Serena Owusua Dankwa, Knowing Women: same-sex intimacy, gender, and identity in postcolonial Ghana. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (hb £75 – 978 1 108 49590 5; Open Access at ). 2021, 318 pp.

Abstract

Serena Dankwa’s Knowing Women, a fascinating exploration of African women’s same-sex intimacies in Ghana, starts off by reminding us to ‘“free our imaginations” in order to “make new exciting things”’. These were the late Binyavanga Wainaina’s words, and, in the true spirit of his premonitions, the ‘knowing women’ Dankwa describes in Ghana do exactly that. Dankwa captures these women’s lives in a multitude of spaces, public and private, and invites the reader to enter a world where the space for ‘new exciting things’ is created. In this world, friendship is open to all interpretations. There are what might be called ‘friends with benefits’ in other settings – and these benefits are endless. At the same time, the deep sense of sharing and ‘doing everything together’ tips the friendship scale to other limits – veering towards siblinghood, mother and daughter relations and other precarious relationships that demand no other words. Dankwa is right to ‘mobilize friendship as a conceptual tool’ (p. 43) as the potentials of friendship allow for all possibilities. However, while a useful and significant device, there are obvious challenges with friendship even in the context of Ghana and in Africa generally. In the first instance, friendships exist also within the frame of LGBT issues and queer existence in Ghana. While Dankwa does not rely too much on LGBT identities and language, these same-sex intimacies and desires cannot completely escape the Western frame of same-sex sexuality and gender identity. As Dankwa asserts: ‘global LGBT initiatives have prioritized male homosexuality and activism in a way that renders illegible tacit forms of queer resistance, including Ghanaian women’s culture of indirection’ (p. 48). This form of activism, and the silence in women’s voices, is a result of a workshop from a European donor, an international intervention not uncommon in many African countries.8 The ‘noise’ that comes with this version of activism requires certain declarations and ‘privacy’ to be made public through ‘the performance of the lesbian self’ (p. 74). This goes against the value and inventiveness of ‘knowing women’ who create contextually relevant expressions of their existence. How is friendship a useful tool in engaging with the demands of LGBT activism and the need for naming and labelling? Can friendship and LGBT activism seamlessly coexist or is a tug of war inevitable? The second aspect of friendship pertains to its locatedness and queerness, particularly in relation to spaces and love. The bathhouse, as an erotic space for women, offers theoretical potentials. Practices of caring, touching, kindness, assistance and sharing water form part of everyday expressions of love in this space. Dankwa suggests that these practices queer this space ‘through repetitions and resignification’ (p. 111). In this space, however, only two women are generally