Sights, Sounds & Stories: Hobbies of the Contemporary African Woman

Juanita CEESAY
May 3, 2012
2 min read

The stereotypical image that comes to mind when one thinks of an African woman is that of a poverty stricken, multitude of children, charity dependent individual. Let’s face it, this genre does exist yes, however the media at large has done a disservice in only portraying this one sided version of what an African woman represents.

In the Africa of today, there exists an abundance of highly educated, ambitious, career driven, overachieving genre of African women who permeate every sphere of society, from Presidents, to Cabinet Ministers, Company Execs, Bankers, Lawyers, Doctors, Professors, etc. Unfortunately for them, their stories and perspectives have taken a back seat to the more popular media driven image of the “poor African” woman.

With that being said, the advent of Africa’s growing middle class is assisting to generate an increasing number of contemporary African women, commonly referred to as young African professionals. This demographic of women are for the most part, at par with their worldwide counterparts. Though they live in Africa, their lives are no different from that of a contemporary woman living in say Brazil, India, or Russia. As they too have memberships for the gym, go on summer vacations to New York, carry around IPhones and IPads, do manicures and pedicures over the weekend, and go on spa dates with their girls.

Seems unbelievable! Well believe it, for as a matter of fact, a couple of weeks ago my South African friend, Mpho, decided to organize an all day trip to the spa with a group of girlfriends. No particular reason for it, we all just did it because we thought….hey we’re worth it!!

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