only a few months later.

MCXN produces Senegal’s only locally-made foam/polyester/epoxy boards. While some local Senegalese surfers have experimented with locally-made wooden boards, they generally have limited performance in the water. They all are custom-made, and take into account the person’s weight, height, surfing level, fitness level, and surfing environment. According to Moukadem, “It’s kind of like having a suit or dress custom-made by a tailor rather than buying a readymade suit or dress. The final product is a board that is tailor made for your individual needs and preferences.”

The brand’s name stands for Mouk’s Connection. The name derives from Moukadem’s surname and stands for the owner’s goal of celebrating Senegal’s vibrant and diverse surf community. Through MCXNboards, Moukadem hopes to grow Senegal’s surf culture on the international stage, and build more connections between surfers across West Africa.

Moukadem hopes these surfers won’t be limited to men. Sambe, Moukadem’s former surf instructor turned close friend, serves as MCXN’s brand ambassador in an effort to promote the company’s social development mission. Through working with Sambe, MCXN hopes to develop strategies to tackle gender inequality and to encourage other young women to pursue their passions.

“Before MCXNboards started-up, I had never owned my own surfboard,” Sambe says. “Having my own board has helped me to find the courage to keep doing what I love. I hope that, in the future, more Senegalese women will surf.”

MCXN also has plans to expand its social mission to include projects focused on protecting the sea and supporting local artisans. Tapping into Dakar’s vibrant urban arts scene, Moukadem is in talks with local graffiti collectives to produce joint artwork for their boards. Through creating more avenues for artistic expression, he hopes that MCXN can positively contribute to Senegal’s social and economic development.

“Surfing has an amazing ability to bring people together, to empower people to reach their potential and to bring people closer to nature,” Moukadem says. “I truly believe that a home-grown surf culture has the potential to contribute to wider social and economic development in Senegal.”

This New Ivorian Surf Shop Is Putting Côte d’Ivoire On To Surf Culture (OkayAfrica)

My latest for Okayafrica goes behind the scenes of new Ivoirian surf workshop, The West Factory. Check out the original post here or find it below.

The world’s surfing population is growing fast. Between 2001 and 2011, the number of surfers increased from 26 million to 35 million. Serious surfers seek the right amount of wind and wave, and uncrowded beaches. Africa, with over 26,000 kilometers of coastline, can help meet that demand.

Some of the continent’s best surf spots in North and Southern Africa are well known to surf lovers worldwide, but the waves in West Africa are still underexplored.

“Everywhere you go in the world, you hear about the Californian, Hawaiian, or Australian surf cultures—you never really hear about the Asian or African surf cultures,” Hadi Beydoun, founder of The West Factory, says.

Beydoun opened The West Factory, a new surf workshop in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, which serves as a work space for shapers and a local center for the Ivorian surfing community this April.

He grew up in Abidjan before decamping to Lebanon following a coup d’état in Côte d’Ivoire. After moving to Australia for university, he developed a passion for surfing. “As soon as I got to Australia, I had wanted to learn how to surf because it’s such a big part of the culture,” he says. “I went to different surf camps and shops to learn more about the sport. When I first got into it, I loved the sport so much that I immediately thought: ‘I need to bring this to Côte d’Ivoire.’”

Located on the Gulf of Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire has 515 kilometers of southerly facing shoreline. Azure waves from the South Atlantic break along the country’s white sand beaches, nestled between coconut trees and pineapple plantations. Beydoun counts Assinie, the country’s most popular beach, and San-Pédro, as his favorite go-to places to catch a good wave. Despite the country’s natural beauty, the surfing culture is still young. “It’s a small community made up mainly of Lebanese and French,” he says. “There aren’t that many Ivorian surfers yet, but they’re growing in number as more people get interested in the sport. At the moment, it’s primarily men, but at different surf camps and events, I’ve started to see more female surfers.”

