Without Them there is no Us

Let me type freely.

This year, like every year, I have reflected on the importance of African American people to me. I see them as kin: first cousins, my mother's sister's children. And I don't use the word "family" lightly. So when I say that, I mean it with my full chest, not as a metaphor and not as a cute diasporic moment. For me, it is something real that has shaped who I am, how I think, and the space I allow myself to take up on earth.

I feel like I owe so much to African American people, Black Americans, Foundational Black Americans. Without them, I wouldn't even be living in Australia (and I'm not forgetting the ongoing struggle of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples here) but so much of the global civil rights movement was built on the foundations African American people laid down. The Panthers. The visibility. The strategies. The clarity about state violence. The refusal to make oppression polite. African Americans shifted the global imagination about what Black people could demand.

The first examples of Blackness I ever saw, Black womanliness, Black girlhood, Black joy, were Black women and girls on television. Before I even knew what America was or grasped the enormity of being Black here, on this shared earth.

Gulla Gullah Island. Oh, Gulla Gullah Island. How that show formed little me. Then as I got older came Sister Sister, My Wife and Kids, Moesha, Taina, The Cheetah Girls, and The Parkers. A mum and daughter, both fat and dark-skinned. Funny, loud, magnetic, and completely unapologetic about taking up space. At a time when the UK simply was not ready to put fat Black women on television, I was living. Seeing myself in hair texture, skin colour, broad nose and curves on a screen felt like something close to relief.

Then came the years of desperately wanting to move to America. It seemed like there were more ways to be Black there. Back in the '00s and '10s, the UK hadn't caught up yet. I was rocking single plaits, also known as box braids, and being laughed at by other Black girls at school because of it, but I'd get home, switch on the TV, and there they were. Other Black girls with hair like mine, not apologising for a thing. Slowly the UK changed, but by then I had already found my way to Australia, where my time has also been marked by African American people supporting, organising and trailblazing for our broader community of Black people of African descent in so called Australia.

I have been to America many times. California, Texas, Tennessee, Maryland, Rhode Island, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Philadelphia, New Jersey and Illinois. I also have family living there as part of the great Nigerian diaspora calling America home. I've felt the air in those places. I've seen the roads. I've sat in rooms where history is not "back then" it is still in the walls, still in the way people hold their bodies, still in the silence before certain sentences.

And even though my own relatives in the US are Nigerian, the inheritance I'm speaking about is not family by blood. It's family by impact.

I will never forget a road trip we took with my uncle, well he's technically my mum's cousin. He was driving us from Texas to Tennessee to see my aunty, okay again she's my mum's cousin. On that drive we were stopped by the police and I will never forget how the whole atmosphere in the car turned hazy, heavy and strange. The way my uncle switched his voice and behaviour so instantly. We all went tense because we could read his feelings. That moment has stayed with me forever. The thought that people who look like me go through versions of that every day still feels beyond fathom.

That moment made it very clear to me that in America, power lives in everyday encounters and African Americans' determination and grit would always have to be disciplined, precise and swathed in refusal.

Now, a lot of what I know about refusal, I learnt from African Americans. Actually, a lot of what I know about softness, too. And that might sound contradictory until you understand the specific genius of making softness possible in a world that keeps demanding hardness. I learnt what it looks like to refuse without people even noticing that you've been defiant, to say no and leave it at that and to hold a boundary, but unfortunately my Britishness does get in the way, so I might sometimes apologise for having one. I learnt what it means for Black women to take up space physically and spiritually. On camera. In boardrooms. In art. In community. In grief. In pleasure. The confidence, the range, the insistence on being fully human. It has fed me, genuinely and deeply, in ways I am still discovering.

Sometimes people talk about African American influence like it's pop culture, oh it is just about the music and film and fashion and slang. The "cool" side of Blackness, packaged and distributed for whose consumption?

That is not what I'm interested in.

I am interested in the culture that built and continues to build roads. The kind you walk on without knowing who poured the concrete, who bled for the ground to be flat enough to walk on at all, that skipped with glee along the path once it was laid down. That's African American culture to me: grit, resilience and a whole lot of fucking joy.

