A piece by Muthoni Mwangi and Mwikali Ruth.
As a vehicle for African culture, one that helps it move from the past into the present and beyond, we (African Digital Heritage) want to take apart the structures that stifle indigenous traditional expressions in the present day. Part of this is our understanding that restoration includes a mental shift in communities; to counter the culture stripping and notions of Western supremacy from colonialism. But sometimes these shifts seem extremely difficult to achieve and many cultural practitioners can find the work too daunting.
Enter “Radical Hope’, a live online course exploring Pan-African histories of transformative action, kinship, and collective futures.
It promised that “Over the course of 9 weeks, (participants) will encounter the stories and knowledge of people of African descent around the world who are thinking critically and creatively about how to shift our patterns of relationship with each other and our environments.”
Above that it would help participants to find ways of practicing radical hope (anticipating beauty and progress despite collective doubt or loss) in their work and move past the feelings of powerlessness that keep us from making the changes we need.
Here, our two team members who took part, Mwikali Ruth and Muthoni Mwangi, share their experience and insights from the course.
Mwikali…
What can we learn from our histories? This question kept ringing in my mind during the 9 weeks of the ‘Radical Hope’ course. I like to think of myself as a strong-willed anthropologist, and yet, I have been living at the margins of society. I have been the best version of a colonial subject; from the day I learnt to read and write, eurocentric education became the only path I thought I could follow to make due in a world of capitalism and supremacism. It was the ‘ticket to a better life’. But who defines a better life? An even more saddening realisation is how much we value the things that are not of ourselves.
What about our blackness? Who is left to nurture and celebrate it? Where is its place in our politics, governance, and leadership? What measures are we taking to ensure our legacies are sustainable? So much of the world today is now catching up to what indigenous people already knew. Everything from mental health and wellbeing, climate change mitigation, to heritage protection and preservation. However, the history of excluding people of colour from leadership in the environmental conservation and sustainability roundtables, heritage restoration discussions and poverty eradication movements (just to name a few) continues. Capitalism is today’s global colonising force; the same system holding black people back from reimagining their beauty. The beauty of collective energy that was deemed barbaric and insufficient. The beauty embedded in community that was pushed back to uplift the Euro-American kind of individualism, stripped us of so much of the power of community.
The radical hope course renewed something in me; created a place to celebrate the current efforts and impact made by many African heritage institutions that are radically disentangling the histories and notions created about Africa and African people. We can reframe our histories with dignity and empathy. African Digital Heritage is one of these institutions championing and re-documenting the beauty of blackness through digitisation, innovation, and research. The ‘development myth project’ clearly shows the beauty of cultures, land, governance, and environment in pre-colonial Africa. All these were wrapped in community; whose legacy was made and built as a pathway for making resources more accessible and shareable. Ubuntu was very evident – consideration for other people’s welfare is not underdevelopment as we have been acculturated to think. Furthermore, the work at ADH challenges us to take ownership and tell stories that are ours in our own ways, voices, and knowledge as it has been passed down from generation to generation; our indigenous knowledge is still with us!
People of colour have faced many tribulations specifically designed to undermine and erase our true histories and indigenous ways, evidently through colonial violence of our cultures, yet still, referencing Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s quote; “writing is one thing and knowledge is another. Writing is the photographing of knowledge, but it is not knowledge itself. Knowledge is a light which is within man. It is the heritage of all “the ancestors knew and have transmitted to us as a seed, just as the mature baobab is contained in its seed.” And I say, no one has a right to take away our blackness.
To fully live the freedom of our blackness, there is a bigger task at hand; to not tire of challenging the existing Western paradigm in the spaces of reparation and restitution, education curriculums, state of governance, health sectors, discussions of climate change mitigation and worse still in our heritage protection, preservation, and conservation agendas. There is a need for pan-Africanism to provide thought material and ammunition for liberation. This is a call to answer; commit to revolutionary community work to address these needs through co-creation. As Frederick Douglas rightly said; “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waves.” This is a call for agency, unity, ownership, and transformative imagination.
Muthoni…
My journey with hope started when I first heard the quote by Marime Kaba, “ Hope is a discipline… We have to practice every single day.” Before then I had intuitively known that hope is a powerful reality-altering force that could be harnessed for our collective liberation. I am forever grateful to Mariame Kaba for giving me the language to articulate something I had felt viscerally in my body but had never had the words to describe. But naming the reality is only the beginning; we must begin to move in hope. I was stuck because I knew in my mind the importance of hope but had no clue how to “practice it every single day.” Over the 9 weeks that I attended the Radical Hope Course; I was equipped and empowered with skills and knowledge on how to embody hope daily. At first glance, the quote above reminded me of discipline- moving per a set of rules or values- but in the course, I began to view hope as such; a systemised way of knowledge, a branch of knowledge. If hope is a discipline then what are its set of principles? The tools and the methodologies used in our approach to embodying hope? It is here that I began to bridge the gap between my knowledge and the practices required to hold on to hope.
Hope is not a regular discipline in the sense that we approach it with our bodies, it is not static but dynamic, expansive, and one of our most important tools for collective freedom- it is a radical force. The Radical Hope Course was curated in a way that linked all the topics together through a common thread. From looking at African epistemologies as resistance to exploring repatterning and Afro Presentism; we saw how hope transcends our multiple experiences of blackness. By grounding ourselves within our bodies and our communities we explored how liberation and creativity require and feed the practice of hope. By looking at African philosophies like ‘Ubuntu’ we saw how the individual and the community are intrinsically linked- whatever happens to an individual happens within the context of a community therefore, it is important to create safe communities. This allows us to analyse our individual and shared structural oppressions and find ways to transform the trauma and pain caused by these structures. In the end, the course helped me move from a place of helplessness to empowerment and presence, as an agent of social change and an individual creating history and embodying shared cultural beliefs like communalism.
At African Digital Heritage, we personify the practice of Radical hope by standing in the present moment, weaving threads that link our past with the liberated futures we hope to see. We preserve our culture and heritage in the hope that future generations will have a solid foundation to create the change they desire. For me, Radical Hope has affirmed the importance of the work I do now of exploring our indigenous and colonial histories in a bid to make them more accessible to a larger audience. I was reminded why I began the work I do and given the strength to endure.
¹Kirimi, K. (August, 2022). The Myth of Development – Community is all we have. https://africandigitalheritage.org/the-myth-of-development-archive/
