How Godisamang Khunou’s ‘Black Women and Sex’ Explores the Nuances of Sexuality and Bodily Autonomy

Curiosity got the best of Godisamang Khunou. For years, the South African filmmaker looked around for complex, in-depth representations of African women’s sexuality, but she didn’t find much. As varied as African cultures are, some ties bind within the nuances, and Khunou felt it was necessary to show both multiplicities and commonalities, an idea that inspired her documentary feature Black Women and Sex.

“I hadn’t seen this conversation on that level, that connected different cultures and different politics from different parts of the continent,” she tells OkayAfrica.

In Black Women and Sex, Khunou intertwines the stories and experiences of three women from Nigeria, Zambia, and South Africa, using honest conversations and spontaneous situations as a gateway into exposing norms and challenging them. It’s a progressive endeavor with real-life touchpoints: Olawunmi defines the terms of her own relationship by confronting her mother’s polygamous past, Iris looks to reaffirm her person and sexuality after a scandal unfairly dealt her public image a blow, and Glow navigates her right to live freely as a trans woman.

Khunou accompanies these three women through intimate conversations and challenging events, her camera serving simply as a window for viewers to learn, relate to, and empathize.

Connecting Cultures: Olawunmi, Iris, and Autonomy

For Olawunmi, reading a friend’s work was the spark that led Khunou to seek out her Nigeria-based subject. “I have a friend in Nigeria who’s a book author and a filmmaker. He wrote this amazing book about his grandfather’s wives, and I read the book, and it was funny [and] amazing. I asked him to connect me with someone who grew up in a polygamous home or is the wife of a man who has multiple wives in Nigeria.”

Olawunmi’s parts of the documentary feature several illuminating conversations, including a church women’s meeting centered on personal sharing about pleasure, and candid narrations with Olawunmi’s husband about their experience together as a couple. Even though she comes off a bit more conservative than the other subjects, Olawunmi's story arc effectively shows her evolution from being disillusioned by past experiences to fully embracing and taking pleasure in her desires.

“I didn’t have a specific expectation,” Khunou says about organizing the conversations that went into Olawunmi’s portion of the story. For her, it was about getting everyone — from the church women to Olawunmi’s mother — to be comfortable airing their experiences without bothering about social conservative conventions. “I had a good idea about what the setup is, but you never really know, so I came into it with an open heart and an open mind.” 

Khunou applied that same level of preparation to her work with Iris and Glow. “We had a lot of conversations, building trust with all three of the subjects,” she says. For the documentary, Iris undergoes a centuries-old coming-of-age practice, usually undertaken by women set to be married. Older women teach the prospective bride how to take care of their husbands, including sexually. Although Iris wasn’t about to be married at the time, Khunou saw the ceremony as a way for her subject to reckon with her values about sexuality and bodily autonomy.

“When we put together a team in Zambia, my number one request was that we would have access to that practice,” the director says. “We were trying to get her back to being herself, show who she used to be, and what she lost because of wanting a specific thing, which is a universal theme. A lot of people change things about themselves when they want specific things, and then it comes back to bite you because you can’t pretend for too long.”

A decade before filming, a sextape with Iris in it leaked without her permission, and it had become a defining part of her public perception. Despite this, she was a community worker and continued to carry out well-meaning humanitarian work after the scandal. Going through the coming-of-age practice challenged Iris, particularly as a woman with ambitions of being a public leader, figuring out who she wants to be in relation to what the conventions demand her to be.

“It’s not black and white,” Khunou says of the coming-of-age practice, which charges women to have sex with their husbands any time they demand it. “It’s a beautiful and empowering practice, because it’s not just something that you expect young ladies to know. I don’t agree with some of the rules, but we also come from cultures that evolve. We can decide to learn what we can from this ancient knowledge, and there are things that we can do away with.”

An Inclusive Narrative: Glow's Story and the Documentary's Acclaim

Glow’s parts were initially challenging for Khunou because she was the first trans woman the director had really been around, and Khunou was afraid of saying the wrong things. Khunou introduces the audience to the South African model as she prepares for a gender-affirming procedure, marking Black Women and Sex as an all-inclusive fare. As the film goes on, Glow shares candid monologues, recounting harrowing experiences of being arrested and forced to be kept in a men’s cell, and dissociating from sex due to previous abuse.

“Glow has a vulnerability about her, which is what made me soften up to her,” Khonou says. “In the early days, she was always a little performative. She’s a model and a performer herself, but her vulnerability couldn’t be hidden. Even with these big costumes, the big hair and tattoos, her vulnerability was there, and I thought that was such a beautiful thing. It came out more and more as the trust built between us, but it was always there.”

With Black Women and Sex, Khunou doesn’t proselytize as much as she simply lays things out – for African women who can relate and for men who get to learn. The film, which won the Best Documentary award at the American Black Film Festival in Miami earlier this year, will be showing at this month’s Women of the Lens Film Festival in the UK and the African Diaspora International Film Festival in New York in December.

According to Khunou, the response has been great, largely because “every story is a human story.” She cites Glow as an example that many viewers will relate to, even though they’re not trans. “If somebody has ever been abused, they can connect to what she’s sharing. In the beginning, I was still unsure of what I wanted her story to be, and I had those reservations about what will people connect to, but as the years went by, it was a woman sitting in front of me, and I didn’t treat Glow any differently from any other person that I interviewed in the film.”