Lydia's Weekly Lifestyle blog is for today's African girl, so no subject is taboo. My purpose is to share things that may interest today's African girl.

This week's contributors: Lydia, Pépé Pépinière, this week's subjects: The Red Dress Project, Reparation, repatriation, decolonization, French sex, and +233 Beef burgers and hot dogs

The Red Dress Project: Stitching Together Stories of Strength and Resilience
In the world of fashion, every piece has its unique narrative, but few projects encapsulate the spirit of empowerment and creativity quite like The Red Dress Project of embroidery. This remarkable initiative transcends mere aesthetics, weaving together the stories of individuals and communities through the vibrant medium of textiles.
What is The Red Dress Project?
Founded to raise awareness about the ongoing issues faced by Indigenous women, The Red Dress Project uses the powerful symbol of the red dress to evoke conversations about violence and missing persons. The colour red is deeply significant in many Indigenous cultures, representing the blood shed by women and the sacrifices made in the silence of their stories. The project encourages artists, especially those from Indigenous backgrounds, to create embroidered dresses that serve as poignant reminders of these losses, giving a voice to the voiceless and honoring those who have been affected.

Reparation, repatriation, decolonization. These 3 subjects remain ever relevant, and from time to time hit the headlines again with the slave-supplying countries claiming part of the profit made from the slave trade and the plantations, with the demand for the return of art objects taken from the colonies by the colonizers, and breaking the yoke that the colonizers have put on us, be they religion, culture or customs. Or are we saying that we did not have religion, culture and customs before we were colonized, or that the colonizers rightly pointed out that our religion, culture and customs were wrong, outdated, and primitive?
But this blog is about lifestyles, and thus also about fashion, (and culture) and our own fashion we have always had, just look at the rich kente, batakari and adinkra fabrics we have.

Also, look at the economic value these fabrics contribute, from cotton growers to weavers to painters to salesmen to transporters and so on. So why do we pay so much attention to foreign fashions and traditions? Why don't we spend more time and money on our own so that the money stays in the family, as the saying goes, rather than feeding the families of our (former???) colonizers? Half-baked efforts are there, with a string of (uncoordinated) local fashion shows, but mainly aimed at foreign investors rather than our own (regional) markets. Maybe it is the cost, most local designers try to charge a fortune, maybe it is the limited choices available. So an addition to kente and batakari and adinkra will be very welcome. Bambolse is coming, check this blog next week.

How to have healthy guts for optimal mental performance (part 3. This will be published in one of our future issues due to lack of space today)

French sex. For some of us French culture is close to romance, and French institutions ANRS and Inserm just finished a mass study on sexual behavior, the 4th since 1970. ANRS is mainly concerned with new sexual diseases like HIV, Inserm is more interested in the general health of all.

31000 people aged between 15 and 89 years old were asked over the telephone about how often in a month they had sex (men 6.7 times, women 6 times (how is this possible), how early they had started to have sex (18.2 years for women and 17.7 for men, this was 17.6 and 17.2 in 2006, reasons given for this “later” are the 2008 economic crisis and thus staying with the parents longer before flying out, the Covid lockdown and, alarmingly, the deteriorating mental health of today's youngsters. 80% of women have at least masturbated once, but especially for the older generations this “secret garden” is something one does not talk about. Sex toys for females are on the increase, and so are female with female sexual relationships. The use of condoms is down as if there were no STDs (sexually transmissible diseases, one of them being HIV for which there is still no cure, only a suppressor). Maybe the main thing we should conclude is that you don’t have to have sex every day to be normal, once every 4-5 days is the average. In any case, why would you want to confirm to anything or anybody at all, nice intimate sex is strictly between you and your partner?

+233 Beef burgers and hot dogs. I mentioned earlier that the beef burger at the +233 Jazz Club (Dr. Isert Street, North Ridge, opposite Ghana Broadcasting, (but you get there from the Alisa Hotel, down), Accra), was a bit OK but not very exceptional, and the bread bun was cold. So this time I rather opted for a hot dog. Which was, unfortunately, not available that evening, I was informed that the dog had run away.

Lydia...

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