“What’s life if we don’t repeat our stories?”
– Boubacar from “Liquid Twilight” by Ytasha Wowack
I am always mindful about what I want to review for Emancipation Day. It’s important to continually re-examine the history of slavery and colonisation, and to identify and challenge the ways its insidious legacy lingers in our present, shaping our systems, societies, and cultures.
But stories of darkness are not the only ones out there. There is a trail of lights leading from the past to the present, lights sparked by the resistance and resilience that have brought African people and the African diaspora to this point in history. These lights are a collective of our art, literature, political activism, grass-roots movements: everything that we have done — however great or small — to make our today better than yesterday. The lights do not just stop here. Our actions in the present ignite more of them which overtake us to spread like wildfires into an uncertain future.