I feel immense pride at the accomplishments of African American people and deep sorrow when their rights are violated in heinous and tragic ways. I used to find those feelings strange, outsized, as if they weren't mine to have. Then I understood: these are my kin. People taken, sold and stolen from the lands of our shared forefathers and foremothers, to lands far away, to be treated as less than. But still they rose. And kept rising. And are still, right now, rising.

If I'm being honest, part of my adoration of being Black, my bone-deep pride in it, comes from what African Americans show the world. Not because other Black cultures don't have brilliance. We do. All of us. But the scale of what African Americans have had to create from dispossession is extraordinary. The output is not just culture. It is a civilisation response. Music, literature, politics, spirituality, language, style, all built from the wreckage of everything being taken. And somehow, in all of it, it still reminds me of home.

So yes. Civil Rights. Black literature. Pan-Africanism. Modern music. First Black everything. So called Gen Z slang (I said what I said). Intricate hairstyles. Fashion. Long, elaborate nails (my personal favourite, don't come for me). The list goes on and it should go on, because the contributions go on.

Without them there is no us. Read that again. Sit with it. Don't be defensive. Without them, there is no us.

So like any ancestor, like any elder, they must be honoured and venerated in the great Yoruba tradition of oríkì.

I pray for the souls of my stolen kin. I pray for their ancestors. I pray for the ones who endured what should never have existed, in conditions that should never have been possible. I call on the ones whose names were changed, and the ones whose names were kept. And in whatever room I'm in, I try to make it plain that who I am, and who I am becoming, comes off the backs of giants, those who were taken to America and those who stayed in Nigeria.

As a Yoruba Nigerian, I love my culture fiercely and believe that those of us whose families remained have had the privilege of continuity and a rootedness that African Americans were systematically and violently denied. That is a privilege I hold with some care and some grief.

And still. And still. African Americans grabbed self-determination anyway. They built culture anyway. They made family anyway. They made beauty, and politics, and softness, and refusal from almost nothing, against almost everything.

If that isn't sacred, then what is?

Under the sacred, there is a question that sits underneath and I won't pretend it doesn't, because it comes to me now and then and is possibly a big part of why I started Ẹlẹ́wà.

I don't know whether my own ancestors participated in capturing and selling people. I don't know what side of the story my lineage sits on, in specific terms. And I am not interested in comforting myself with that uncertainty. The feeling isn't guilt exactly. It's closer to mourning which drifts into nausea. Because even if people did not understand the full machinery of what was being done, there was a point where it became impossible not to know that something monstrous was happening. And if they knew, and carried on, that is a yuck I can't perfume. I won't even try.

I'm not saying this to perform shame or to position myself as one of the good ones. I'm saying it because I refuse denial. I refuse the clean, comfortable stories we tell ourselves to keep our heads in the sand, to pretend that what we don't know won't hurt us, or to act like facing the past is pointless because it's in the past.

And maybe this is part of what makes me hold this kinship so seriously. Because African Americans did not get to look away. The violence is the water they have to swim in, every single day.

So, how do we thank them? Honestly, I don't know if we can. I just know that I feel duty bound as one of those whose families remained, who got to stay on the soil of our ancestors, to reach across those oceans and say: I see you. I know what you made possible. 

So here is my vow.

I will show up for African Americans the way they have shown up for the world without ever knowing our names. I will defend their dignity, not just enjoy their culture. I will practise solidarity as something real and ongoing, not a seasonal gesture or a trend I pick up in February and put down in March.

I will also keep my diaspora lens wide, because the diaspora is part of my wellbeing, my mental health and my sense of belonging. From people who name themselves Black in different ways across the Pacific; Māori, Melanesian, Aboriginal, to people who stayed home on the continent, to those who created whole new cultures on new islands, to people who returned and rebuilt. We are not all the same, but we are all reckoning with what history did, and deciding what we will do next.

This is my thank you. Recognition. Practice. Prayer.

Where would we be without them? I don't think I could answer that. I don't think any of us could.