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

• 00:00:00 — Introduction
• 00:12:00 — A recovering psychologist
• 00:18:30 — The plurality of healing
• 00:28:00 — The one world worldview
• 00:36:00 — Addiction, sleeplessness, and dreaming
• 00:40:30 — Decolonization, monsters, and the cracks
• 00:53:00 — Intergenerational trauma
• 00:57:00 — Wellness, and the nets on the slave ship
• 01:04:30 — Captivity is never total
• 01:08:00 — Arriving on shore
• 01:11:00 — Artificial intelligence
• 01:18:00 — The collapse of modernity, and dead bones

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.

• bayoakomolafe.net
• The Emergence Network
• These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home (North Atlantic Books, 2017)
• We Will Tell Our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak, with Molefi Kete Asante and Augustine Nwoye

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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