As we prepare to wrap up 2024, our team at Adventures From the Bedrooms of African Women is busy tying up loose ends and gearing up for much-needed rest and rejuvenation. This isn’t just about catching our breath; it’s about clearing our minds and bodies to leap into the fray of 2025, which already promises to be an action-packed year. One of the last big tasks on our plate is finalizing the December edition of our monthly newsletter. If you haven’t signed up for it yet, this is your gentle nudge to do so!
The newsletter is always a labor of love. Our process as a team is to review, discuss, and agonize over every aspect of it—sometimes debating a single word for what feels like hours. It’s a delicate balancing act to craft something that feels warm, engaging, and true to the voice of Adventures while also being accessible to our global audience. This month’s draft, however, threw us all for a loop, thanks to our ever-unpredictable social media manager.
Let me tell you a bit about her. She is a free spirit who defies just about every convention of what a “proper” Ghanaian woman is supposed to be. This makes her uniquely suited for the role she holds at Adventures. While she holds an advanced degree in English, she steadfastly refuses to adhere to traditional rules of grammar, delights in slang, and, if left unchecked, would communicate exclusively in pidgin English.
For months, we’ve had an ongoing compromise: she can pepper the newsletter with one or two pidgin or vernacular phrases, provided translations are included for our international readers. This month, though, she let loose completely. The latest draft was practically swimming in pidgin.
At first reading, I was thrown. My immediate reaction was, Isn’t this too much pidgin? I typed the question into our group chat, expecting my team to back me up. Most hadn’t yet read the draft, promising to review and share feedback later. But in those couple of hours before anyone responded, I had time to sit with my discomfort—and to interrogate it.
Why was I trying to police her language?
This wasn’t just a question about the newsletter. It was about something deeper: the way language is gendered and the cultural baggage we carry about how women—especially African women—are expected to speak.
In Ghana and many other parts of West Africa, there’s a persistent belief that “ladies” do not speak pidgin. It’s a stereotype rooted in notions of class, respectability, and gender. Pidgin is seen as rough, informal, and inherently masculine—a mode of speech for boys boys and streetwise hustlers, not for “proper” women.
Over the years, these ideas have seeped into how we approach casual language, slang, and even creative expression. When women use pidgin, it’s often met with side-eyes or outright disapproval. It’s seen as unladylike, rebellious, or simply “too much.”
But isn’t that exactly the point of this platform?
At Adventures, we’ve built our work around celebrating the diversity of African women—the myriad ways we express ourselves, find pleasure, and live authentically. We challenge stereotypes about what African womanhood “should” look or sound like. And yet here I was, holding onto those same limiting ideas, trying to put a gifted writer into a linguistic box.
It was a humbling moment, realizing how easy it is to fall into the trap of policing others, even with the best intentions. Who was I to judge her choices when I know firsthand how talented she is? If she had wanted to dazzle us with $500 Monopoly words, she could have done so effortlessly. Instead, in the spirit of the season—and perhaps as an act of rebellion—she chose to throw off pretense and write as she would to a friend.
The truth is, language is fluid. It adapts to its environment and its audience. What matters isn’t whether the words are “proper” but whether they resonate. This month’s newsletter is her love letter to you, our readers. It’s warm, authentic, and unapologetically hers.
When you receive it, you’ll notice a sprinkle of pidgin here, a dash of vernacular there. It’s her way of speaking directly to your heart, without the layers of formality that often keep us at arm’s length. Because at Adventures, we don’t see our audience as just readers or followers; we see you as friends.
As we close out the year, I’m reminded of the importance of letting go—not just of work and deadlines, but of the need to control every aspect of how things “should” be. Sometimes, the best gift we can give each other is the freedom to be fully ourselves, without judgment or restraint.
So here’s to closing out 2024 with authenticity and joy. And here’s to entering 2025 with open hearts, ready to embrace whatever comes next—including new ways of speaking, connecting, and being.
Happy holidays, dear friends. See you in the new year!
