Love Through African Women’s Writing

Reading Time: 6 minutes

In 2025, as I read widely across books by African women, I found myself drawn to recurring themes. One of these was romantic love. Romance is not a category I would ordinarily gravitate towards, but as I began reading more books by African women, I quickly realised that these are not romance novels – not in the westernised sense at least.

They are, however, stories about love. Just not the fairy-tale, fluffy kind. This is love as lived, negotiated, endured, questioned, and often undone. Love that stretches across time, circumstance, and consequence. Love that transcends.

These are the kinds of stories that make you pause and ask: What did I just read? More than once, I found myself wondering whether I was, in fact, reading a love story at all. As a reader, you encounter many entangled layers in these books, and sometimes it is only after much reading that you realise there is a love story buried somewhere within.

And even then, it is rarely just about two people. These stories often encompass families, communities, and broader social worlds.

Six books stood out to me:

• African Love Stories: An Anthology, edited by Ama Ata Aidoo
• Changes: A Love Story by Ama Ata Aidoo
• The Sex Lives of African Women by Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah
• Rootless by Krystle Zara Appiah
• We Are All Birds of Uganda by Hafsa Zayyan
• The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna

African Love Stories: An Anthology, edited by Ama Ata Aidoo, contains 21 stories written by African women authors from across the continent. Ama Ata Aidoo introduces the anthology, and she prepares the reader for what is to come. I was genuinely grateful for that framing, because without it, I might have given up on this book altogether.

This was one of the first African love story collections I ever read, and I must admit that when I first bought it, I was expecting intense, romantic tales. The stories were intense for sure, but in very different ways. Many of them are layered with tragedy and forbidden love, such as “Transition to Glory” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and “Counting Down the Hours” by Blessing Musariri. Some stories do not directly narrate love but instead allude to it (such as Mildred Kiconco Barya’s “Scars of Earth”). Others dwell in the afterlives of romantic relationships—others on loss, and poverty, such as “The Lawless” by Sefi Atta. And yet, there are also stories where love and longing sit firmly at the centre, such as Wangui wa Goro’s “Deep Sea Fishing.”

As I read on, I became very pleased with myself for staying the course. These stories are rich and deeply embedded in reality, albeit fictional. They are stories that ordinary African people can identify with. I got the same sense from reading Changes: A Love Story by Ama Ata Aidoo, too. Esi and Ali’s story almost had me fooled. Just when I thought a happy ending might be possible, the rug was pulled out from under my feet. And before their story really takes shape, Ata Aidoo takes readers through other circumstances surrounding Esi and Ali’s lives. This gave the book a well-roundedness. The novel is deeply layered and engages with poignant themes that affect women within the broader social fabric. Yet what stood out most for me was Esi’s agency. In fact, I loved how Ama Ata Aidoo writes all her female characters in this book, including the mothers, with such care and intentionality.

Esi is a modern, career-driven woman who divorces her husband, only to later agree to become Ali’s second wife. There is so much to ruminate on here. I was particularly drawn to the fact that her decision was not rooted in tradition or external coercion, but in choice. That element of choice stayed with me and reminded me of a story in The Sex Lives of African Women by Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah, which recounts a Kenyan woman moving to Senegal to become one of her husband’s wives. I think the agency the women exercised in such stories is key.

Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah’s book carries the real-life stories of women across the African continent who are finding themselves, accepting themselves, and allowing themselves pleasure and, when possible, love. This was the only non-fiction book I read on African love stories in 2025. These are stories about crossing boundaries, creating new ones, taking risks, and choosing happiness, whether within polygamous, polyamorous, same-sex relationships, or outside traditional frameworks altogether.

At its core, this is a book about self-love, bodily autonomy, and intimacy on women’s own terms. As I read Rootless by Krystle Zara Appiah, I found many similar themes emerging strongly, particularly around choosing oneself and healing on one’s own terms.

In this book, themes of mental health, motherhood, and choice come through more powerfully than in some of the other books I have mentioned above. Self-preservation, too, stands out as a key theme, something many women are not always encouraged, or even allowed, to practise. I was also struck by the idea of having a “cushion” to fall back on, such as family back home, which plays an important role in the narrative and speaks to transnational belonging and support.

This is one of those stories that gives you so much hope, only to take that hope away. Happy endings are not always guaranteed. But isn’t that, after all, how life sometimes unfolds?

So naturally, when I read We Are All Birds of Uganda by Hafsa Zayyan, I was on edge the entire time. I kept waiting for the cookie to crumble. What was the thing that was going to ruin it all for Sameer and Maryam?

Luckily, Hafsa Zayyan was merciful to us in this one, though that is not to say the story is without layers and entanglements. It is. Deeply so. I loved how she broke so many conventions by intertwining her characters’ lives the way she did. The romance between Sameer and Maryam, in particular, came as a pleasant surprise.

When I first started reading, I assumed this would primarily be a story about Sameer finding his roots in Uganda, piecing together his family history through his grandfather’s letters to his late wife. While that thread remains central and beautifully rendered, the love story that unfolds alongside it adds a richness I hadn’t anticipated. Sameer and Maryam’s story was tender, grounded, and genuinely lovely to read.

This brings us to The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna. This was one of those books where, very early on, I found myself asking: What is this? What am I reading? The plot twists and sheer shenanigans, some of them dangerous, even fatal, are off the charts. There are several love stories contained within this novel, including the tender friendship between Kai and Adrian. However, the central narrative, the one within which all the others emerge, narrated by Elias Cole, the protagonist, is deeply unsettling.

What Elias frames as love is, in reality, a warped and troubling obsession with Saffia. This dissonance is part of what makes the novel so disturbing and so compelling. Love, in this book, is not gentle or redemptive; it is tangled up with power, control, memory, and violence.

If someone were to ask me to recommend an African love story, I would not recommend this book as such. I would, however, wholeheartedly recommend it as an exceptionally good novel, one that grips you from cover to cover and refuses to let go. And yet, by all other measures, the many forms of love threaded through its pages make it deserving of a place on this list.

Taken together, these six books resist any easy definition of love. They refuse the neatness of romance and instead offer love as something complicated, fragile, political, and deeply human. This can be difficult for some people to read and may not appeal to all; however, there is real value in reading stories like these, particularly because of the many intersections they address. They remind us that love is not a single, fluffy experience. People do not simply fall in love and sail off into the sunset. They stay, if they choose to, and move through what their stories bring. Those movements can include deep desire, longing, sexual attraction, belonging, strength, loss, grief, life, divorce, family, poverty, wealth, happiness, loneliness, polygamy, and queer love. These experiences may appear at different stages, not necessarily in any order, and not always all at once. These are not stories that promise happy endings or tidy resolutions. Instead, they ask us to sit with discomfort, to recognise love in its many imperfect forms, and to understand that loving, especially for women, often involves negotiation, resilience, and self-preservation.