Bridging the gap

WE ARE BLACKNESS

Bridging the gap

We're not a t-shirt brand that talks about culture. We're a cultural transmission project that takes the form of clothing.

Black and white close-up of a person's clenched fist

Activism is building. And building doesn't show.

Sankara's Faso Dan Fani, Ella Baker's organising: the struggles that last are the ones that build something able to carry on without its founder. Read more...

Clear liquid poured from a glass bottle splashes onto dry red earth in low golden light

Pouring to Return: Libation on the Other Side of the Atlantic

The same gesture as in Benin, poured on the other side of the Atlantic. What it became in a place where the law said these people had no ancestors. Read more...

Sodabi, akpeteshie, ogogoro: same spirit, same ban, same answer

Three countries, three names, one spirit. The same treaty banned it, and in the same decade each of them made it anyway, without ever comparing notes. Read more...

Pouring for the Ancestors: Libation in Vodun

A few drops on the ground before drinking. In Vodun, libation is not a loss: it is an address, a first glass served to ancestors who never left the family. Read more...

Sodabi: Benin's Sacred Spirit and the Memory of the Ancestors

Libation is millennia old, sodabi barely a century. How a palm wine spirit born in 1920s Benin, banned for forty-four years, became the drink poured for the ancestors. Read more...

An elder Black man rests a hand on a younger man's shoulder as they talk on a street lined with pastel Creole houses

Sankofa, a User's Guide: Three Moves to Decide With Your Past

Sankofa is not an image, it is a move. Three things to go back and fetch: teachings and not just stories, know-how and not just words, criteria and not just... Read more...

Close-up of many cowrie shells forming a dense pattern

Can AI Replace the Fâ?

The Fâ counted in base two long before our processors. An AI can learn its 256 signs and recite every verse, but reciting is not receiving. Read more...

A young Black woman in an indigo garment looks back over her shoulder, holding a pale egg against her chest, in warm golden light

Why The Return Begins With Heritage

We Are Blackness returns, not with something new but with something retrieved. Why the comeback starts with Heritage, and what sankofa, go back and get it, means to us. Read more...

Black history: a legacy that lives every day

Gumbo, Carolina rice, orixás: the same words and the same gestures from one continent to the next. What the African diaspora still practises every day. Read more...