Unlearning Shame: Skin, Spirit and Freedom

When Europeans came to Africa and saw that not being fully clothed wasn’t considered shameful or inappropriate, they called us savages. Over the course of several centuries, they beat biblical piety into us and forced us to trade our customs for their so-called “respectable” dress codes. To capitalism's delight, these codes eventually led us into business suits and ties. I know, it’s the story of so many Indigenous peoples.

If you know anything about my homeland, Ghana, then you’ll know that most people are deeply religious and highly conservative. For a woman to be covered, signifies dignity, self-respect, and a good upbringing. For years, these ideas shaped how I saw myself and how I viewed other women. They shaped my sense of what was acceptable and what was not. No matter how progressive I became, there were certain things I couldn’t adapt to, one of them being something as simple as wearing a bikini, taking a picture of myself in it, and posting it on social media. Why, you might ask?

Well, until very recently, I hadn’t confronted the shame I carried within, shame I projected onto other women, rooted in beliefs I had internalised through my upbringing and passed down through colonial conditioning. And that’s a difficult thing to confront.

When I was young, I saw a picture of one of my older cousins in Ghana. She had a traditional cloth wrapped around her waist, with beads of varying sizes adorning her neck, her breasts exposed. There was nothing remotely sexual about the image. It communicated power, beauty, and pride. But even then, I understood that this wasn’t something we embrace in the mainstream anymore. So many parts of our culture have been quietly erased, replaced by what is now considered more “respectable.”

For someone who has spent years wrestling with what it means to be Black, and the influence of colonialism on African culture, within Africa, and throughout the diaspora, it’s painful to realise how something that seems so trivial, like showing skin, can hold such weight. That it can carry a shame whose origins you don’t even fully understand.

It’s also easy to project these ideas onto women from other communities and cultures.

In the past, I’ve been harsh and overly critical of women who dance freely, dress scantily, and use their bodies as a form of expression and art without shame. I’m speaking specifically about Caribbean and Latin American women during Carnival. I couldn’t fathom the idea of semi-nudity being an expression of female autonomy. Like many of us raised under religious doctrines, I had learned that nudity outside the bounds of matrimony was sinful, that it diminished femininity. An ideology that, ironically, stands in stark contrast to many precolonial African cultures. Still, I was quick to judge them, much like the colonisers once judged us, as if our nudity were somehow a signifier of something perverse. But that picture of my cousin was far from perverse, it was nothing short of radiant, powerful, and glorious.

If there’s one thing we know, it’s this: being covered as a woman doesn’t shield you from violence or abuse—and neither does being uncovered. It’s not the nudity or the clothing that’s the problem, it’s the gaze. If the gaze upon you is violent or dangerous, it says everything about the viewer and nothing about the woman herself.

And although I’ve known this for a long time, I hadn’t truly embraced it…until now.

This Easter break, I went to Greece. For the third time in my life, I wore a bikini. I took a picture. And I posted said picture. And even though I looked confident in the photo, it took me a long time to decide whether it was “right” to share. Even on my private Instagram, where I only share with people I personally know, I wrestled with it, as usual. And I know it shouldn’t be a big deal. It’s 2025. But still, I struggled. In the end, it was my best friend who snapped at me and said, “Why are you overthinking this?” Because I’ve always overthought things like this, what it means to be “proper,” what it means to be “respectable.” But I am all of those things. And I can be nude too. Well, semi-nude. But still, it’s okay.

It’s all okay.

I don’t come from a culture that historically associated nakedness with shame. That only came through our encounter with Europeans.

So now, turning 37, I’m going back to my roots. I’m choosing not to be afraid, not to be shrouded in shame.

Shame is a strange garment to wear for someone like me, coming from where I come from, with the customs and traditions we’ve had for centuries, celebrating the body as we have always done. What is this shame that was put on me? And why did I choose to wear it for so long?

When we talk about decolonising the mind, there’s so much to unpack, for all of us. And much of it, I’ve found, we’re afraid to confront. Decolonising ourselves means peeling back the layers that were forced upon us. It means scrutinising, questioning, and critically thinking about who we are in relation to the world we inherited through colonialism.

When I reflect on African spirituality, customs, and rites of passage, I’m struck by how much we’ve demonised; how much we’ve relegated to the so-called “heart of darkness”—and how much we’ve abandoned in our efforts to adopt and uphold the colonial worldview. And the truth is, we still uphold it. Even now, knowing that it has taken so much from us.

As an African woman, the way I’m acutely aware of my body, my appearance, and how I present myself is, in many ways, a legacy of colonialism.

Now, I find myself consciously trying to unlearn, to unravel, to free myself from these inherited constraints. To decolonise my life. And most importantly, to free my son from the shackles of European ideologies. Because we are not Europeans. And I say this knowing it’s not easy.

The world we live in, the African world I belong to, has been reshaped by our encounter with Europe. Maybe forever. But it is not the world my ancestors left behind for me. Our identity has been fractured and fragmented in ways that are difficult to even name.

But there is an Akan symbol I hold close to my heart: the Sankofa bird. It teaches that it’s not wrong to go back and reclaim what has been lost. And in my small, daily efforts, that is what I’m doing. I am going back. I am retrieving what was buried, what was demonised, what was dismissed as primitive or dark or uncivilised. I’m reclaiming what is deeply, unapologetically African.

What was once rubbished—our traditions, our spirituality, our ways of knowing and being, the way we chose to present ourselves in the world —was never dark. The real darkness is what they did to us and how they helped us to forget ourselves.

And when it comes to nudity and respectability, we know it’s all irrelevant—because the wickedest of people can be clothed in holy garments, while the kindest of souls may exist in next to nothing.