A personal manifesto.

A personal manifesto and auto-theoretical essay on Afrocentric ambassadorship and Africanness beyond borders.

ABSTRACT

This text reflects on my self-chosen role as an Afrocentric ambassador and the political, spiritual, and artistic implications of identifying first and foremost as African rather than as a product of postcolonial national borders. It argues that African identity is inherently fluid and relational, challenges performative “woke” discourse, and uses everyday cultural debates, such as who makes the “best” jollof rice, as metaphors for the borderless circulation of African culture. Drawing on John Blacking’s reflections on multiculturalism, African and Afro-diasporic critiques of cultural essentialism, and Ubuntu philosophies of relational being, I position my work as both practice and protest: a living refusal to be confined to categories I did not create.

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IF I WAS EVER FORCED TO EXPLAIN MYSELF​

To call myself an Afrocentric ambassador is both a philosophical choice and an artistic rebellion. It is a conscious re-centering of my being that defies the inherited logic of colonial borders and the modern obsession with fixed, tidy identities. My claim to Africanness is not a matter of geography; it is a matter of consciousness, a lived commitment to acknowledging the complexity, fluidity, and interconnectedness of the continent and its people.

In embracing the multiculturalism of the continent, I acknowledge that Africa’s essence cannot be reduced to a map. It is a mosaic of languages, spiritualities, aesthetics, and cultural continuities that transcend borders, a living archive of collective becoming. My roots, like my expression, extend far beyond a single nation or lineage. My truth is continental.

We are in a time where I refuse to validate myself by conforming to scripted “woke” speech. Authenticity has become a performance to be graded, a checklist to be approved by distant audiences. Yet the very silliness of arguments like who has the best jollof rice proves my point more sharply than any theory: the cultural expression and impact we call “African” are borderless. The same food, different names. The same memory of nourishment, carried across regions and rewritten in spices, textures, and family stories.

Many are so quick to draw the lines that they fail to see that a fundamental truth of African identity is fluidity.

You keep trying to force squares into circles, insisting that we must fit into the rigid shapes of nation and neatly branded diversity. In that process, you miss the entire point. You miss the motion. You miss the remix. You miss the way Africanness refuses to sit still for your definitions.

Similarities, Differences, and the Violence of Grouping

Here is one of the very few times I find resonance with John Blacking’s reflections on multiculturalism and human expression: the idea that while patterns, structures, and shared forms connect us, no culture is ever a flat copy of another and no group is a monolith to be treated as a single unit. Multiculturalism is not about collapsing everyone into “sameness” under a colorful banner; it is about holding, at the same time, the recognition of shared humanity and the specificity of each tradition, each community, each person.

To speak of “Africans” as if we are interchangeable is a dangerous convenience. It erases the richness of our differences, our rhythms, our cosmologies, our ways of loving, grieving, and celebrating. It flattens thousands of histories into one stereotype. The danger lies not only in racism from the outside, but also in the lazy habit of grouping ourselves in ways that ignore our internal diversity and individuality.

To acknowledge similarity without honoring difference is a subtle violence.

My Afrocentric ambassadorship refuses that violence. I insist on the right to be part of a larger African “we” without disappearing as a specific “I.” Ubuntu philosophy reminds us that “I am because we are,” but it never says, “I am only the we.” Ubuntu holds a paradox: my personhood is formed in relation to others, but I am not dissolved into the group. Relationship does not erase uniqueness; it brings it into focus.

Thinkers like Molefi Kete Asante, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, Ubuntu philosophers such as Desmond Tutu and Mogobe Ramose, and critics of Afrocentric essentialism like Tunde Adeleke all, in different ways, warn against turning “Africans” into a single cultural type while still affirming our deep connections. Their work echoes what I know in my body: that Africanness is a network of relations, not a uniform costume.

So when I talk about Africa as a continuum, I am not erasing distinctions. I am recognizing that the same human questions, about meaning, beauty, justice, and belonging, echo through different languages, rituals, and art forms. The similarities remind us that we are connected; the differences keep us honest, creative, and humble. An Afrocentric lens that ignores either side, similarity or difference, is incomplete.

Borderless Culture, Borderless Accountability

The politics of cultural expression today often veer toward performance: who is allowed to say what, who owns which dish, which rhythm, which hair, which word. Debates about jollof rice may seem playful, but they carry philosophical weight. They illustrate, through humor, that African culture is intrinsically borderless, the same dish traveling with us, expressed through different tongues, seasoned by different memories and soils. Jollof, in all its variations, asserts both diversity and unity. It is a culinary metaphor for an interconnected continent. To claim that there is only one “true” version is to misunderstand the very nature of Africanness: adaptive, shared, and impossible to pin down.

At the same time, recognizing how culture travels does not mean ignoring who created what, or where practices and knowledge systems originated. Borderless does not mean ownerless. Shared forms are not excuses to erase origin; they are invitations to engage respectfully with difference.

To be Afrocentric is to honor the lineages behind the forms we celebrate, even as we acknowledge that those forms have never stayed still.

Ubuntu knowledge deepens this: if “I am because we are,” then I am also responsible for how I engage with the “we.” Borderless culture demands borderless accountability. My freedom to draw from a wide continental well of influences comes with a responsibility to name, credit, and respect the specific communities, practices, and people that feed my work.

Practice, Protest, and Plural Identity​

So I choose to live, create, and speak as one who carries the multiplicity of the continent within. I resist postcolonial borders that dictate who I should be or how I should represent. I refuse to bond myself to a postcolonial rulebook that pretends my belonging stops at a line on a map when, in reality, I am bits of it all. My African identity is plural by nature. It cannot be contained by nationality, nor simplified into the performance of “woke” politics that polices how authenticity ought to sound or look. I have no interest in validating myself through such frames.

My work as an Afrocentric ambassador stands as both practice and protest. It is practice because it is something I do daily: how I move, curate, speak, dance, and organize.

It is protest because it rejects the colonial and postcolonial demand that I pick one flag, one tribe, one version of African womanhood and stay there quietly.

I do not claim to represent every African; that would be presumptuous and impossible. I represent every ingredient of who I am.

I am an accumulation of intersecting traditions, social experiences, and ancestral memories. Through this lens, Afrocentricity is not just ideology but praxis, a way of being that treats Africa as a continuum rather than a compartment. We live in a world where even playfulness becomes political, but I choose to let that politicization expose the truth instead of hiding it: that our cultures flow, overlap, and co-create each other far beyond the borders we inherited.

So when I say I am African, I am claiming the right to hold many worlds at once. I am claiming the right to be a moving target for any gaze that seeks to pin me down.

My ambassadorship is not a title; it is a pulse. It is a calling to embody Africa as living philosophy, complex, contradictory, radiant, and infinite.

Further reading

• Molefi Kete Asante – works on Afrocentricity and centering African agency.

• Kwame Anthony Appiah – writings on identity and anti-essentialist views of “African” and “Black” identity.

• Valentin-Yves Mudimbe – analyses of how “Africa” has been constructed in knowledge and discourse.

• Desmond Tutu, Mogobe Ramose – key voices on Ubuntu, relational personhood, and dignity.

• Tunde Adeleke – critiques of Afrocentric essentialism and homogenizing images of Africa.