The Manifesto

Black African artists are remembering.

We are putting back together what has never been forgotten.

We have always been here, shaping the world.

What is emerging is our ability to see ourselves more clearly, within the context of our time.

With our remembering comes an ancestral language, spoken anew.

This manifesto seeks to give it voice.

Today, many Black African artists are walking a tightrope—endeavoring to be valuable in a global marketplace that cannot fully see us, while remaining true to the continuity of ancestral memory, ritual, culture and communal power.

This tension produces flashes of brilliance and novelty on the one hand, and exhaustion on the other.

To navigate this polarity, we have begun to embody a new language.

This language is heard most clearly in places where ancestral veneration, ritual, culture and geography are the bedrock on which the structures of family, enterprise, politics, and art itself rest.

This language can hold complexity without reducing it, because the contemporary African context is layered and interconnected.

We are journeying across multiple geographies.

Local and global realities coexist. Tradition and modernity intersect. Sacred practices meet economic systems. Colonial traumas move through present generations. And individual identity evolves within communal roles.

I have come to understand this language through the Dagara cosmology taught to me by Malidoma Somé— a cosmology that sees life as an expression of five elements:

MINERAL ~ that which transmits memory.

NATURE ~ that which fuels change.

FIRE ~ that which purifies and makes visible.

WATER ~ that which connects and integrates.

EARTH ~ that which holds and balances.

Drawing on this teaching, I offer these elements, their symbols, metaphors and activities as the foundation of a shared language—one through which we might encounter each other across differences of history, place, appearance, clan, spiritual tradition and nationality.

These elements provide a prism through which to see our dynamic roles, identities and functions in this world of art.

Together they provide the essential questions that we must now ask, urgently, of ourselves and our art.

Why do we exist?

When do we come alive?

Who are we now?

What do we offer?

Where are we arriving now?

We are remembering that we are elemental functions within a communal ecosystem.

We function as:

Echoes of memory.

Guides to new worlds.

Makers of value.

Healers.

Holders of ritual space.

Our art is the expression of a continuum of:

ancestral memory

ritual

dreams

culture

and place.

Together, we are the realization of the primordial desires —

to hear and speak the innermost truth

to change endlessly

to express infinitely

to connect deeply and

to be at home in the world.

With our remembering, we open a gateway to a deeper encounter with our art and with all artists.

For this remembering is about how we now understand our purpose, the nature of change, our work together, and how we might journey amid the turbulent forces now at play on our planet.

Our remembering is a challenge and an opportunity to us all.

This manifesto is offered to Black African artists as a praise-song to inspire our coherence and well-being; to help us to locate each other, gather and work together as a matter of our individual and collective survival.

For our art is the life force of our evolution.

And it is at stake now.

Olubode

Grand-Bassam, Côte d’Ivoire

March 26, 2026