In many African households, talking about sex is seen as taboo. For the daughters in those households, those conversations consisted of a popular one-liner: ‘If a man touches you, you will get pregnant.’ 

But sex education is so much more than a birth control or pregnancy scare lesson; it also includes conversations about vaginal health. A refusal to talk about sex means girls grow up learning reproductive care from social media, where they learn harmful practices like douching and resort to questionable herbal mixtures to treat vaginal infections.

This commonplace ignorance is also what fuels the stereotype that every itching around a woman’s genitals is a sign of poor hygiene.

In this article, four women share their most embarrassing experiences with vaginal infections and the cost of ignorance on their reproductive health.

1.) “My Elder Brother Said My Vagina Was Smelling” — *Rose (25)

A few years ago, I noticed that I had chunky vaginal discharge. At the time, I didn’t know about vaginal hygiene, so I thought that if I rinsed with water and wore clean underwear, it would go away with time. 

After a few months,  the discharge turned green. For some strange reason, I believed it looked like that because my panties were old. When the discharge started to smell, I thought it was caused by the hot weather because I was plus-sized at the time. Back then, vagina talk was dirty talk, so I didn’t know who to speak to about it. 

One afternoon, I was sitting with my brother and mum when my 24-year-old elder brother started sniffing aggressively. He sniffed until he was directly in front of me, then he made a sour face and said very loudly that my ‘bum bum’ was smelling. It felt even worse because I knew he was right; the smell was so bad that other people could smell it, but I didn’t know what was wrong with me. 

After an intense bout of tears and doomscrolling, I found articles suggesting that drinking enough water and cutting out soda would help. You can imagine how that went.

I didn’t realise that I had an infection for an entire year until I went to the hospital to treat an ulcer in my intestines. While running tests, the doctor asked me if I had an infection. I said I didn’t because at the time, I believed only sexually active people could have vaginal infections. Until I finished treatment, I didn’t ask the doctor what the infection was because I was too scared to ask questions.

It’s just very sad that I went a whole year without knowing that I had a vaginal infection.

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2.) “They Called Me a Prostitute Because I Had a Vaginal Infection” – *Esther (23)

In my first year of university, I was 17 and basically clueless about everything, including my vagina. Unlike now, where we have women who talk freely about their bodies, conversations about vaginal health were centred around shame and hygiene. My only source of information was from friends, fear-mongering Facebook posts, and misogynistic memes about smelly vaginas, itching, pubic rashes and boils.

Girls with these conditions were known as ‘dirty girls’, and I developed an obsessive phobia of being labelled a dirty girl. It wasn’t enough just to bathe and wash down there; I wanted to kill the germs that would make me stink. My search led me to my roommate, who introduced me to a group chat created by a vendor who sold intimate products. 

The girls in the group swore by practices like washing the vagina with hot water and Dettol daily and spraying perfume on panties before wearing them.  I started doing all of this and more. After a few days, my vagina began to itch terribly, and my discharge was off. I couldn’t complain to anyone because the symptoms were the same as what the girls in that group were trying to prevent, and I felt very ashamed. 

In hindsight, that group wasn’t created to give information about vaginal health. The vendors used shame and fear-mongering to sell their products, because why was anyone telling a 17-year-old that vaginas should smell like flowers?

When the infection started to get really bad, I bought the yoni pill that the vendor marketed as the cure to any vaginal infection. I confided in the roommate who introduced me to the vendor that the pill was making things worse. She reassured me that it would get better.  Three days later, I saw my pictures in a collage with dirty panties on my campus’s most popular WhatsApp channel. Apparently, someone had sent an anonymous message telling the handler that I had a vaginal infection. The person had included my full name, department and level. A year later, right before her final exams, my roommate confessed that she was the person who sent the message and my pictures to the handler.

People equate having a vaginal infection with being promiscuous, and in her message, she had mentioned that I had slept with half of the campus. Mind you, I was not even sexually active at the time. Strangers sent in stories about my ‘fishy’ vagina, and men I had never met claimed they had slept with me.

People would stare and whisper as I walked around my faculty. I became depressed and stopped going to classes for about three weeks. My third roommate noticed and asked me what was wrong. Then she took me to the pharmacy, got me drugs and had me burn all my underwear. 

After that incident, I became very self-conscious. It took three years for me to feel comfortable with my body enough to try intimacy, but the silver lining is that it has also made me very knowledgeable about reproductive health. Now, I know better than to buy pills recklessly or to put things in my vagina that don’t belong there.

3.) “I Found Out I Had an Infection During Sex” — *Dabira (24)

Early last year, I noticed that my discharge was watery and I had a fishy smell coming from my vagina. It went on for about a month, but I didn’t realise that it was an infection. I had never even heard of bacterial vaginosis (BV) at the time. 

I had just started dating my girlfriend at the time, and we were about to have sex for the first time. We decided to try oral, and the moment she put her head between my legs. She stopped, took a deep breath, and said,  ‘Babe, I think you have BV. ’ 

I was mortified. She was very gentle about it, but I still felt dirty and ashamed. My girlfriend is a practising nurse, so I didn’t need to go to the hospital; she gave me the medication I needed. Even though she tried her best to make things less awkward, my ego was bruised. I couldn’t stop thinking that she saw me as unhygienic. 

I couldn’t have sex for months after, and it took a lot of conversations and reassurance for my self-esteem to return and for me to be comfortable with intimacy again. 

4.) “The Smell From My Vagina Stank Up an Entire Classroom” — *Darcy (20)

In my first year of university, I lived in a dormitory with public bathrooms. One day, I realised I needed to shave down there, but I had run out of hair removal cream and could not get another tube anywhere on campus. After a while, I gave up on the hair removal cream and decided to use a shaving stick. 

I wasn’t comfortable with having people around while doing something so intimate, so I decided to wait till late at night to do it because the bathroom would be empty then. At 2 am, I went to the bathroom and began. While I was mid-shave, the lights went off, and I panicked. In the process, I dropped the razor on the floor, picked it up, and ran back to my room. 

The next day, I used the same razor, rinsed it, and continued shaving with it. After about two days, my vagina started to itch badly, the skin around that area was covered in small boils, and there was swelling in several places. The worst symptom was the awful smell. 

My roommates complained about a strange smell in the room after a while, so I started wearing trousers and covering my legs with blankets and wrappers to keep the smell in. The inflammation was so bad that I couldn’t wash myself properly. The smell worsened from poor hygiene and from the sweat that came with always covering my legs in heavy layers.

One afternoon, the discomfort got particularly bad, and it was too hot to wear trousers, so I wore a skirt to class. Halfway through the class, the lecturer noticed that something smelled bad.  Everyone (including me) agreed and began searching for the smell in the small space. It took me a few seconds to realise that the smell was coming from me. Thankfully, no one had noticed yet. That experience was the last straw. I left school immediately and went home. 

I went to a hospital with my mom for treatment and was directed to see the matron. After telling her my symptoms, she asked me if I had a boyfriend.  I was confused by the question, but I told her I didn’t. 

She nodded and began to talk about STIs and how chastity was very important. My mom mentioned that I had not brought up sex at any point, to which she replied that small girls like me could not be trusted, and she could tell that I had slept around from the look on my face. We left and went to another hospital, where I was told I had a mild bacterial infection and an inflammation likely caused by the razor. 

Since then, I’ve been unable to use a razor to shave. I also started to wipe myself when I feel like I’ve sweated between my thighs. It was an awful experience, but at least I’ve become more conscious about reproductive health. 

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