Displacement: Belonging in Exile

My lineage is one of displacement, shaped by extraction and destruction under global systems of domination.

Both sides of my family endured the Scrambles for Africa, which transformed their lands into sites of extraction—first for enslaved bodies, then for raw materials, and later through exploitative exchanges of capital and labor.

On my mother’s side, my “Congolese” ancestors—Twa foragers later absorbed into Bantu societies—faced Afro-Arab slave raids in Manyema and Kivu, adopting Islam as a survival strategy. Caught between Leopold’s Congo Free State and Arab-Swahili warlords, they endured the brutalities of Belgian colonial rule and the subsequent devastation wrought by the East African campaigns during World Wars I and II.

My paternal ancestors, the Kerewe and Jita of Lake Victoria, endured and were reshaped by German, British, and later anti-colonial nationalist rule—adopting Christianity while being drawn into agricultural modernization projects that razed forests and sabotaged agro-ecologies for cash crops.

My parents’ migrations—from postcolonial Tanzania to the United Kingdom and eventually the United States—extended these histories of forced displacement. They left a nation impoverished by structural adjustment, only to enter imperial metropoles that demanded their labor while denying their full dignity. Yet even within these ruptures, acts of endurance persisted—ways of knowing, being, and surviving that refused erasure. These histories of resilience shape the work I do today, from AGAPE‘s critique of global apartheid to Maroon Infrastructures’ efforts to build autonomy in exile.

Discipline: Survival Through Distinction

Growing up, I was taught that survival required distinction. My parents, shaped by colonial systems of meritocracy, believed that academic excellence, linguistic precision, and polished presentation would protect me from a world that dehumanizes Black boys. They demanded perfection, knowing that any misstep could carry dire consequences. Their discipline was a shield, but it also carried the echoes of colonial violence, a pressure to perform humanity under impossible conditions.

This logic mirrors the systems critiqued in projects like Accounting Otherwise, which interrogates the violent mechanisms of binary logics and meritocratic value. I resisted these pressures, carving out spaces to imagine, create, and exist on my own terms. Those small acts of defiance planted the seeds for my Fugitive Erotics, which reframes intimacy and relationality as acts of refusal and care, rejecting the dehumanizing demands of distinction.

Loss: Severing My Tongue

As a child, I lost my ancestral languages to a well-meaning but misguided speech pathologist who convinced my parents that multilingualism in a minor African tongue would hold me back in the meritocratic rat race. Bantu languages were replaced by pitch perfect English, the colonizer’s language. This erasure mirrored the larger history of African languages suppressed under colonial rule, where speaking otherwise marked one as less-than-human.

My efforts to reclaim KiSwahili, KiKerewe, KiJita, and KiBwari and reconnect with ancestral knowledge reflect a broader commitment to reviving what colonial systems sought to destroy. This journey aligns with AI&D, which reclaims divinatory practices as living alternatives to extractive technologies, and Reparative Ecologies, which honors ancestral ways of tending the land. Relearning these languages is not merely about recovering the past—it is an act of imagining futures where these systems flourish again.

Creativity: Deschooling as Defiance

Dropping out of the academy was an act of defiance against a system that sought to contain and commodify knowledge. The university was a space of conformity, not creativity—a place where the logic of extraction reigned. Leaving it behind allowed me to explore alternative ways of learning, grounded in collaboration, curiosity, and care.

This ethos drives BADS_lab, where decolonial practices of art and science converge, and projects like Measure with Care and Infopoiēsis, which explore the relational and performative dimensions of knowledge production. Writing, for me, remains central to this work: a way to resist commodification and imagine new forms of collective knowing. These acts of creation are refusals to let Empire define what knowledge is and who it belongs to.

Everydayness: Resistance in the Mundane

The most profound lessons I’ve learned have come from everyday acts of care and resistance. Watching my mother, a social worker, navigate systems designed to fail, I saw how she created spaces of care where none existed. Her work, though unglamorous, was transformative—an everyday resistance to the world’s indifference.

These lessons shape projects like Reparative Ecologies and Maroon Infrastructures, which integrate care and creativity into ecological and communal systems. My mother’s advocacy, her careful choice of words in reports, taught me the power of language to resist erasure—a principle that informs the Process Germ Bank’s efforts to archive and disseminate these small but vital acts of care and creation.

Refusal: Beyond Survival

My history is one of refusal—refusal to be silenced, erased, or defined by systems that view me as a problem to be managed. From resisting the rigid discipline of academic conformity to reclaiming ancestral languages and refusing meritocratic hierarchies, my life has been a commitment to something beyond survival. I strive to create, to dream, and to build systems where survival is not the end goal but the starting point.

This commitment animates the interconnected projects I pursue. AGAPE offers a critique of systemic injustice, while Fugitive Erotics reimagines intimacy and relationality as forms of liberation. Reparative Ecologies and Maroon Infrastructures apply these principles to real-world contexts, while the Process Germ Bank ensures their survival and adaptability. Together, these efforts reflect a refusal to accept the world as it is and an insistence on imagining what it could be.