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Life & culture

Explore essays and reflections on life & culture, grounded in African realities and open to new questions.

31 January 2026

Your silence, or the friction of voice?

I am a quiet person. My natural reserve is often misread as pride. Yet, I am relentlessly vocal. I say and write the things marked taboo. This contradiction has earned me a labe…

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Life & culture

10 January 2026

The Heirloom of Hurt: Trauma, Not Curse

What is commonly called a ‘generational curse’ is not a spiritual sentence. It is not a mystic hex placed upon a bloodline. It is unhealed trauma. It is a psychic injury, untrea…

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Life & culture

1 January 2026

Your cumulative wealth in 2026

I do not dwell on what failed. I do not tally losses in a ledger of regret. The exercise is not productive. The question is never what went wrong. The question is what did it re…

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Life & culture

28 December 2025

What gives a man the right to grab you?

What happens when a simple act—holding a rail—becomes an excuse for violation? What does it mean when a corporation tells you your safety is less important than its profit? And…

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Life & culture

5 December 2025

Why we choose to disbelieve her

We claim to value truth. We build monuments to justice. We teach our children to speak up. Yet when a woman speaks about her violation, a different machinery engages. Our first…

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Life & culture

5 December 2025

My silence was complicity

I once sat in a room and helped a man build a cage for his wife. I did not lift a hammer. I did not twist a wire. I simply listened. A friend, a man I respected, dissected his w…

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Life & culture

3 December 2025

A new grammar of justice that restores, not punishes

What does justice look like when the verdict is delivered, but the woman is still broken? The current system often fails survivors of gender-based violence. The formal, colonial…

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Life & culture

20 November 2025

What if Your Day Off is Just Another Shift?

The Hidden Burden of Domestic Labour What if your "day off" is just another shift? What if the rest you desperately need is being stolen by work you do not even call work? When…

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Life & culture

13 November 2025

The water and the clay ancestral wisdom

What does it mean to truly drink? Not just to swallow, but to receive water as our bodies are meant to receive it? We have traded this essential purity for convenience. We store…

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Life & culture

10 November 2025

The soul in our hands

You are African. How many African outfits do you own? I can still hear the steady hum of my mother's sewing machine. I remember coming in from playing outside and finding a new…

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Life & culture

9 November 2025

Nature's equation: Living by seasonal rhythms

Where do the stories come from? They whisper from the morning message of a friend remembering shared laughter. They echo in the memory of a failed meeting that taught me more th…

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Life & culture

6 November 2025

Building a communal home: Our shared space to heal and grow

What does true sanctuary feel like in a world that never stops demanding? Where can we be both strong and vulnerable without judgement? How do we build spaces that honour our ne…

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