There is a question that has followed me from the studios of Bahia, Brazil, to the lecture halls of Tshwane University of Technology — and it is this: What happens when a people are systematically severed from their memories? What is lost? And more urgently, what must be rebuilt?
These are not abstract philosophical questions. For Afro-descendant communities across the world, from the favelas of Salvador to the townships of Gauteng, memory is not nostalgia. Memory is infrastructure. It is the architecture upon which identity, belonging, and collective power are constructed. To speak about memory in Black communities is to speak about ancestry — and to speak about ancestry is to speak about survival.
Art as archive, resistance as canvas
The Blues People project — currently building an artistic bridge between Bahia and South Africa — begins with a radical premise: that the emotional memories of Black people are not a private matter. They are a cultural inheritance. They are also under threat.
Through painting, workshops, and transnational artistic exchange, Blues People proposes to do something quietly revolutionary — to reframe personal and collective stories from the Black community, connecting them with Afrofuturism as both an aesthetic and political tool. Afrofuturism, for those encountering the term for the first time, is not science fiction for its own sake. It is the deliberate act of imagining Black futures when history has often denied Black people the luxury of imagining any future at all.
In this framing, ancestry is not a backward glance. It is a creative force — a generator of symbols, colours, and emotional languages capable of engaging with new temporalities. The ancestors do not merely haunt us. They equip us.
“Preserving the emotional memories of Black people is essential for building Afro-Brazilian cultural identity — allowing knowledge, practices, and worldviews to pass across generations.”
The garden within: A closing keynote at TUT
Last week, I had the honour of delivering the closing keynote at the Faculty of Arts and Design at Tshwane University of Technology, for a beautiful arts programme titled The Garden. As I stood before those remarkable young people, one thought kept echoing in my heart — that just like a garden exists in nature, there is also a garden within each of us.
You were born with it. It did not come from your parents, though they planted early seeds. It did not come from your school, though teachers walked its pathways. That inner garden is your mind. Your emotions. Your imagination. Your identity. Your capacity to heal, create, love, recover, and grow.
What struck me, standing in that room, was the profound connection between what Blues People is attempting in the visual arts — and what every young Black creative in South Africa is navigating internally. Both are acts of cultivation. Both require intentional tending.
Flourishing is not an accident
Mental health is not merely the absence of illness. It is the presence of meaning. Connection. Purpose. Creativity. Wholeness. And yet, in our productivity-obsessed culture, we rarely create space for creative workers — especially young Black creatives — to tend their inner gardens with the same rigour we demand of their outputs.
Blues People understands this. Its workshops are not merely technical skill-building exercises in drawing and painting. They are spaces of belonging — environments where each participant is invited to recognise themselves as both an inheritor of something ancient and a creator of something entirely new. The goal is not to produce artists who can perform Black culture for international audiences. The goal is to produce people who know themselves deeply enough to lead.
Some gardens need rest. Some need pruning. Some need sunlight. Some need new soil. And some simply need somebody to finally believe that growth is still possible. This, ultimately, is what the arts do when they are at their best — they convince us that growth is still possible.
“When the human spirit is nurtured well, people do not merely survive. They flourish.”
Protect your inner garden: Whether you are a creative, an executive, or an educator — commit this month to identifying one thing depleting your mental and emotional soil, and one thing that replenishes it.
A bridge between territories
What excites me most about the Blues People project is its geography of imagination. The strengthening of artistic exchange between Bahia and South Africa is not simply a cultural programme. It is a demonstration of what becomes possible when African and Afro-descendant communities refuse to be isolated by the legacies of colonialism and choose instead to build direct connections — trade routes of the spirit, corridors of memory, pipelines of creative intelligence.
South Africa and Brazil share more than a colonial wound. We share a diasporic genius — a capacity, born of survival, to transmute suffering into beauty, to make art out of adversity, to insist on the future even when the present is brutal. Blues People names that shared genius and asks it to collaborate.
In this new month, I find myself returning to the image of the garden — both the one Blues People is cultivating across the Atlantic, and the one each of us tends in the quiet hours of our own becoming. Both require intention. Both require courage. Both, when tended well, produce something the world has never seen before.
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Dr. Joshua Awesome is a Coaching Psychologist/Executive and Business Performance Coach who has supported over 100,000 professionals across Africa and the globe. He can be reached via: joshua@africainmind.org
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