Before moving back to Côte d’Ivoire in 2015, Beydoun visited Lebanon where he met Paul Abbas, a self-taught shaper. When Abbas began surfing, there were no boards in Lebanon—so he decided to make his own. Today, Abbas is the only person in Lebanon building surfboards from scratch on a large-scale. Beydoun approached Abbas about collaborating to build boards in Côte d’Ivoire. Although Abbas was initially hesitant, he quickly came around in the face of Beydoun’s passion and persistence. As the workshop launches this month, Abbas came to Abidjan for a month to help shape custom boards and train locals in the art of the surfboard.

“None of the boards in Côte d’Ivoire are made here—everything is imported. I decided to open a factory, a small workshop, to produce high-quality local boards made by local people at a lower price point,” Beydoun tells Okayafrica. If the demand keeps growing, The West Factory plans to recruit different shapers from across the world to make boards and teach a local team. Beydoun hopes that one day, The West Factory and its Ivorian staff will be able to shape their own boards. Currently, there are three different models available in every shape and color imaginable. Surfers can peruse The West Factory’s catalogue and opt for ready-made or custom-built boards.

As post-civil war Côte d’Ivoire begins to flourish again, greater domestic and international interest in surfing can help drive the country’s flagging tourism industry. As Beydoun builds the business, he hopes that The West Factory can help expand knowledge and support for surfing in West Africa, and change the image of surfing as a luxury Western sport.

“As we create an African surf and beach culture,” Beydoun says, “I want people to make their own boards and become independent of California, Australia and Europe, and I want to do it at a lower price.”

This London Supper Club Wants You To Come And Chop Delicious Nigerian Delicacies (OkayAfrica)

The foodie in me couldn't help reaching out to Tokunbo Koiki, the mumpreneur behind Tokunbo's Kitchen and Tee's Food Corner to talk Nigerian food and the London pop-up scene. You can read the original article over at Okayafrica or read below.

Tokunbo Koiki, a self-described British-Nigerian mumpreneur, hopes to convince Londoners to trade in their fish and chips for suya and yam. Forget the tartar sauce, where’s the pepper sauce?

As the world’s undisputed culinary capital, London’s restaurant scene features anything from your standard Indian fare to less well-known cuisines like Burmese or Czech food. Yet despite the city’s nearly 16,000 restaurants, African restaurants make up less than 1 percent of the vibrant food culture. Through her new supper club, Tokunbo’s Kitchen, will introduce Londoners to the colorful flavors of Nigeria.

The club builds on Tee’s Food Corner, a pop-up Nigerian street food stall that served as Koiki’s first venture in the culinary world. The enthusiastic response inspired Koiki to expand her growing business. “Tokunbo’s Kitchen is an intimate social dining experience, whereas Tee’s Food Corner is more tailored towards simple finger food,” she tells Okayafrica.

Tokunbo's Nigerian-style fried rice. 

Koiki began cooking at age twelve, starting off with fried egg and plantain and expanding to more complex recipes such as pounded yam and okra stew. Today, the latter remains her signature dish, along with Nigerian-style fried rice.

A recent addition to her list of favorite dishes is egusi stew, made with protein-rich egusi (melon) seeds. “Growing up, I didn’t eat it much, but a couple of years ago, I came across a recipe and decided to give it a try,” she says. “I realized I had been truly missing out all those years after I cooked egusi and okra stew on the same day, and I didn’t even eat the okra because I was so focused on how the delicious complex flavors of the egusi were!”

The vegan-friendly dish features on the menu of her inaugural supper club on April 23. Other menu items include oxtail, goat and tripe pepper soup, yaji spiced butternut squash soup, and efo riro, a vegetable stew. Her second dinner later this year will be centered on seafood dishes.
 

Koiki decided to pursue the supper club route instead of a restaurant in an effort to diversify beyond an African audience.

“There’s about 1 million Nigerians in London alone, but if you ask the average Londoner about Nigerian food, they don’t even know what it is. I didn’t want to just open a restaurant for Nigerians and other Africans,” she says. “I want to introduce Nigerian food on a gradual basis to a global audience. Whether it’s London or Barcelona, I can travel the world introducing people to the colorful flavors of Nigerian food.”

