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THE FIRST PILLAR:
IDENTITY
HERE WE EXPLORE HOW AFRICAN PEOPLE UNDERSTAND WHO THEY ARE — THROUGH CULTURE, HISTORY, LANGUAGE, AND EVERYDAY LIFE. HERE YOU’LL FIND STORIES, REFLECTIONS, AND CREATIVE WORK THAT LOOK AT IDENTITY AS SOMETHING LIVING, PERSONAL, AND SHARED.
IDENTITY
Kamwala Musau Mativo
Kwame Mensah Agyeman
Fatou Binta Sissoko
Zubeda Almasi Fatma
Abdi Hassan Nur
Mbuyi Kalala Nkosi
Chantal Lumumba Kanku
Sipho Andile Khumalo
Tendai Nyasha Moyo
Moussa Ibrahima Traoré
Amina Zahra El-Hassan
Youssef Amari Benali
Naledi Thabo Maseko
Imani Zola Okorie
Baraka Nuru Kamau
NAMES CARRY MEMORY
They hold lineage, geography, belief, and belonging often more than history books ever could.
This living sequence reflects the everyday names of Afrikan people across the continent and diaspora, reminding us that identity is not abstract, but spoken, inherited, and continuously becoming.
UNDERSTANDING WHO WE ARE BEYOND IMPOSED NARRATIVES
We do not need permission to remember who we are. Here, Identity is not a question it is a homecoming.
It is the return to indigenous names that sing in mother tongues, to cosmologies that place us at the center of creation, to ways of being that predate conquest.
This is where we shed borrowed masks and stand—naked, proud, whole in the truth of our Afrikan selves.
Identity means reclaiming our indigenous Afrikan selves with clarity, pride, and sovereignty. It is the conscious unlearning of colonial labels and the reawakening of ancestral knowing: Who were we before the world renamed us?
Melanated Then: “We remember our pre-colonial names, spiritual systems, and governance models.”
Melanated Now: “We question imposed identities and affirm our self-definition in everyday life.”
Melanated Tomorrow: “We raise children who know their origin stories before they learn foreign alphabets.”
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