In the Telling

On today’s episode, Vernon Textel, who was born in Paramaribo, Suriname, shares a bit of his own family history, starting with himself, his parents and then maternal grandparents. He also talks about what African-ness means in Suriname--as in how African peoples came to Suriname and how people of African descent identify themselves today. Textel is a journalist at the De Ware Tijd newspaper and public communications officer at Staatsolie Petroleum Company in Paramaribo, Suriname. Born in 1975, Vernon was raised by his mother, Muriel Texel and says that he was born into a typical Black Surinamese family.

Music by Sean Bempong.

Andwele means “God brought & delivered me” in Swahili. He was born November 20, 1977 in the capital of Suriname, Paramaribo. Suriname is a small country on the northern coast of South America where the official language is Dutch. He currently lives on the island of Saint Maarten in the West Indies where he works as a clinical pharmacist. His journey into unearthing his family history started as a child...being fascinated by stories told at family gatherings. Stories that connected him to people long dead before he was born...but whose stories helped to shape his identity...and fed his hunger to fill in the blanks. In this episode, Andwele's story begins with a 1926 photograph featuring his great grandmother on the occasion of her 60th birthday. It was his curiosity about the people in that picture that made him always listen to stories from his mother’s siblings and cousins about those memories from their childhood, and bits and pieces of information that they remembered about stories that were told to them. Music by Sean Bempong.

Odile Tevie’s love of people and their stories and connections inspire a curiosity that moves her to explore beyond the surface and cross boundaries. Born in Accra, Tevie refuses to be boxed in by anyone and embraces all the things that make and have shaped her. And for her, the voyage of discovery is a never-ending one.

Tevie is the current director and co-founder of Nubuke Foundation, a visual arts and cultural foundation based in Accra, the capital of Ghana and in outstation Wa-Upper West Region. She is a graduate of University of Ghana BA (honors) Computer Science, Mathematics. Her journey within the arts started after retiring from 10 successful years in the field of IT. After setting up Black Swan gallery in London from 2000 to 2005, her interest in artists and creative people grew. 

Under Tevie's vision and drive, Nubuke Foundation, established in 2006, has become an internationally acknowledged arts institution whose robust and engaging programming calendar has supported the career of many mid-career Ghanaian artists today. The multi-faceted programming initiatives of the Foundation can be attributed in Tevie's interests in people and her curiosity about human interactions beyond the obvious.

Visit our website for more information about the NAP Scholarship.

Music by Sean Bempong.

Ajamu is a fine art photographic artist, scholar, archive curator and radical sex activist with a 25+ year track record of exhibiting in museums, galleries and alternative spaces worldwide. He is the co-founder of the award winning rukus! Federation, the rukus! Black LGBTQ Archive, and is a leading specialist on Black queer history, heritage and cultural memory in the UK.

His philosophical-political-aesthetic includes portraiture/studio-based constructed imagery, early analogue printing processes and large format photography, which unapologetically celebrates Black queer bodies, the erotic sense[s], desire, pleasure as activism and difference. He recently made history by showing the first erect penis on British terrestrial TV in the documentary, Me and My Penis.

The Nomadic Archivists Project (NAP) is seeking submissions for The Evidence: Black Archivists Holding Memory, an anthology exploring the archival experience across Africa and the African Diaspora. We understand that the global Black archival experience is a complex one and converging over time, space, and memory. We acknowledge and affirm archiving our stories is a cultural and political act. Learn more about the project here.

Music by Sean Bempong.

Dr. Edwina Ashie-Nikoi is an archivist, historian and curator of the African/Diaspora experience. Her probing of culture and history began early, constantly asking (pestering!) her bemused parents and older kinfolk about their family and Ga ethnic histories. Having connected with various strands of blackness while growing up in Dubai, studying in the US and researching in the Caribbean and UK, she continues to be fascinated personally and academically with the ways peoples of African descent document themselves. Her scholarly research engages the myriad cultural records and indigenous knowledge peoples of Africa descent create as well as the institutions and processes involved in preserving them. Edwina currently teaches at the University of Ghana (UG)’s Department of Information Studies and is editorial coordinator of UG’s Institute of African Studies' Contemporary Journal of African Studies.  On today's episode, Dr. Ashie-Nikoi shares information about Ga naming practices, which are unique in Ghana. Ga names immediately identify one's clan, one's position among siblings, possibly even one's father's position among his siblings, one's clan, and possibly one's town of origin. 

The Nomadic Archivists Project (NAP) is seeking submissions for The Evidence: Black Archivists Holding Memory, an anthology exploring the archival experience across Africa and the African Diaspora. Please submit proposals here.

Music by Sean Bempong.

In this episode, Dr. Maboula Soumahoro talks about her Côte d'Ivoire heritage and the complexities of being born in France.

