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The Dance of Exile & Settlement: Bayo Akomolafe

Full interview with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, recorded by SAND founders Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo. Edited portions appear in The Eternal Song; this is the whole conversation.

Bayo moves from his childhood in Lagos to the Orisha who wanted only to travel, from the psychologist's couch he calls too small a space for healing, to the nets slave ship captains strung along their hulls to stop people from jumping. Along the way: why decolonization isn't individual work, why wellness might be a net rather than a cure, what a monster does to a world that's stuck, and the story of a dried African lake whose dust still feeds the Amazon.

Topics

  • 00:00 Introduction
  • 00:03 Lagos, the Yoruba, and being schooled away from context
  • 00:07 Eshu, who wanted only to travel
  • 00:11 A recovering psychologist
  • 00:14 What the babalawo knows that the couch cannot hold
  • 00:18 The plurality of healing and the one-world worldview
  • 00:27 Whiteness, and the world kicking back
  • 00:35 Mice, sleeplessness, and the forgotten technology of dreaming
  • 00:43 Decolonization, monsters, and living in the cracks
  • 00:52 Intergenerational trauma, and why the idea doesn't go far enough
  • 00:56 Wellness, and the nets on the slave ship
  • 01:07 What the arriving felt
  • 01:10 AI, and the nobility of the digital
  • 01:18 Collapse, and the lake that feeds the Amazon

Bayo Akomolafe

Yoruba philosopher, psychologist, poet, and writer. Founder and Executive Director of The Emergence Network, host of the postactivist course series We Will Dance with Mountains, and inaugural Global Senior Fellow of UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute. He is a board member of Science and Nonduality.

From SAND

Liberation Psychology: Roots, Memory & Practice
 A nine-month journey with Dr. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Dr. Jennifer Mullan, Dr. Samah Jabr, Dr. Eduardo Duran, Linda Thai, Dr. Daniel Foor, Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, Alnoor Ladha, and Dr. Lynn Murphy. Bayo teaches Module 8, The Cracks Are the Medicine: Fugitive Healing in a Broken System, with Staci Haines.

The Eternal Song
 SAND's documentary series on indigenous cultures, in which Bayo appears.

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