A Story of Who We Once Were

Good evening.

It is a real pleasure to be here this evening — here in Boston, my hometown. Before I begin in earnest, I want to share a little history that I believe provides a fitting context for the story of my journey as an artist, social activist, educator, and now sustainable designer.

I always wanted to be an artist, and I learned at a young age to value education. I was raised during segregation, by a community that believed education was the only way to transform society, and that valued the teaching profession as a noble one. My mother was one of those people, and on my twelfth birthday she presented me with a set of encyclopedias. It was through that gift that I was introduced to Africa. From the first page I read about Africa, I was filled with curiosity and mesmerized by images of people who resembled me, living so differently from anything I could ever have imagined. Of course, there were those exotic images of facial markings, and disturbing images of illnesses like elephantiasis. But oddly enough, it was the paintings on the dwellings, the carvings, textiles, baskets, and verdant landscapes that captured my imagination.

I was reminded of that discovery while clearing out my mother's home after she passed away. Among her belongings I found a paper I had written as a child, entitled "Africans Are Great Artists."

I came of age in the small, close-knit community of Roxbury, where education, as I said, was revered, and people were distinguished as much for their aspirations as they were for their material possessions. It was a community where a young person like me could be mentored by the likes of Sarah Ann Shaw, who at that time led the Northern Student Movement before she became a celebrated news reporter; Ms. Muriel Sutherland Snowden, co-founder with her husband Otto of Freedom House; and, of course, the venerable Ms. Elma Lewis, who started a dance school in her living room that evolved into the National Center of Afro-American Artists — the museum of which still exists today in celebration of her commitment to investing in people and community. Those were days when an elder in the community like Ms. Lewis could drive by you walking along the street, stop to ask you where you were going, and if you didn't answer quickly enough, she would simply open the car door and tell you to get in. And you did. And she would drive you home. Full stop.

Coming of age in the 60s was to be molded by ideals of solidarity, community, and universalism — with the underlying belief that if the world does not reflect you, it is your duty to change it.

The post-civil rights era was marked by government employment programs that momentarily quelled the unrest and discontent, but would never restore the community to the place its people once knew. I was employed by one of those programs. It was named H.I.P. — those days were full of acronyms — an acronym for Health Improvement Program. I was excited to use my skill as a graphic artist in its first campaign to educate the community on issues of health and sanitation. That assignment, community beautification, felt easy for me. Influenced by the bold poster art of artists like Emory, who illustrated the Panther Party newspaper, and by the political silkscreen Cuban posters popular at the time, I created a colorful image of a flower breaking through asphalt. It was bold and triumphant. And I was proud.

The second campaign — educate the community about rodent control — was a stark and depressing reminder of the realities on the ground. I sat for two days in a small cubicle on the fourth floor of the city hospital, leafing through literature about rodent behavior, trying my best to imagine how to fulfill that assignment without drawing rats. It was impossible.

As an African American growing up in the sixties, I was confronted, of course, with overt political and social oppression. As an active participant in the struggle against racism and the status quo, I devoted my time to examining and questioning the social order. Although life during the civil rights movement was violent and often dangerous, it was also an intellectually vibrant and stimulating time in my life. I was reading everything, especially books on African independence movements. However, in time I came to realize that almost worse than the overt oppression and militancy we faced during the movement was the aftermath — the soft bigotry of low expectation, or no expectation.

Laws had been passed and demands had been made, but only within the narrowly defined parameters of being branded a "minority citizen." I was witnessing the emergence of an identity that felt as though it had been constructed for the sole purpose of maintaining the very social order we had fought against. There were limits placed on my citizenship, and therefore limits to the protections I would receive in exchange for my allegiance. It was this more subtle, psychological oppression, along with the dilemma of the earlier story I mentioned regarding my rodent control assignment, that proved to be the catalyst for my decision to leave the United States.

Deciding to travel allowed me to understand alternatives to my identity as "other." Bertolt Brecht said, "Man understands himself best in estrangement." Or as a traditional Ghanaian proverb reminds us, "One must go out of one's house to begin learning."

