Voices of Valor Issue 005: SANKOFA : OWN YOUR NARRATIVE

Voices of Valor Issue 005: Sankofa

There are things a people can forget and still survive.

But there are things a people cannot afford to forget if they intend to know where they are going.

Voices of Valor Issue 005: Sankofa was created from that tension.

Not nostalgia. Not an attempt to romanticize the past. Not another collection of beautiful African words arranged neatly on a page.

Sankofa asks us to look back deliberately.

To remember what was carried before us.
To recognize what was taken, abandoned, distorted or forgotten.
And then to return to the present with enough clarity to decide what comes next.

This issue of Voices of Valor is about that return.

Across Issue 005, MfalmeBits explores African identity, belonging, memory, creativity, culture and liberation through stories that do more than describe Africa. They ask what happens when Africans begin to see themselves as authors of the story again.

Because ownership begins long before property.

It begins with the ability to say: this is ours, this is where we come from, and this is what we choose to carry forward.

That is the spirit behind Voices of Valor.

Issue 005 brings together voices and perspectives that move between ancestry and the present day. From the House of Mumbi to African fashion, from the power and beauty of African women to the questions confronting our food systems and institutions, the issue keeps returning to one idea:

We cannot build a future we have not learned to recognize ourselves in.

And that is why this edition carries the language of Sankofa.

Look back.

Remember.

Reclaim.

Build forward.

There is something deliberate about putting these words together. Looking backward is not the opposite of progress. Sometimes it is the only way to understand what progress should actually mean.

For us at MfalmeBits, Voices of Valor has always been more than a magazine. It is part of a larger attempt to document, question and preserve the stories, knowledge and perspectives that deserve space in the African record.

Issue 005 continues that work.

It is for the person who has ever wondered where certain parts of themselves came from.

For the student trying to understand history beyond the classroom.

For the African who knows there is more to our story than what the world has chosen to remember.

For the reader who understands that liberation is not only political or economic. Sometimes liberation begins with memory.

And sometimes it begins with finally telling the story in your own voice.

Voices of Valor Issue 005: Sankofa is now available as an eMag.

If you want to read the full edition and support the work behind MfalmeBits, you can purchase your copy through our HustleSasa store.

Read it. Sit with it. Question it. Carry something from it forward.

Because owning your narrative is not about changing the past.

It is about refusing to surrender the meaning of it.

Get Voices of Valor Issue 005: Sankofa →
Purchase the eMag on HustleSasa

MfalmeBits — Own Your Narrative.