As a social dining experience, guests will share a table with other like-minded foodies over delicious plates they would find in any Nigerian home—with Koiki’s creative touch. Tokunbo’s Kitchen focuses on the ingredient-driven food similar to what chefs like Anthony Bourdain now worship—dependably delicious, but not necessarily expensive or stuffy.

With an adaptable menu and location, Koiki believes the versatility of Tokunbo’s Kitchen is its greatest advantage. During future supper clubs, she hopes to host art exhibitions and provide musical entertainment to not only give guests a taste of Nigerian food, but also the Naija way of life.

This New Line Shows There’s More To West African Fashion Than Ankara And Kente Cloth (OkayAfrica)

An article for OkayAfrica on new Ghanaian fashion line Raffia, which is steadily dismantling stereotypes about Ghana's Northern Region. Find the original article here or read below. 

Far from the flashing lights of Accra, Northern Ghana might be the surprising new locus of a growing market for African fashion. While the Gold Coast is well-known for kente cloth, a richly patterned fabric that Ghanaian royals have sported for centuries, gonja cloth, its northern cousin, has yet to make a splash on international markets—until now.

Madonna Kendona-Sowah, founder and creative director of new fashion line Raffia, knows that there’s more to West African fashion than Ankara and kente cloth. Raffia produces high-quality clothing made from the woven material made in Northern Ghana.

Now in its second season, Raffia plans to dispel stereotypes that Ghanaians in the country’s wealthier, southern region have about their Northern countrymen. According to Kendona-Sowah, “Because of poverty, Northerners are considered to be less educated or enlightened. I think that perception is largely because it’s far away and most Ghanaians don’t travel widely throughout the country.”

The line’s name comes from the Raffia palm, which like Northern Ghana, is “rough and dry in its raw state but can be used to make beautiful things.”

Northern-born Ghanaians are vastly underrepresented in Ghana’s burgeoning high-street fashion scene led by designers like Christie Brown, Mina Evans, and Duaba Serwa. From the colonial days of gold mining to the present, the Akan people have dominated the country’s business elite. “Northern Ghanaians, even those who are well educated, will aspire instead to be civil servants. One of the things people told me when I decided to start Raffia was, ‘We’re not really entrepreneurs. That’s not what we do,'” Kendona-Sowah says.

Some raffia designs at the atelier opening in Accra.

Until now, shea butter is likely Northern Ghana’s most well-known export. Raffia hopes to add gonja cloth to that list. Made from cotton, gonja cloth is carefully dyed and hand-woven. Unlike its younger, southern cousin kente, which tends to feature bolder colors, gonja cloth traditionally uses more subdued tones like blue, brown, and black. In contrast to the wax print market, which is dominated by Dutch-owned Vlisco and Woodin and a growing flood of Chinese-made products, kente and gonja are still almost exclusively produced in Ghana. A growth in demand for these high-quality local materials could help the struggling Ghanaian textile industry.

Gonja cloth, also popularly known as batakari, can also be distinguished from kente cloth in another unique way—the gender of its weavers. Traditionally, men weave kente, but in Northern Ghana, Kendona-Sowah tells me, “You’ll see women weaving when they have time off.”

The budding designer works with an all-women cooperative in Zuarungu, Upper East, who produce her range of originally designed fabrics. As a social enterprise, Raffia focuses on professionalizing the women’s work and enhances their quality of life to enrich their families and communities.

Madonna sketching a bespoke design for a client.

Raffia’s beautiful range of skirts, blazers and crop tops might be shock to those familiar with gonja cloth, which is usually only found as a smock or kaba and slit. Kendona-Sowah attributes the limited range of traditional designs to the cloth’s standard use as a utilitarian piece of clothing. “My mother and aunties, who are very fashion-forward, never even used the fabric to make dresses. It was just skirts and tops,” she tells me.

“People haven’t seen the high fashion potential, but I’ve always loved the fabric as a child. When I decided to go into fashion, I wanted to do something high quality. Knowing about the fabric, how it’s woven with such attention to detail, but has always had a low profile made it a no-brainer when I decided to create the line.”