I gained admission to the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, which boasted among its faculty the likes of Joseph Beuys, Klaus Rinke, and Nam June Paik. Art college in Europe taught me that the notion of white and black was a construct of apartheid, and that like-mindedness is not confined to ethnicity. It was during this time that I was able to deconstruct, if you will, America's language of race politics. It is still amazing to me that, of all places in the world, Germany — a destination I never aspired to visit — would be the place that allowed me to encounter and collaborate with people from around the world. It was an important reminder that life-changing moments can happen in the most unlikely places. People were not just black or white; I met Germans and Turkish people, French-Canadians, Nigerians, Japanese, and others. I learned that outside of the social construct of race, we are understood more humanely through the lens of culture and values.

I was even overwhelmed by the simple question "Where do you come from?" — which on the surface can seem a rather benign inquiry, but for me, a person of African descent born and raised in America, it was a rather profound experience to have someone look at me and imagine my physical presence could suggest I came from some place worth knowing about. During that time, I lived the freedom of being regarded as an entity unto myself, as opposed to the opposite of a norm. It was during this period in my life that I began to become a global citizen. In other words, I understood that cultural, political, and ethnic boundaries were not innate, but instead socially engineered constructs. These differences make us diverse, but by no means materially different. I discovered that when you approach people with the expectation of seeing this, you can find it.

I returned to America the recipient of a Bunting Fellowship that allowed me the privilege of being part of the rarefied, intellectually stimulating environment of Harvard University — to enjoy the company of about 45 writers, historians, scientists, mathematicians, artists, and scholars. It was a triumphant return: I had gained entry into a world I wasn't fully aware of when I left a decade before — America's elite private education system. After my Bunting fellowship, I stayed on at the Graduate School of Education as a visiting scholar at the invitation of Dr. Howard Gardner, working with Project Zero. But it was being invited as an artist in residence at a private, elite New England prep school — with a population of a little over 600 upper-school students, of which approximately ten were African American — that evoked another level of consciousness in me. As I mentioned when I began this presentation, I came to realize that almost worse than the overt oppression and militancy we faced during the civil rights movement was the aftermath — the soft bigotry of low expectation, or no expectation, embodied in being branded a "minority." But I don't think I realized how deeply institutionalized it had become until, during the tour of the Academy, I was taken to visit the office of the Dean of Minority Students. It was a stunning awakening; the terminology had the same impact on me as when I first heard of the "Office of Bantu Affairs" in South Africa. And please do not misunderstand me — for certain, that era provided some equity for a moment, and many benefited, just as we did after slavery during the period of Reconstruction. I guess what stunned me was that I was under the illusion that that era was history. So it was puzzling to have left America during "Black Power" and to return to "Minority Recruiting." It was genuinely unsettling — how a struggle for equal access under the law had morphed into a language that suggested we were asking for more than we deserved and needed help getting it, when in fact we were simply asking for a level playing field.

Anyway, I accepted the position. But it wasn't long before I realized how different my point of view had become compared to those of my peers and many of my students. A culture of neo-segregation had become normalized. Although I obviously didn't condone it, I didn't respond to it the same way I would have 20 years prior. I was more understanding, because I knew something different was possible.

I reminded myself of what I had concluded during my studies in Germany: that cultural, political, and ethnic boundaries were socially engineered constructs. And if they were mere constructs, they certainly could be deconstructed and rebuilt. What also surprised me was that the faculty and administrators who were the custodians of this culture weren't mean people. I realized that the policies of division produce victims on both sides. I decided that, unlike my earlier response to racism, my life would not be consumed by protest. I would build.

The Academy had many clubs and societies — the French Club, the Asian Club, the German Club. The African American club was called "Minorities in Motion." Again, I had a startled reaction when I heard the name; it sounded like something that should be chased with a fly swatter. And it was not, as the other clubs were, primarily invested in studying and sharing their culture. The students in "Minorities in Motion" were poised to surrender to a future of institutionalized marginalization. The Academy sponsored many educational tours to Europe, but there was no such acknowledgement of the nearly fourteen percent of America's African American population — whose presence, I might remind us, built the economy, distinguished the culture, and through their quest for human rights struggled to help refine its democracy.

