retriever & bearer of indigenous Afrikan lifeways
What is the relationship between grief and honesty, grief and truth? I see grief as a braided rope with strands of anger, sadness, fear, disgust, all those most knotted of reactions to what we have lost, in a word, to our pain. Is grief truth because it names our most humbling truth: we of the humus, we have lost We lose, daily, in each moment, big and small Is this…
GRIEF AND REST “Rest? Grief? I don’t have time for that” she said to me. Collectively we are in awakened deep generational pain. Awakening to the ways colonialism never truly ended. Awakening to the thieving of the colonial State both past and present. Awakening to the ways in which we are made disposable. Awakening to the places where trust and community are broken and need to be rebuilt. Even for…
When did you realise you were Afrikan? What does it mean to you? If you’re like me and grew up in an Afrikan country, you may not have realised your Afrikanness early on – you may not have had a reason to. Growing up in my small town outside of Nairobi, Afrika did not have as much salience as my neighbourhood and town. In honesty, even Nairobi was an excessively…
“Tracing African pasts through the interlinked lenses of agency, possibility and imagination allows us to counter narratives of Africa as a blank slate, to challenge the privileging of whiteness and Europeanness, and to debunk myths about Africans as people who are destructive or unchanging. It allows us to illuminate diverse possibilities of human living to build on, against the hegemony of a present moment that unsees and devalues us. For…
When we wrote our open letter to the department of African Studies, hoping to document our collective grievances and open a conversation about how to change and improve the course for future students, we titled it “Searching for the ‘Africa’ in African Studies”. Getting through that course and being able to truly say that one had learnt somethings in African Studies, one had to search. Search beyond the shock of…
I was recently again in London for a brief moment for my graduation. It’s summer and sunny and warm – the best time to be in London because you can be outside for longer periods of time. And yes indeed, summer means picnics, walks in parks, swims in ponds, lunches in parks, games in neighbourhood greens, full outdoors enjoyment of life. So much so that I thought visitors to London…