The Spirit of Intimacy
In homage to Sobonfu Somé’s work of the same title.
Amidst the echoes of history and the clamour of social change, the intersection of sexuality, pleasure, kink, and race in South Africa beckons us to explore the depths of human experience and liberation.
The urgent need for this dialogue is underscored by the amusing and infuriating fact that the Wikipedia page for ‘The History of Human Sexuality’ only mentioned Africa twice, both in reference to HIV. Yet, we know that African histories of pleasure, sexuality, sensuality and potentially, kink and leisure, are as rich as those of our traditions, cultural practices and spirituality. The ‘old’ violences of colonisation and apartheid bleed into modern life.
From ancient times, to pre-colonial periods, and into the post-colonial eras, Africans have always engaged in a variety of sexual and leisure activities that provided entertainment, spiritual connection, relaxation and shared sexual pleasure. Writer, Swiry Nyar Kano has written about the ways, “Africa has viewed certain aspects of pleasure and romance as foreign due to the imposition of foreign values, misinterpretation, and misrepresentation of the precolonial African way of life and sex.”
African sexuality has always been valued, from the Ssenga in the ancient Baganda Kingdom’s initiating of young people into concepts and acts of human sexuality without shame, the Kuru Warriors rites of fertility, the arousing dance rituals of Ghana and Burkino Faso’s Lobi people, to offering guests sex when visited in Northern Namibia and Kunene Angola and the vast oral histories and Nubility songs of the Zulu, Agikuyu, Maasai, Mende, Bechuama, Pondo, and Lokele, which contained suggestions of kink practices.
In Catherine Burns’ ‘Writing the history of sex in South Africa’ (2012), we learn that researchers are often astounded to discover experiences ofthe intimacy, sexual passion, and youthful love present in studies dating back to the 1920 to 1950 captured in monographs and studies. To see the ways even our great grandparents were deeply sexual beings. Now, I can truly only speak about personal experience of sexuality cultures from the 1990s, when I was born. Raised with two nurses for grandmothers, one of whom would later teach my cousins and I how to use HIV home tests, and a father who worked for Planned Parenthood when I was a teenager, much of what I knew about sexuality was medicalised. This was a time when the HIV health crisis in South Africa had government ministers and religious leaders discussing safe sex in the media, normalising public discussions of sex for me and many others.
Sexual liberation was explored in the themes of my TV and radio, where Boom Shaka’s and Brenda Fassie’s lyrical and clothing choices slowly opened me up to concepts of queerness, where tongue kissing and moaning were shown on Generations, one of South Africa’s longest running daily soapie. I grew up in a time where progressive policies were hurtling forward into open-minded approaches around sexuality, pleasure and kink. All while having the fear of slut-shaming, domestic violence, and punitive rape embedded in me from every media source. When I discovered BDSM on Twitter in the early 2010s, I was fortunate enough to discover it alongside Black feminism. So my own leaps into sexual liberation were bound with my ideological convictions, concerned with challenging norms and advocating for the freedom of my Black queer disabled communities.
Spirit refers to the life force in everything.
BDSM led to places where I could play, practice, explore and connect to myself and others through my sensuality and sexuality. Where I could design freedom for myself, where consent was expressed clearly.
It was also a place where I could still see the ways the white supremacist capitalist violence feigned ignorance, where racism was so at home it was innate in the design of kink spaces. I was painfully aware of how Black people were treated kink communities, often facing fetishisation and discrimination, yet still hopeful experiencing smaller BDSM spaces that were created for and by Black people. I held both these truths at the same time because I understood the ways that the ways I practised kink were directly linked to freedom.
Exploring the history of sex in South Africa reveals the intertwined legacies of colonialism, apartheid, and indigenous traditions, each leaving its mark on our understanding of pleasure and desire. BDSM was spoken as a ‘white people’s thing’; this was true over ten years ago when I was new to it, and is still true in various predominantly white kink spaces in South Africa to this day. The very existence of Black, queer, disabled kinksters says , “we are all at liberty to explore sensation, to toe the line between pain and pleasure, to take up space in ways many of our ancestors could not do freely.”
The decolonisation of sexuality, kink and BDSM practices does not have to be overt to be powerful. One only needs to look into the ways you design kink spaces and develop personal practices. This discernment allows us to look into the ways our desires are constructed and how we often lean into or away from desires of ancestors we can channel without much awareness. It brings us closer to finding balance. As Mamello Sejake has previously said to Thandiwe Ntshinga,
“We play with chains and whips, right? Some of the toys that we play with have been used in very violent ways. [But] everything is given power and meaning if we give it. Within kink you get to play around with that power. You get to diffuse it.”
BDSM has allowed me to return to my spirituality in ways that are not asphyxiated by religious purity, shame and guilt. While colonialism and imperialism sought to suppress African kink practices, I expanded my connection to my ancestors and spirituality through BDSM. Doing my best to live by the words of Kiru Taye, “It seems that Africans lost their imaginations when it comes to lovemaking when they adopted colonial Victorian values. Our ancestors certainly weren’t ‘lying back and thinking of England’ during sex, if you catch my drift.” A brilliant African writer of sensual African stories who looks beyond the effects and ‘biassed’ history narrated by colonisers, credits the power of radical imagination when it comes to sexual pleasure. Kiru asserts that ancient Africans were sexual, whether we want to admit it or not.
Sobonfu Somé speaks clearly about The Spirit of Intimacy and how spirit refers to the life force in everything , similar to the ways Audre Lorde conceptualises erotic energy. How intimacy has always been an African practice that involved the community, in matchmaking and the sustenance of various relationships. How intimacy gives us space for communal forms of ritual, where spirit is called to come and be the driver, the overseer and a form of connection of self to community and natural forces. How these rituals recognise the line of ancestors behind you, the spirit worlds around you, offering language that can only be understood with deep listening. This is the energy I take into my BDSM, into my ways of connecting with those who come to play, to rest, to writhe in pleasure and pain. This spirit of pleasure allows me to experience the sacred in my every day.
Colonialism and Apartheid may have imposed rigid norms and values about sexuality upon African populations, but an awareness of our histories and hopes for continued resistance in sexual liberation touch on themes of identity and belonging. These resonate for so many of us who understand the ways the complexities of race, sexuality, societal expectations and freedom dance together. We are fueled by our desire for liberation from oppressive regimes and futures that celebrate the interconnection of sexuality, pleasure, kink, and spiritual healing as part of our African cultures.
The piece was originally published in GIDA Journal Volume III in 2024.
