#93: It Stuck With Me – No. 07

A vignette titled ‘Gap Year Exploits’ – autobiographical piece capturing the moments from my life that remain etched in my memory

Mar 25, 2026

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Gap Year Exploits

In 2008, when I was 19 and on my gap year, I flew to Accra, Ghana, to spend some months re-connecting with extended family in my homeland. At the time, I was in a very new relationship with my first ever boyfriend, someone I’d met while we were both working at a bar in Sheffield, and with whom I had been spending an inordinate amount of time in his shared student house, the two of us slipping easily into that early stage of a relationship where everything about each other feels novel and wonderful, particularly when it came to getting to know each other’s bodies. He was my first ever sexual partner and I felt very grown up having ‘The Chat’ with him. You know, the one about ‘not wanting to use condoms anymore, so I had better get myself on the pill.’

I was feeling content in my burgeoning womanhood. And yet, there was something about the timing of the trip and the length of it (the fact I’d be away for months rather than weeks) that made the relationship feel slightly provisional, as though our connection wouldn’t withstand that kind of distance. Or perhaps, it was that I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted it to…

So I broke up with him.

Not with any real sense of finality, mind, but with the unspoken understanding (at least on my part) that this was a ‘pause’, rather than an ‘ending’. And that he’d probably agree, quite easily, to picking things back up once I returned. Mostly, though, it meant I could embark on new experiences without the limitation of the phrase “I have a boyfriend.”

Once settled into my life in Accra, where I was a teaching assistant at an independent school and an apprentice at a hair braiding salon, I started heading out dancing at the weekends with a new friend who felt, in lots of ways, like a parallel version of me. She was curious about bodies and desire, but the respectability politics at play within my social circles of well-educated Accra church folk, meant that being chaste was the only option for young, unmarried women. People dated to marry. And aesthetic conformity – of hair, dress, and demeanour – was not explicitly enforced, but rarely deviated from.

Sleeveless tops, miniskirts, multiple piercings, or dancing in ways that drew attention to the movement of the hips were coded as low class, or worse, as suggestive of a looseness that could compromise one’s standing.

I’d received an ‘A’ grade for my Sociology A-Level, which, according to the exam board, meant I was already good at observing and decoding social norms. And so, what struck me, about the upper-middle-class social circles in Accra, was how closely everyone reproduced the colonial inheritance. This disciplining of the body and its expressions echoed missionary ideals of modesty and restraint, where to be respectable was to be contained, and where the expressive, rhythmic movement that came so naturally within Ghanaian culture – bodies popping, winin’, grinding, and moving in ways that felt intuitive rather than learned – was recast as something excessive, something to be tempered or withheld. So, for young women like my friend and me who were positioned as educated and upwardly mobile, we were accountable to these expectations.

And this kind of behaviour policing was new to me. By the time I was away in Ghana, I’d already been a nightclub regular for a number of years. I revelled in the energy of a crowded, sweaty dancefloor. I saw how people responded to the way I moved. The flicker of a smirk, the spark of something like desire. I learned to read the language of bodies in motion, to interpret the subtle cues of interest, hesitance, or indifference.

Whenever I pulled an introverted guy onto the dance floor, I adjusted my energy to meet his. If he stood awkwardly, unsure how to mirror me, I’d sway gently, coaxing him with a softer rhythm. If he didn’t take the bait and made no attempt to close the space between us, I’d smile, suggest heading to the bar, and let him buy me a drink instead. But if he stepped into my space, hands tentative on my waist, I’d melt into him, letting my movements guide his.

In the UK, dancing like this carried a certain social currency. Moving your body in a way that suggested confidence, ease and a kind of sexual fluency, often translated into attention and validation. And so, to find myself in a context where those same movements were discouraged felt disorienting. The kinetic vocabulary I’d picked up from music videos was suddenly being treated as something inappropriate by the people within my social circle in Accra.

But this actually didn’t matter to my friend and I, as we went out and danced in the way we wanted, regardless. And there’s one particular night out that remains etched in my memory.

The music is already loud when we arrive. Bass-y and rhythmic. We buy drinks from the bar and head to the dancefloor. After a while, we notice two hot, young rastas watching us. One of them looks like Wesley Snipes in his White Men Can’t Jump era, all dark shiny skin and bulging biceps underneath his black, green and gold string vest, and the other wears his cargo pants low enough to show off his cut V-line. My friend and I bite our lower lips, they were just sooooo attractive. And they were watching us.

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I’m Almaz Ohene, a Creative Copywriter, Freelance Journalist and Accidental Sexpert.
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