Doreen Has Freed Herself From African Patriarchy

Creater of the blog, The Childfree African, Doreen Yomoah shares her journey to non-motherhood. At 23, she realized that she did not want what a good Ghanaian girl was supposed to want: children. Though she only spent the first year of her life in Ghana, Doreen was well aware of the cultural pressure African women experienced to give their husbands babies. This pressure did not escape any African woman regardless of where she lived throughout the diaspora. She speaks about creating the blog as a way to connect with other young African women who felt as she did and to bring awareness of the African voice to the Childfree blogosphere – a world that remains overwhelmingly white. Doreen shares anecdotes of aunties and uncles demanding she have babies and potential suitors telling her she had no right to decide she would not have children without first having a husband. She connects these encounters to other patriarchal expectations she flouted when she chose to go back to Ghana as an adult. “I will not concern myself with who African patriarchy believes I should be,” Doreen says. “I will just be me.”