So, in 1989, in an effort to respond proactively to what I was witnessing, I organized a travel-study program to introduce all American students to the history and culture of Ghana through the arts. My goal was to elevate Ghana in particular, and Africa in general, to the status of an Old World to the Americas — part of our ordinary shared cultural heritage, just like Europe.

The experience in Ghana was life-altering. The students — both Anglo and African American — were stunned by the physical beauty of the landscape, the pristine beaches, the bounty of culture, and the absence of the race politics they had grown accustomed to. Notions of blackness told them nothing about the people they were interfacing with. They didn't know if they were speaking to an Akan, a Ga, a Fanti, or any of the multitude of ethnicities in Ghana. And over time, they learned just how distinct the cultures of those various groups were. It was a freedom that most of them had never known. All of us were in awe of Kokrobitey Village — a place with none of the amenities we had thought essential to navigating daily life. But there were bubbling brooks and sacred water holes, and a landscape replete with edible flora. The sandy beach in those times was overrun with crabs that would migrate there, and the turtles would migrate there to lay their eggs.

The students learned how local Ghanaians lived in harmony with their environment and the practical, medicinal, and reverential uses of the various flora and fauna. They learned which leaves relieved malaria and healed rashes. Everyone seemed to know the value and use of the trees around them — what the leaves do, the flowers, the root, the seeds, the fibers. And people treated water like what it is: a very precious commodity. You would really be surprised at what a cup of water can do. We were fully immersed in an environmentally sustainable way of living.

After bringing students to Ghana for a couple of years, I decided to move there permanently and establish the Kokrobitey Institute — a tranquil space where people live and learn together in community. I have been very fortunate to live a life of constant movement and growth, and my life in Ghana has kept me on that trajectory. I have had years of unfettered freedom to view the world through the lens of a different landscape — a different way of being, a different way of learning how to live in our environment.

Thirty years later, Kokrobitey is no longer that tranquil, verdant sanctuary I encountered when I arrived. It is being dismantled by a development model that I call the underbelly of globalized free trade. This model has had a devastating impact on almost every aspect of life, including how local Ghanaians relate to food, housing, clothing, the arts, health, and even safety. When everything can be monetized, the result is disconnection. Over the years I have witnessed a population become estranged from basically all of its life-sustaining resources. What once was freely available to all — the neem and charcoal that Ghanaians once used to clean their teeth — are now packaged and sold.

The very fabric of community has been altered. Communities where people lived in homes made of local materials and ate locally sourced food must now depend on imported goods. From multi-storey buildings, people now live next door to strangers, or in shanties along the roadside, believing junk food is a luxury. I watched commercial fishing practices utterly decimate the local Ghanaian fishing community, whose members didn't fish on Tuesdays because they believed that was the day the sea rests. Commercial farming has exacted the same consequence — forcing people who farmed in proximity to where they resided to rely on cheaper, processed foods, jeopardizing the health and well-being of those who traditionally regarded food as medicine, using the bountiful herbs and spices of the environment to remedy illness.

I have witnessed an entire nation have its reality disrupted by an outside force — a force that values profit over people, and has no regard for the environment beyond what it can extract from it.

It is not the change — change is inevitable. It is the only thing we can really depend on. The tragedy is that the people in those villages have had nothing to do with the change; this so-called model of development has been unleashed on them. All they know now is that they need money. And this new reality affects young people the most. They are stuck between the world of their parents that they will never know, and the underbelly of a global economy that they lack the tools to navigate.

It was heartbreaking to see people I knew to be rich in culture, knowledge, and resources gradually become poor before my very eyes. As the qualities I valued most about the community around me began to disappear, I made it the Institute's mission to do all we could to preserve them. This work gave us a new perspective on the value — and the sheer scope — of local knowledge, especially regarding plant life.

I began to understand that what I was actually dealing with was environmental literacy. I used to believe that literacy was essentially confined to reading written words. However, I soon realized that reading is just one form of literacy, and that there are others that are equally, if not more, important to the sustenance of life. In fact, it became increasingly clear to me that the primary literacy is the ability to read your environment. It means knowing what nature provides you and what you must provide it in return. The people I met in Kokrobitey spoke that language fluently — but they were slowly losing it.

