Let's Talk about Sex: Reflections on Conversations about Love and Sexuality in Kumasi and Endwa, Ghana

"I argue that young people's silences and respectful speech in family settings reflect a local moral world in which parents authorise and acknowledge sexual engagements of young people only when the latter have achieved the necessary spending power and capacity to care for their partners."

"This paper recounts and reflects on conversations about love and sexuality conducted with young people in Kumasi and Endwa, Ghana. It examines the settings of these conversations - in a kinship-based household, secondary schools and Pentecostal churches - and explores young people's reticence to talk about such matters in the light of intergenerational respect. Analysing young people's strategies of silence and provocative speech, the paper shows that, paradoxically, schools and churches provide institutionalised spaces for young people's subversive outspokenness that contrasts with the ethical codex of decency as the expression of hierarchical relations."

This research recounts, in a narrative format, the settings and substance of the author's conversations in English and Twi with approximately 30 young people: market women, young people in Pentecostal churches, students at secondary schools, and teachers in Ghana. [Footnotes are removed throughout by the editor.] The author examines "how intergenerational respect transpires through young people's speaking and not speaking about love and sexuality, and what these discursive practices reveal about young people's position in society. Speaking about love is shameful for everybody among Twi speakers....This paper will instead show why and how it is shameful for young people in particular. As I will demonstrate, how young people speak about love and sexuality changes in the framework of two institutions, schools and Pentecostal churches, as they provide young people with a legitimate framework with which to communicate their striving for love."

"People in Kumasi are highly aware of speech as an act of proper social conduct. A person's way of speaking, what they say and do not say, with whom they speak and with whom they do not, are subjects of constant comment. To speak correctly is constitutive of personhood; mastery of speech is associated with social maturity and influence.... As these expectations follow hierarchies of gender and age, through speaking, subjects insert themselves within wider notions of social hierarchy. Speech constitutes a person as a social being. By using respectful speech one shows that one knows one's place in society and is placing oneself into the web of social relations of young and old, female and male. 

The ideals of correct speech and personhood must also be exhibited in the domain of love and sexuality. Respect is the leading virtue to be shown when talking about one's own or other people's love affairs and sexual relationships.... Since for young unmarried women, talking about love and boyfriends would be a confession of involvement in a sexual relationship, expressing ideas of love, care and intimacy appeared nearly impossible."

The author found that being able to care for spouses, children, and kin is associated with maturity, and that men and women alike who are able to care for others are highly respected. Related to the concept of care is the providing of and the preparation of food (gender-specific roles) which are considered prerequisites (in a socio cultural sense) to love, sexual relationships, and marriage, categorising the institution of marriage as "processual and fluid....Young men know that they will then be held responsible for their girlfriend's unwanted pregnancy and, according to custom, would be responsible for supporting her financially until delivery as well as the costs of delivery itself. Female students know that a pregnancy will end their schooling and for this reason fear their parents finding out about their premarital sexual relationships. Introducing one's partner to one's parents means that one is making a claim to being mature enough to take up financial responsibilities.... Parents and teachers' demands of 'respect' from children, forbidding them to talk about sexuality, are, if examined more closely, contestations over young people's economic capacities."

Social spaces where young people do talk about sex are schools and churches, and, in these spaces, speech is outside of parental controls, referred to by the author as "subversive speech acts". Girls are able to talk about the receiving of gifts (in this case, for Valentine's Day, a concept imported from Western culture) that show love or desire and about potential "sugar daddies"- older men who can provide gifts for sex, calling these men Mr. Otua (the one who pays). "Even though gaining these items through sexual intercourse is widely condemned, possessing them can be perceived as demonstrating the ability to attract a man's care, which again relates to marital conceptions of love whereby a relationship gains legitimacy through its material practice. Talking about the quantity and quality of these gifts is therefore, in a cultural context that does not allow for the expression of female sexuality, a legitimate framework for women to constitute themselves as desirable female subjects."

Discussions conducted by the author with school boys "prove that taken out of the context of the kinship ruled household, it is possible to discuss matters of sexuality concretely." These discussions centred around condom use, a shortage of condoms on Valentine's Day, and what that demonstrated about Ghanaian male sexual conduct. The author speculated that condoms symbolise adulthood for young males (not protection from infections or pregnancy) because sex is related to providing sufficient support for a female or, in this cultural context, maturity.

Conversation in the Pentecostal church youth clubs offers group dynamics that support open conversations about matters of love and sexuality, while the clubs work to educate young people to become successful adults by delaying their commencement of an active sexual and reproductive life. There is active discussion of abstinence during "courtship" and encouragement to seek "an elite lifestyle" of prosperity connected to delayed marriage, monogamy, and delayed pregnancy. The churches then offer both a meeting place in which to talk about sexuality and a place to seek a partner. "Pentecostal doctrine provides a legitimate framework for young people's premarital relationships by introducing a clear distinction between a premarital and a marital relationship…. By providing young people with a framework in which having premarital relationships gains legitimacy, Pentecostal churches offer young people space to express their theories about love, their knowledge about sexuality and their personal experiences of being in premarital relationships."