We are a mutual aide network building collective power. [email protected]
New York
Joined December 2019
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We Keep Us Safe retweeted
Flashback to a time when life moved slower and bonding was a way of life.
The tradition of combing and styling children’s hair on Sunday evening is a deeply rooted cultural institution, often referred to as part of the broader "Wash Day" ritual.
Far more than simple grooming, this weekly event serves as a foundational rite of passage, an expression of maternal love, and an essential practical step for the week ahead.
The physical act of styling hair—sitting between an elder's knees on a veranda, porch, or living room floor—is a direct continuation of West African communal hair tradition and is evident especially in the Caribbean but throughout the African diaspora.
This is culture! ❤️🖤💚
We Keep Us Safe retweeted
In early 2024, IMF told the government to impose draconian taxation, and when Kenyans protest, they should crush the protest.
That's what happened in June 2024. The government killed protestors.
Since then, the Kenya government has been going round the world boasting about how Kenya is a "vibrant democracy" where people have the right to protest.
Same thing happens with mitumba. Government destroyed the textile industry. Kenyans sought to cope with mitumba. Now the same government is promising to crush the mitumba market for a textile manufacturing that doesn't exist.
Same thing with employment. The government suppresses employment with its looting practices. Kenyans start small businesses and stalls. One day, they wake up and find that government bulldozers came the night before and demolished their stalls, because some rich parasite got the tender to build a multi-storey market on the same spot.
The government crushes us, we invent coping mechanisms and protests, and it turns even our coping mechanisms and protests into capital. At some point, we need to stop thinking that this cruelty is funny. It's parasitic. We are not victims who have to hide from the government. We the host of a parasite that is the government, and parasites can be killed by treating the host, meaning We the People. #MaishaKazini #GentrificationKE
We Keep Us Safe retweeted
Europeans used to recruit West African divers to salvage sunken treasure because West Africans were reputed to be the best swimmers in the world & could hold their breath underwater the longest.
I don’t know why this myth that Black people can’t swim persists
We Keep Us Safe retweeted
Mother Rosa Parks joins Mother Khadijah Farrakhan and Dr. Betty Shabazz at the Million Man March, October 16, 1995.
We Keep Us Safe retweeted
“We are trying to heal from past wounds while we are trying to heal from present wounds, so we don't heal. Significant life-threatening events alter genes. We need to be well for the generations to come.” - Dr. Joy Degruy #reparations #healing #trauma
We Keep Us Safe retweeted
American civil right activist Nina Simone speaks about Africa and it's civilization...🌍
We Keep Us Safe retweeted
I’m watching this Colombia game, & an Afro-Colombian player, Yerry Mina, subs in for another Afro-Colombian, Jhon Lucumi, & my mind is just blown.
Mina is what Portuguese called enslaved West Africans from the Gold Coast because many of them were shipped from the slave fort El Mina in Ghana. And Lucumi comes from the Yoruba phrase Olu Kumi, meaning “My friend”, which is what enslaved Yoruba called each other in the Americas. Fascinating🤯
We Keep Us Safe retweeted
@BeeSaysPolitics The empowerment and repair of the Black community of Black America isn't going to come from wishful thinking. It isn't going to come from AmeriKKKa's government. It will only come Black unity, mind, knowledge, planning and organization.
We Keep Us Safe retweeted
“I think music is an instrument. It can create the initial thought patterns that can change the thinking of people.”
— John Coltrane
We Keep Us Safe retweeted
Peoples living in the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor know what I’m cooking for breakfast on the Fourth of July! This recipe is older than our country! (Our red rice and our Louisiana cousins’ jambalaya are Africanisms.)
ALT Cooking pot with sauce for rice
We Keep Us Safe retweeted
Happy Amistad Slave Revolt Day! On this day in 1839, a rice farmer named Sengbe Pieh—also known as Joseph Cinqué—led the African captives aboard the slave ship La Amistad in a revolt, breaking free from their chains and seizing the ship. Let’s get into some slave resistance!
ALT "The Mutiny on the Amistad" (A 1939 oil on canvas painting by Hale Woodruff, in the collection of Savery Library, Talladega College, Talladega, Alabama / National Museum of African American History and Culture)
We Keep Us Safe retweeted
After slavery ended in Barbuda, the Africans there were free to develop their own system. What they developed was a communal land system in which the land is owned collectively. For the past several years the people of Barbuda have been struggling to protect this system against efforts to overturn it.
We Keep Us Safe retweeted
Africa’s elites have been Westernised, says Kenyan scholar Prof Wandia Njoya. They rise on the back of foreign degrees rather than hard work and local expertise. Citing philosopher Lewis Gordon, she blasts "elitists" who've ruled for decades without serving real public interests. True excellence, Njoya insists, means solving people's daily struggles – not just collecting certificates. Hard to disagree?
#Kenya #politics #PanAfricanism #Traore #Decolonisation #Community #Leadership #Elitism #Africanism #AfricaWakeUp #Njoya
We Keep Us Safe retweeted
"KENYA'S PROBLEM IS THAT IT STILL RELIES ON THE WEST FOR IDEAS"
For Kenyan academic Wandia Njoya (@wmnjoya on X), Kenya's crisis is not a lack of policies, funding, or development plans, it is a crisis of thought.
She argues that too often, Kenyan elites look to West; the World Bank, OECD, UN agencies, and foreign policy papers for answers, treating development as a technical problem of implementation rather than asking deeper questions about power, institutions, and sovereignty.
She questions why Kenyan elites are still searching for solutions in the very systems that helped shape their problems? While public debate focuses on fixing individual problems, Njoya believes Kenya must confront the bigger question: what ideas are shaping the system itself?
Her argument is simple: no nation can build its future by outsourcing its thinking, especially not thinking from collapsing Western hegemons.
Finally, she argues that Kenya's real curse is actually having a mass Western-educated middle class pushing this agenda of dependence on the foreigners vs a Pan-African local model such as that demonstrated by Captain Ibrahim Traore in Burkina Faso.
Do you think Kenya's middle class is the problem? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