The line is the culmination of a long-held dream of being a fashion designer. After interning for a designer at 18, Kendona-Sowah deferred her aspirations in favor of a career in international development. When she turned 30, she decided it was finally time to pick up the sketchbook again.

In the two short years since Raffia launched, it’s seen remarkable success. In 2015, Kendona-Sowah was selected as one of 1000 Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurship Program (TEEP) 2015 entrepreneurs. The line is now stocked at London-based store Sapelle as well as Accra’s Elle Lokko, a picturesque concept store that recently opened in the bustling neighborhood of Osu.

With more retailers coming on board this year and a steadily growing clientele, Kendona-Sowah opened a Raffia atelier this March in Accra to give customers the space to meet her with her to discuss fabrics and bespoke designs. While Raffia does have an online shop, a full-scale shop in Accra is much further down the pipeline. “At this point, I want our team to concentrate on growing the brand, cultivating our customer base, and growing as creative—hence the atelier space,” she says.

As Raffia continues to grow, Kendona-Sowah hopes that the brand’s expansion helps the women at the foundation of the business. “To me, social enterprise is having the development of the community you work with in mind as you grow your business. There wouldn’t be Raffia without community development. As we grow, they will grow.”

Could She Be Somalia's Next President? Meet Fadumo Dayib (Ayiba)

I am deeply honored to have had the opportunity to interview Fadumo Dayib, Somalia's first female presidential candidate. In this interview, we talk Somali politics, Al-Shabaab, women's empowerment, and dreams for the future. Read the full Ayiba Magazine interview here and check out my favorite excerpt below.

I would not be who I am without my mother. My mother instilled in me from a very young age that you can do whatever you set your mind to. She would actually take me around so that I could visualize that future for myself. When I started interacting with my mother as a mature young woman was when I was able to negotiate with her about my education. Every Saturday, my mother and I would get in a taxi and she would ask me, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” I would say, “I want to work for the UN.” At the time, everyone wanted to be a Secretariat staff member at the UN complex in Gigiri. We would go there and she would say, “Do you see these gates, Fadumo? One day, you will walk through these gates. Keep that in your mind.” And I would respond, “no I can’t—I can’t even write.” She said, “Nonsense, you will. Keep this image in your mind.”

Then she’d say, “You’re working in the UN complex. Now, where do you want to live?” I’d respond, “I want to live in Spring Valley, where all the mzungu live.” We would go there and I’d point to the house in the compound where I wanted to live and she’d say, “keep it in your mind, and you will.” Then she’d say, “you work in the Gigiri complex and you live in this house, where do you want to shop?” I’d say, “Nakumatt.” We’d go there and she’d say, “ok, where next?” and I would say Sarit Center. We’d go there next.

Every Saturday, we would literally drive through my dreams and my vision for myself. You know, Akinyi, I walked through those gates in the UN complex, I lived in that compound in Spring Valley, and I shopped at Nakumatt and Sarit Center. I went everywhere my mother said I would go. Including to three universities in Finland and one in America. Everything she said to me, I’ve done.

Those people who doubt women are foolish. The world is running and functioning because of women. I am where I am today because of a very strong woman. All those men in high offices are where they are today because of strong women. It’s time for women to understand that we are the backbone of our continent and our countries. We need to formalize this leadership. We’ve carried these countries, these people on our backs for so long, and it’s time to have it recognized. Women are much stronger than many people would like us to believe or like us to know. People think my biggest challenge is my gender, but it’s also my biggest strength.

Is ‘An African City’ A True Portrayal Of The Urban African Woman? (OkayAfrica)

Check out this recent article I wrote for Okayafrica on feminism, sex and An African City. I discuss how the web series is re-shaping the image of the urban African women by focusing on the female gaze. You can find the full article below and the original here.

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 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 fulfills 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 NanaYaa (played by the talented MaameYaa 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 labeled a whore because her self-love is not predicated on the attention of men.

On its face, this behavior 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 from Shuga 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.