Dr. Soumahoro is an associate professor in the English department of the University of Tours, France, where she also received her PhD. A specialist in the field of Africana Studies (Atlantic), Dr. Soumahoro has conducted research and taught in several universities and prisons in the United States and France: Bennington College, Columbia University (New York and Paris), Barnard College, Bard Prison Initiative (Bayview Correctional Facility), Stanford University (Paris), Sciences Po (Paris and Reims), the prisons in Bois-d’Arcy, Villepinte (juvenile detention), and Fresnes. From 2013 to 2016, Dr. Soumahoro served as a member of the National Committee for the Memory and History of Slavery. Since 2013, she is also the president of the Black History Month (BHM), an organization dedicated to the celebration of Black history and cultures throughout the world. Dr. Soumahoro is the author of Le Triangle et l’Hexagone, réflexions sur une identité noire (Black is the Journey, Africana the Name, La Découverte).

The Nomadic Archivists Project (NAP) is seeking submissions for The Evidence: Black Archivists Holding Memory, an anthology exploring the archival experience across Africa and the African Diaspora. We understand that the global Black archival experience is a complex one and converging over time, space, and memory. We acknowledge and affirm archiving our stories is a cultural and political act. Learn more about the project here. 

Music by Sean Bempong.

Flip Couto is the Executive director of "Aliança Pró Saúde da População Negra" (Alliance for the Health of the Black Population), founder of Collective AMEM (group of black queer artists), dancer at Sansa-croma company and member of House of Zion.

He is an HIV+ brazilian dancer, performer, cultural mischief maker and curator who interrogates, redefines and creates a diverse range of spaces and actions athwart the periphery of São Paulo culture.

As a South American gay black male who is publicly open about his HIV status, Flip uses his own body as source material. Working within and across several companies, projects, different community groups and networks both physically and on online including --art, urban spaces, dance battles, balls, performances and theatre--his practice is always searching for a transit between these spaces, which provides and provokes a creative-socio-political conversation within the gaps and silences in the Brazilian QPOC community and the wider public.

In this interview, he speaks about the value of family, his biological family, his partner, and the House of Zion. 

The Nomadic Archivists Project (NAP) is seeking submissions for The Evidence: Black Archivists Holding Memory, an anthology exploring the archival experience across Africa and the African Diaspora. Please submit proposals here.

Original music by Sean Bempong.

In this episode, librarian and genealogist Phillip Bond talks about the maternal and paternal matriarchs of his family, Venus Bond and Ella Dockery,  the impossible odds they had against them and the incredible legacy they left behind.

Phillip Bond has been working in public libraries for 15 years. Beginning his career as a public librarian for the Brooklyn Public Library, he uses the diverse backdrop of the changing Brooklyn Borough to create projects, events, and programs around archives, photography, oral histories, podcasting, and genealogy. The Milwaukee native has a personal invested interest in the research of his African American Southern roots, by way of Tennessee and Arkansas, having traced his family lineage back 6 generations to the 1700's. He currently resides in Washington DC and works as an Adult Literacy and Technology Librarian in South East DC for the DC Public Library.

The Nomadic Archivists Project (NAP) is seeking submissions for The Evidence: Black Archivists Holding Memory, an anthology exploring the archival experience across Africa and the African Diaspora. Please submit proposals here.

Original music by Sean Bempong.

Where are you from? Where are your families from? Dr. Stanton Biddle began his family research in response to these questions from classmates while in grade school in rural western New York State, which was largely white. His initial questions: when did his African American ancestors come to New York; where did they come from and why did they come? These questions gave way to other questions. Fortunately, his family had amassed significant documentation of their presence in New York going back many generations. In this episode, Dr. Biddle talks about applying his library research skills to his quest to document his family’s unique history. 

Dr. Biddle is a retired librarian whose career spanned nearly fifty years. He held positions at the Library of Congress, The New York Public Library, Howard University, SUNY at Buffalo, and finally Baruch College at the City University of New York. His time at New York Public included seven years at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture where he served as reference librarian, archivist, and research project director. Dr. Biddle was born and raised in a rural and predominantly white area of western New York State. He has cultivated a lifelong interest in African American history and culture. His focus in retirement has been on genealogy, primarily involving his own African American family that has been based in western New York for over two hundred years.

Original music by Sean Bempong.

Eric Darnell Pritchard is an award-winning writer, cultural critic, and an Associate Professor of English at the University at Buffalo. He is also faculty at the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College. Eric is the author of Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy and editor of “Sartorial Politics, Intersectionality, and Queer Worldmaking,” a special issue of QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking. Pritchard’s writings on fashion, popular culture, literacy, rhetoric, and pedagogies have been published in multiple venues including the International Journal of Fashion Studies, Harvard Educational Review, Visual Anthropology, Literacy in Composition Studies, and ARTFORUM. Currently, he is completing two books: a historical ethnography of Black queer feminist literacy activism and a biography of 1980s international fashion superstar Patrick Kelly.

In this episode, Eric shares a story about his family who suffered two house fires (one when he was an infant) and how family photographs gained an even more important significance his my elders that has been passed down in various ways. Learn more about Eric's work here: https://www.ericdarnellpritchard.com/

Original music by Sean Bempong.