Akosua Hanson is an artistic activist, based in Accra, Ghana. Her work spans radio, television, print media, theatre, film, comic art exhibitions, art installations, and graphic novels. Akosua’s activism has been centred around pan-Africanism and feminism, with an interest in the intersection of art, pop culture, and activism. She has a Masters in Philosophy in African Studies with a focus on Gender and African Philosophical Thought. Akosua Hanson is the creator of Moongirls, a graphic novel series that follows the adventures of four superheroes fighting for an Africa free from corruption, neocolonialism, religious fundamentalism, rape culture, homophobia and more. She works as a radio host at Y 107.9 FM, Ghana.

Ever experienced moments of deep clarity during or after sex?

In these panels, the Moongirl Wadjet is engaged in BDSM lovemaking with a two-gender daemon. Of the four Moongirls, Wadjet is the healer and philosopher, the conduit of the Oracle. She does this to launch a scientific and spiritual process – an experiment she calls “Illumination by the Light of the Full Moon” – through which she traces a vibrational time arc between her memories, sensations, emotions, visions, and imagination. It is a form of vibrational time travel in order to discover what she terms as “truth-revelations.” 

During the experience, some of Wadjet’s hazy visions include: an approaching apocalypse brought about by humans’ environmental destruction in service to a voracious capitalism; a childhood memory of being hospitalized after a mental health diagnosis; and a vision of a Moongirls’ origin story of the Biblical figure of Noah as an ancient black Moongirl warning of the dangers of environmental pollution.

More than a fun kink to explore for the sensations, BDSM can be a way of addressing emotional pain and trauma. It has been a medium of sexual healing for me, providing a radical form of liberation. There is a purge that happens when physical pain is inflicted on the body. Inflicted with consent, it draws out emotional pain – almost like a “calling forth.” The whip on my body allows me to release suppressed emotions: anxiety, depression, my sense of defenselessness to the stresses that overwhelm me sometimes.

When engaging in BDSM as an avenue for healing, lovers must learn to be very aware of and responsible for each other. Because even though consent may have been initially given, we must be attentive to any changes that might occur in the process, especially as feelings intensify. I approach BDSM with the understanding that in order to surrender pain, love and empathy have to be the basis of the process and by that, I create space or open up for love. 

The engagement with aftercare after the infliction of pain is a completion of the process. This can be done in very simple ways such as cuddling, checking if they need water, watching a movie together, sharing a hug or just sharing a joint. It can be whatever your chosen love language is. This holding space, with the understanding that wounds have been opened, is necessary to complete the process of healing. It is the biggest lesson in practising empathy and learning to really hold your partner, due to the delicacy in blurring the lines between pain and pleasure. In this way, BDSM is a form of care work for me.

After BDSM sex, I feel a clarity and calm that puts me in a great creative space and spiritually empowers me. It is an almost magical experience watching the pain transform into something else in real time. Similarly, this personally liberating experience of BDSM allows Wadjet to access the foreknowledge, wisdom, and clarity to aid in her moongirl duties in fighting African patriarchy.

Moongirls was birthed during my tenure as the director for Drama Queens, a young artistic activist organization based in Ghana. Since our inception in 2016, we’ve employed different artistic media as part of their feminist, pan-Africanist, and environmentalist activism. We used poetry, short stories, theatre, film, and music to address issues such as corruption, patriarchy, environmental degradation, and homophobia.

Our inaugural theatre production, “The Seamstress of St. Francis Street” and “Until Someone Wakes Up” addressed the problem of rape culture in our communities. Another one, “Just Like Us,” was arguably one of the first Ghanaian theatre productions to directly address the country’s deep-seated issue of homophobia. Queer Universities Ghana, our queer film workshop for African filmmakers, has trained filmmakers from Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda. Films birthed during the workshop, like “Baby Girl: An Intersex Story” by Selassie Djamey, have gone on to be screened at film festivals. Therefore, moving to the medium of graphic novels was a natural progression.

About seven years ago, I’d started a novel that I never completed about the lives of four women. In 2018, the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA) opened up a grant opportunity that launched the production of the project and my uncompleted novel was turned into Moongirls. 

There have been two seasons of Moongirls made up of six chapters each. Contributing writers and editors for the first season were Suhaida Dramani, Tsiddi Can-Tamakloe, George Hanson, and Wanlov the Kubolor. Writers for the second season were Yaba Armah, Nadia Ahidjo, and myself. Character illustrations and conceptualizations were by Ghanaian artist Kissiwa. And AnimaxFYB Studio, a premium animation, design, and visual effects studio, does the illustrations.

Writing Moongirls between 2018 and 2022 has been a labour of love for me, even, a labour for liberation. I aim to be very explorative in form and style: I’ve dabbled in converting other forms of writing, such as short stories and poetry, to graphic novel format. By merging illustration and text, as graphic novels do, Moongirls aims to tackle the big issues and to honor real life activists. My decision to centre queer women superheroes – which is rare to see in this canon – came to mean so much more when a dangerous backdrop started developing in Ghana in 2021. 

Last year saw a marked hike in violence for the Ghanaian LGBT+ community that was sparked by the shutdown of an LGBT+ community centre. This was followed by arbitrary arrests and imprisonment of people suspected to be on the queer spectrum, as well as of those accused of pushing an “LGBT agenda.” Crowning this was the introduction in Ghanaian Parliament of an anti-LGBT bill named “Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values.” This bill is arguably the most draconian anti-LGBT bill ever drafted in the region, following previous attempts in countries like Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya. 

I remember quite vividly the first time I read the draft of this bill. 

It was a Friday night, typically a night I take off to rest or party after a long work week. By sheer luck, the draft was leaked and shared with me on a WhatsApp group. As I read it, a deep sense of fear and alarm made burnt toast of my Friday night chill. This bill proposed to slap any LGBT+ advocacy with five to ten years of imprisonment, and to fine and imprison people who identify as LGBT+ unless they “recanted” and accepted conversion therapy. In the draft bill, even asexual people were criminalized. The bill went for all fundamental freedoms: freedoms of thought, of being, and the freedom to hold one’s personal truth and choose to live your life by that truth. The bill even went for social media and art. If it passed, Moongirls would be banned literature. What the bill proposed to do was so evil and far-reaching, I was stunned into a depression at the depth of hate from which it had been crafted. 

Scrolling through my Twitter timeline that night, the terror I felt inside me was mirrored. The timeline was a livestream of emotions as people reacted in real time to what they were reading: disbelief to terror to a deep disappointment and sorrow when we realized how far the bill wanted to go. Some tweeted their readiness to fold up and leave the country. Then, in the way Ghanaians do, sorrow and fear is alchemized to humour. From humour came the zest to upscale the fight.

So, the work still continues. I created Moongirls to provide an alternative form of education, to provide knowledge where it has been suppressed by violent patriarchy, and to create visibility where the LGBT+ community has been erased. It is also important that African BDSM is given this platform of representation when so much of BDSM representation is white. Sexual pleasure, through BDSM or otherwise, as well as non-heterosexual love, transcend race and continent because sexual pleasure and its diversity of experience are as old as time.