So at the Institute, we became students of Ghanaian culture and its environmental language. And here is what we have learned. Everything needed to sustain life comes from the environment. Land is not just property or real estate — it is a living, breathing network of relationships between all living things, human and non-human. The use of the world's resources cannot be viewed, as I said, just for their commercial value. A tree is more than just timber. A tree is a natural drainage system; it provides shade, oxygen, food, water, clothing, fuel, and medicine; and it is a habitat for other living things. That is why a tree was at the centre of every housing compound in the traditional societies of Africa. And we really understood just how deeply rooted this reverential intelligence is in the culture when we learned that in the Twi language of the Akan people — one of the most widely spoken languages in Ghana — the word for body is "nipa dua," which literally translated means "human tree."

The Institute soon realized that preserving knowledge alone wouldn't be enough to address the environmental, social, and cultural decay happening around us. There were also more pressing issues with environmental degradation, and specifically the damage caused by the European and American second-hand clothing industry. I noticed that people were wearing fewer local textiles and fabrics and replacing them with these second-hand clothes. What masqueraded initially as philanthropy became an industry and a system for dumping waste in countries like Ghana, and across the continent. Over a million pieces of used clothing go into landfills every week in and around the capital city of Accra. Second only to oil, the textile industry is the most damaging to the environment.

Ghana has become a hand-me-down nation — a result of misguided development and aid that only served to trap Ghana (and countries like it) in a cycle of dependency and stagnation. I remember the AGOA Act, and the excitement it generated when America decided to allow textiles to be exported from Ghana tax-free. Of course, the industry in Ghana needed time to develop in order to take advantage of that opportunity. And of course the act was reciprocal — the U.S. was also allowed to export tax-free to Ghana. And that is when the massive amounts of second-hand clothes deluged the market, destroying the industry stream before it ever got off the ground. And worst of all, beginning to erase the nation's identity.

The symbol of what I am describing can be summed up with the image of a local man in Kokrobitey wearing a T-shirt with a Confederate flag on it that read: "The South Will Rise Again." The man wearing that shirt had no idea what it meant, but for me it was everything I had been trying to escape when I left America. And for him, the beginning of his own erasure at the hands of so-called development.

Part 3

Over the years, Kokrobitey's mission has evolved — from inclusion (establishing Africa as an Old World to the Americas) to include preservation, cataloging traditional knowledge, and working to reverse harmful environmental trends. Through this evolution, it became clear to us that we were unraveling the construction of colonialism, which uses exclusion and erasure as strategies of plunder. However, for the deconstruction to be complete, a third component was missing: African leadership.

I began to ask myself what Africa and the diaspora had to offer the world. Ghana was in the unique position of being in the beginning stages of its own industrial development, with the opportunity to avoid the mistakes of the West. What new story could we tell — especially in this age of climate insecurity? The world needed a new story. Why not tell it?

So it begged the question: why is it not happening? What is standing in the way of African leadership?

It occurred to me that those on the African continent and those of us in the diaspora both share a crisis of identity. Africans abroad endured slavery and the humiliation that comes with it, while the continent endured the horrors of colonial rule. Both experiences were traumatizing.

When looking forward, though, it's important to understand that Africa has one key advantage: it can look to a past before the trauma.

It is in that past where we can search for the answers to guide us to a healthy, sustainable future. We need an African Renaissance — a rebirth of traditional knowledge systems, and narratives on which to build a vision for the future.

As an art student, I would often have to remind myself that the naturalistic sculptures of antiquity and those of the Renaissance were interrupted by 500 years of the Dark Ages — a time of moral decay and lost knowledge. Renaissance literally means rebirth.

So when I talk about rediscovering African knowledge and traditions, I am not talking about the trappings of tradition. I am talking about the substance. I am talking about environmental literacy — the ability to read one's surroundings, to know what nature gives you and what you must give it in return.

On fashion

Now I am talking about fashion — and you all came here to talk about fashion. I took the really scenic route. My mother used to always say the shortest distance between two points is a straight line — but it's not always the most scenic route.

