What Africans Actually Call It: Sex Slang, Country by Country

Language is the first thing that gets lost when a continent is treated as one market. Nowhere is that more obvious than here, where every country has built its own vocabulary and none of it travels.

This is a light field guide. It is not exhaustive, it will be wrong in places, and every reader will have a better word from their own city. That is rather the point — send us the ones we missed.

Nigeria

Nigerian English does more work per word than any other variety of English on earth, and pidgin does more still.

"Knacking" is the workhorse — direct, unembarrassed, universally understood. "Doing the do" is its coy cousin. "Chop" is a whole family of meanings depending on context and nobody will explain which one to you.

"Runs" and "runs girl" carry a specific transactional meaning that Nigerians will understand instantly and outsiders will get wrong.

"Sha" is not about sex at all, it is a sentence-ender meaning roughly anyway, and it appears in approximately every conversation about it.

Nigerian slang has the highest export rate on this list — pidgin travels with the music, and half of these words now appear in London.

Ghana

Ghanaian slang is warmer and less blunt than Nigerian, which tracks with basically everything else about the two countries.

"Chopping" appears here too, borrowed and softened. "Ashawo" is shared across West Africa and is not a compliment. Twi supplies most of the rest, and most of it does not translate cleanly, which is usually the sign of good slang.

Kenya

Sheng — the Swahili-English creole of Nairobi — is the most inventive slang system in East Africa and it changes fast enough that a word can be dead within two years.

"Kunyoosha" and "kudunda" both do work here. "Mchele" carries a warning attached that anyone in Nairobi will explain. "Kupiga" turns up in constructions that are entirely unprintable and entirely everyday.

The distinctive thing about Sheng is that it is genuinely generational. Nairobi teenagers and Nairobi thirty-year-olds are not using the same words, and both know it.

Uganda

Luganda-English mixing produces something quieter than Sheng but sharper than it gets credit for.

"Okwegatta" is the formal term and nobody under forty uses it. "Kwepena" and its relatives do the everyday work. Ugandan slang tends toward euphemism more than its neighbours — a lot of it is constructed to be sayable in front of people who should not be following along.

Tanzania

Standard Swahili is more formal than Sheng, and Tanzanian slang reflects a country that is generally less in a hurry.

"Kufanya mapenzi" is the polite construction, and Bongo Flava lyrics have supplied most of the impolite ones over the last two decades. Tanzanian slang comes out of music more directly than anywhere else on this list.

South Africa

Eleven official languages produce, predictably, the most chaotic vocabulary here.

"Ukwepha", "jol" (which means several things, one of them this), and a large body of tsotsitaal terms that vary by township and are essentially a regional dialect map.

"Sharp", "eish" and "yoh" are not about sex either but they will bracket every conversation about it.

Amapiano lyrics have been doing to South African slang what Bongo Flava did to Tanzanian — pushing township vocabulary into national and then global use, usually without the global users knowing what they are saying.

Why any of this matters

Beyond being fun: this is what a real category looks like.

Six countries. Six vocabularies. Several dozen languages underneath them. A search-term landscape that is completely different in each one — and a global industry that files all of it under a single tag and wonders why the traffic is hard to reach.

People search in their own words. If a platform does not know the words, it cannot be found by the people using them.

That is not a cultural observation. It is a product requirement.

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We have certainly got some of these wrong and missed better ones. Corrections welcome — this guide is meant to grow.