Fake Wedding Rings And Fictitious Children
….in my attempts to mitigate these harassments, I started putting one of my rings on my ring fingers. Believe it or not, it has been a game-changer. I can finally walk a block without random men yelling for my attention. You should seriously see me be obnoxiously loud about my fake husband…
It’s Ramadan! Invite me for iftar? I already have the shoes #CROCS
….because I’m a grown woman (lol! deep down I really do wish someone would buy me a dress for Eid lol!), I'm settling for these new crocs. You can also shop the Crocs Ramadan collection at #Footsteps, and then we can be twinning and iftar hopping in style lol! JK JK - but seriously, get the #crocs.
Coming as I am - in my Crocs of course
Knew Music from a legend in the making, Sir Damini Ogulu a.k.a Burna Boy
…Sir Damini Ogulu -the dude has earned the title in my books- preaches in this album! He says, “you were African before you became anything else” in Spiritual. That statement is practically a middle finger to anything that creates hyphenated African-ness. From Inferiority complexes to systemic oppression.
Urban babe in the bush
… here I am, 6 years later, overlooking the Serengeti plains from my office window. I knew my hundreds-of-thousand-dollar-degree would take me places, but I did not imagine it would bring me to a job in the Serengeti.
Yet here I am, an urban babe in the bush!
One year of blogging
Listen, it’s been a while since I’ve written here and I can bore you with excuses or I can just pretend like I’ve been here all along and tell you about what I wanna talk about.
I say it as if you have a choice lol😂 I’ll just get on with it!
On hair and spirituality
If you had been following my birthday month countdown (which you should have. Jokes, do whatever you want 😂 ) you would have noticed that a lot of it was reflection notes. I wanted to sum it all up with one more reflection on two things that I have been thinking about critically recently. When I initially drafted this post, it was titled Birthday Reflections. Birthday, because I specifically wanted to conceal my age. Age is one of those things that breeds a lot of insecurities in me... it is quite up there with language and financial status, but I shall not get into those. However, let me tell why age is one that causes so much anxiety in me.
A symposium, a period and a worldwide web surfing session later
Hi, lovelies!
I missed you on Friday but I promise it was for a good cause. I spent the whole day on Friday at the Dreaming Feminist Futures Symposium and didn't get a chance to post here. I promise not to make a habit of this but this was not one to miss. Although I do not have any pictures or anything visual to share with you, I have a whole entire Journal. Each year the Africa Gender Institute hosts a themed symposium like this and with it, they release a new issue of Feminist Africa. This year's issue is the 22nd one and it is titled Feminists Organising - Strategy, Voice, Power. I am so excited to indulge in the readings and I hope you will too.
Wrapping my head around privilege
As part of African Leadership Academy's decennial celebrations, I and a couple of other alumni of the academy were asked to share our stories. We used to do this even when I was back at the academy. The process of sharing your entire life's story requires an extreme level of vulnerability and I was never brave enough to be that vulnerable. That was then. This time when I was asked, I wanted to share! The request found me at a place where I was already reflecting on my whole existence. Sharing my story gave me a great space to contextualise that existence and so, I reflected.
There were two things that kept popping up in my brain as I reflected, opportunity and privilege. Hold on to those ideas, I will come back to them.
What does Black Panther have to do with me? I'm Tanzanian!
When I heard that Marvel was creating Black Panther, a movie with an all black (except two) cast and is supposedly set in an African context, I rolled my eyes so much and awaited a horrible Lion King type of madness. Because I am not a movie fanatic, I didn't even bother to go deep into researching what the movie and "Black Panther" is all about anyway. This Friday, my friends insisted I go watch it with them. Since I had heard the movie is a big deal and FOMO is a real thing, I bought a ticket -for D-Box seat even- for the movie. Thank heavens I did!
Why Not Having a Man Behind Me at a Club Still Triggers My Insecurities
I cut my hair
OMG! I did it! I cut my hair! I have wanted to do this for a while actually but I didn't trust the barber shops oversees so when I came home, I made sure I'd do it before I leave.
On a daladala in Dar es Salaam
“Pee peeep!” The bus honks to the vendors who have placed their magunia with madera and jelojelo products. It finally comes to a stop right in front of me and I hop on before the many people who have been waiting for a bus to town start fighting for a seat. “Ta ta ta!”-the sound of my shoes in motion as my feet meet the rusty iron of the Tegeta-Kkoo bus. I head straight to the empty seat at the back. I slide in as fast as I can because, a second delay and I am one of the people standing back to back from Tegeta to Kariakoo.
Confessions of a bilingual orator
I am what you would call a bilingual orator. A two-language speaker. The two languages I speak find individual chambers in which to stay in my brain without mixing, but the two depend on each other and form one whole language with which I speak, with which I exist.
My spirit, it speaks Swahili. I learned my Catechism in Swahili. I can only communicate with God in this language, because it is the language through which I was introduced to Him. Do not ask me to pray in English. I can try, but chances are I will fail miserably. I simply do not know how to. I have heard what other people say when they say prayers in English, and they are no different from my Swahili prayers. But I, I can never say those words to God in English and mean them the same way as I would in Swahili.