Serena Dankwa's work Knowing Women is a rare and precious gift that will undoubtedly reshape the contours of queer African studies. I hope the following can help transmit this gift of queer knowledge, which is itself the product of intimate processes of learning from and with Ghanaian working-class women who pass on erotic knowledge to their partners—and whose insights can now also touch us (albeit, unavoidably, in highly mediated textual form).
This commentary first highlights the sheer originality of Dankwa's monograph, then identifies some of its thematic and analytic contributions to queer African(ist) scholarship. Next, it kickstarts a comparative exercise that foregrounds similarities and differences between the erotic culture of same-sex desiring women in postcolonial Ghana and the queer world of gender-dissident “fioto” men and their boyfriends in urban Congo. Finally, it crafts a new definition of “queerness” from erotic realities Dankwa depicts and which trouble its dominant understanding as...
