An invitation to enter the fire circle of ancestral remembering
An imagined manifesto
In November 2024, I held KOKOBA’s first online study circle in collaboration with Ijeruka, a Pan-African educational platform that curates virtual learning experiences with visionary minds from Africa and the Diaspora. This online offering was a new site of possibilities that led me to take the course participants on a 3-week pilgrimage alongside ancestor Sobonfu Somé and the timeless knowledge of her people: the Dagaaba1 of Southern Burkina Faso. The Spirit of Intimacy: Ancient African Teachings in the Ways of Relationships, Sobonfu Somé’s seminal book, was our companion on this quest of ancestral listening and remembering. It sang a song as old as humanity, filled with sweet rhythms and potent spells that led us to a sacred dance with life.
According to the Dagaaba, intimacy is (in my own word) the Siamese sibling of ritual. One cannot exist without the other because they form the equation for true connectedness that is guided by spirit. To be intimate is to continuously be in ritual space and to be in ritual space is a proof of the burning desire to deepen and expand ones intimate relationship with the self, our community of humans and more-than-humans, spirit, the ancestors, life, the cosmos and beyond. Intimacy enables us to see the sacred subtleties that dwell in every single dimension of life and to connect with them accordingly. Intimacy tells us that grief is a gift of rebirth for the living, that a grain of sand holds divine intelligence and that we only have each other. Intimacy is found in Sawubona2, the multi-dimensional Zulu greeting that sees you in addition to the ancestral lineage that flows inside your veins. It is also found in the rainmaking dance3 of the farmers from the Matobo Hills in Zimbabwe whose embodiment of the rain is a prayer to the water element. Inherently, intimacy is about spirituality, vulnerability, intentionality, responsibility, expansion, connectedness, the heart and the sacred.
This Dagaaba concept of intimacy which is felt at every level of their society reminds me of bell hooks’ All About Love and the love ethic she carefully envisioned for us all. It is an endeavour and a practice that involve radical changes if we desire to live in a healthier and freer society.
“Commitment to a love ethic transforms our lives by offering us a different set of values to live by. In large and small ways, we make choices based on a belief that honesty, openness, and personal integrity need to be expressed in public and private decisions. [...] Embracing a love ethic means that we utilize all the dimensions of love— "care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge”—in our everyday lives.”
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions, “Values: Living By a Love Ethic”, pg. 88-94
This compels me to ask questions that could seed in the celestial vault infinite possibilities for a better “now” and a desirable future. What if we collectively embraced an intimacy ethic and lived by a set of values that are life-affirming and that acknowledge the sacredness of existence? What if we crafted our own intimacy ethic that would keep us grounded while we walk on the serpentine path of our life-journey? An intimacy ethic that requires us to tune in and listen to our inner and collective needs, an intimacy ethic that attempts to make our fragmented world whole again through rituals and ceremonies we return to, to feel alive once more, again and again.
It can look like the ancestral song we sing at every board meeting whose vibration activates the awareness and knowledge we need at that very moment. It can look like having medicine-people as politicians who can actively listen to the needs and demands of the spirit of lands troubled by colonialism and geopolitical conflicts. Our intimacy ethic can be felt in the manifesto of an up-coming project, a work contract, a community agreement and anywhere we feel the need to invoke the sacred.
KOKOBA: Meeting Our Griots / À la Rencontre de Nos Griots is a cultural project/creative offering that stands at the intersection of art, archiving, documenting, research and education. It wholeheartedly embraces the wild imagination buried in our poetic mind and uses African literature and literary arts as praxis and tools of healing and liberation. I have been cultivating its rich soil for the past three years, watering its many seeds, reaping its fruits, savouring them with you all and preparing the ground for new seeds to be planted and watered all over again. The time has never been so ripe for me to share KOKOBA's intimacy ethic - a set of guiding and grounding principles I return to when I feel the need to remember my purpose and intentions for this exhilarating adventure.
An imagined manifesto
i am telling stories of long lost forgotten histories
stored in the primal sound of our long lost oral history
please sit around the fire
and let the children from here and elsewhere
sing the song of your soul
so that you can re-member why we do the things we do
We gather in a circle, a sacred learning space, an imagined vortex, a non-hierarchical dreamscape. In front of us lies a literary altar, a portal into our collective stories - near and far, old and new - distilled from the imagination of great African minds.
We acknowledge the spiritual, healing and transformative potential of words, written, spoken, chanted or otherwise as we tap into the ancient technology of storytelling, one that shape-shifts throughout the ages, throughout time and space.
We shape our inner and outer worlds through radical dreaming, radical imagining and spell-crafting using African literature and literary arts as praxis.
We understand the relationship between sound and literature, sound and storytelling thus, we engage with lesser known rhythms and sonic aesthetics that deeply connect us to our essence as storytellers of time long gone who use sound to recount, re-member, heal, rejoice, cry and give thanks.
We remember those who came before us to seed the fertile soil of our imagination with their words. A constellation of tale-weavers, spellbinders, babalawos, teachers, kokobas, lullaby-makers, griots, medicine people, djeli and sages, whose ancestral technologies we use to negotiate freedom, healing and revelation.
We are committed to knowledge activation, mind-expansion and community care through reading and studying together as collective ceremonies and practices of freedom. The sprit of play to which we surrender is our guide on this journey of un-learning, re-learning, critical-thinking, world-bending and world-making.
We embrace the infinite possibilities of multi-modal ways of knowledge-sharing and knowledge-creation that tend to our curiosity and that nurture our agency in the now, the future and in other ways of existing.
We are of service to our community, continuously asking ourselves “How can we help?”, “What can we teach?”, “What can we make?”, “What can we share?” “How can we grow?” “How can we learn?”
This is my call, what would be your response? What would be the purpose of your intimacy ethic? What qualities would it embody?
They are commonly known as the Dagara.