So I came to fashion through the lens of sustainability. The materials I use are inspired by the amount of waste they exact from the environment. Of course, once I envisioned myself as a designer, I was obliged to find a voice, an inspiration, a kind of aesthetic vision. That led me to survey the visual work I had done over the years. Interestingly, I realized that most of my pieces were figurative, and the figures were often interwoven with the environment. The figures were sometimes amorphous, tree- and plant-like. Long before I ever heard the word "nipa dua" — human tree — the sensibility was somehow subconsciously infused in my work. That set of encyclopedias served me well.

One of the first products the Institute ever designed was a school bag made from advertising banners, in a style influenced by a very successful sustainable product I saw when I visited Switzerland — a bag called the Freitag, made from recycled truck tarpaulin. It taught me a lot about what it takes to make a product: a product should be practical and useful (form follows function), durable, aesthetically pleasing, have a clear market, and — most importantly — you should be clear that you can procure the materials necessary to sustain your production.

So I was clear about all those things, and I found my way to fashion.

Our collection is produced from pre- and post-consumer textile waste — cotton sheets, men's cotton shirts, denim, and t-shirts. (At the end of the day, t-shirts are just jersey fabric.) From pre-consumer textile waste that we take off the factory floor, we also use fleece. Pre-consumer textile waste is great because it is virgin material. Unlike many who use second-hand clothes and produce one-offs, we use the material as fabric: we actually deconstruct the second-hand clothes, which allows us to replicate designs using patterns that dictate the shapes, colors, and sizes of each production run.

Our team is guided by the ancient language, script, symbols, and quintessentially modern aesthetics of traditional Ghanaian artifacts and product-making. We combine the ancient use of natural turmeric and kola-nut dyes with integrated natural fibers — banana and agave plants — to create comfortable, versatile, contemporary unisex clothing. Our manufacturing style also references traditional knowledge by using decentralized production systems, in the same way traditional kente-making did: participants can weave their fabrics at home.

One of our signature programs is the SC sweater project, which trains local women to weave on simple handmade looms — with the warp and weft threads fashioned from strips of waste material; in this case, t-shirt fleece and men's shirts. The finished sweaters are then purchased by the Institute. What's lovely about this is that women and mothers can work from home. Initially we thought it would take a woman about a week to produce a finished piece, but with the incentive of being paid for each product, we found people are producing 3 to 4 pieces weekly — which I'm happy to say means they are earning 10 to 12 times the daily minimum wage. With 50 looms out in the community, we are producing between 600 and 750 garments.

Closing

The waste that litters our landscapes is evidence of an age of careless extraction and greed. But the voices buried beneath it can tell us the story of who we once were. These are the voices we should heed in this crucial moment of fundamental change. All indigenous cultures have answers that can guide us and remind us of who we are — and, more than that, of who we can be. Only then will we truly understand what we need to do to write this next, defining chapter.

They say the tale of mankind begins in Africa, so it is only fitting that in this crucial moment in its narrative, we call on African voices to bring that story home.

We are the movement. We have the power to be major influences on what the future looks like — on how we open the world by adding new perspectives, by sharing the knowledge from this part of the world so we can work, live, and grow in concert with what we know and have experienced.

At the Kokrobitey Institute, we are a residential hub of inter-disciplinary teaching and learning — facilitating a shared inquiry into meaning, honoring and exploring traditional Ghanaian intelligence as it relates to sustainable economic development in Ghana and beyond. We achieve this by offering short- and long-term residencies, projects, and programs that demonstrate the intersection between traditional environmental literacy, art, culture, resourceful design, health, and well-being.

I am truly grateful to have met Ghana when I did, because I know what is possible. I know there are solutions and answers, and they are embedded in traditional knowledge systems. If I reference Africa more, it is because it has been referenced less, and because those systems have endured up until this century. But I encourage us all to reference indigenous knowledge systems from around the world. All the knowledge we need to re-imagine development models is there.

Thank you.

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Hosted by MassArt Boston - Tyrone Maurice Adderley Lecture featuring Renée C. Neblett. "A call for an African Renaissance rooted in environmental literacy and indigenous knowledge. In this moment of climate crisis, she argues, the voices we most need are buried right beneath the waste we've produced.”