Kolawole Akinlosotu Talks Africa Now's Impact and upcoming Event highlighting African Diaspora
Photos by Susan Fried
In this segment of The Day With Trae, host Trae Holiday is joined by Kolawole Akinlosotu, a Senior Program Manager at Common Power, a proactive civic organization focused on empowering individuals from education into action. Additionally, Akinlosotu founded Africa Now, a nonprofit organization committed to educating and nurturing connections within the African Diaspora. Akinlosotu sheds light on his organization's history, initiatives, and upcoming event slated for April 14.
Africa Now began at the University of Washington in 2017 when Akinlosotu and a cofounder shared aspirations of returning to their home countries post-graduation to leverage their education and resources to contribute to the potential they saw in Africa. Recognizing the importance of community engagement and understanding local issues, they decided to lay the groundwork beforehand.
"I had talked to a mentor, and they mentioned that you can't just go back home and throw money at issues without fully understanding what's happening without being part of that community," Akinlosotu said. "Because then you can be perpetuating issues that you don't even know about. As we're having this discussion, we were like, 'We really need to figure out how we can start now. How can we start sooner than later?"
Instead of waiting, they organized their inaugural conference in 2018, laying the foundation for Africa Now's growth and development into its current organization that is still growing.
"Overall, it's a positive response. People want to be part of the organization and the work that we're doing. I think when it comes to having discussions about how we relate as a diaspora, there's always a tension there," Akinlosotu said. "We welcome that tension because that's what we need to get over to find progress."
Akinlosotu described the 'diaspora wars' as a significant aspect of community tensions, cross-cultural disputes among members of the African diaspora. He underscored the necessity of acknowledging and addressing these tensions while also emphasizing the role of the Pan-African movement in fostering unity.
"When you look at our history, when you look at the examples of our people, you see unity pushes us forward, and you see that in the movements that we've started, the businesses that we've started, are our leaders like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and so many more, they are a pan Africanist," Akinlosotu said. "They see the value in Africa and bridging that diaspora. So when there is that tension, it's an exciting conversation because I think that's how we heal when we have that conversation. That's how we learn. We are learning from our history so that we can move forward in a more sustainable way."
For Africa Now, their mission of fostering unity has primarily revolved around their Black Dialogue Series, aimed at bringing together young people from different backgrounds across the African Diaspora to share their experiences and collaborate on building sustainable futures. Initiated in 2020 amidst COVID-19 and the Black Liberation Movement, Africa Now found their work resonated with partners worldwide. Recognizing the need to extend their impact, particularly among immigrants in the US, they acted as a resource by launching their dialogue series over Zoom, attracting over 100 participants to learn more about the diaspora.
"It's really evolved into something that where we're having consistent conversations about what brings us together and the systems that perpetuate anti-blackness because anti-blackness is this common issue that we see across the board, whether you're in the US or Africa," Akinlosotu said. "When African countries want to play on the world scale, there's anti-blackness in the world systems that hold these countries back and exploit these countries. We're able to talk about those systems and figure out how we in the US can use our platform [and] privileges to fight against these systems on a world scale, but also locally."
The organization is gearing up for its first in-person dialogue following a recent session addressing the conflict in Sudan. Together with Harambee House Global, a nonprofit dedicated to social justice, youth empowerment, education, and community, they are hosting "Pan African Perspectives: Building Bridges Beyond Borders" at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute. This event will be a platform for conservation and collaboration, discussing themes of colonization, ongoing systemic challenges across the African continent, and the notion of identity.
"We're just kind of taking this formula that we've used with the dialogue and being intentional about creating an intergenerational space [for] these dialogues," Akinlosotu said. I'm really excited about the topic we've chosen because we're talking about identity."
Reflecting on his upbringing in Federal Way as the son of Nigerian parents, Akinlosotu shared his journey grappling with questions of identity and belonging. He recalled moments where he found himself caught between two worlds, navigating the nuances of Black identity within predominantly Black spaces where he sometimes felt alienated and in predominantly white environments where he encountered racism and microaggressions.
"I always questioned, What does it mean to be Black? What does it mean to be African? And I had teachers tell me, 'Oh, you're not African. You're American. You're born here.' I had other Black people tell me, 'You're not Black enough. You're African," Akinlosotu said. "These were always questions that I had to do my own research on and ask myself. That led me to bring other people into that conversation to discover what that means."
Click here to secure tickets for the Pan African Perspectives event happening on April 14. Visit Africa Now's website here to explore its ongoing projects, upcoming events, and initiatives in more detail.
"We're asking ourselves, how do we identify, and what does that mean to us? And then where can we find the similarities, what brings us together, and how can we move forward from there," Akinlosotu said. "There'll be a lot more to that discussion, but that's the part that really resonates with me and why I'm excited to have this discussion."
To hear more about exciting upcoming event happening in Seattle and beyond, tune in to Trae every weekday at 11 am on all Converge Media platforms and The Day With Trae YouTube Channel.
