MsIkilezi Writes🪶

It’s being digitized and made free for access to the public by Internet Archives. What a treasure!

Western media strikes again! U.S. Migrants Deported to Congo: ‘Where on Earth Is This Place?’ nytimes.com/2026/05/15/wor… via @NYTimes

One of the greatest.. Instant Vintage was exactly that..

Maria Popova is famous for her personal blog, The Marginalian, where she's published more than six million words. All the nights I've spent reading her writing were like an entry point into intellectual curiosity. She's introduced me to more writers and ideas than just about anybody, and this conversation is about how she does it. Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 00:37 Why writers should visit archives 04:39 Lessons from reading diaries 09:41 Letters vs diaries 11:35 Presence over productivity 18:30 How language shapes thought 19:48 Why Maria started reading poetry 36:46 Why college failed her 39:58 Reading to survive 41:41 Why epiphanies don’t stick 43:57 Thoughts on famous quotes 47:32 Why AI can never make art 53:10 Stop calling it content I've shared the full interview with Maria Popova below. If you'd rather watch it on YouTube, or listen on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets.

From a $12 billion budget deficit to $0… In less than 1 year!! A city with the same or bigger population than many of our countries! What, again, is our excuse??

Everything is a sound byte these days.

Insomnia by Zhiyong Jing

One of the most terrifying images in history: a transformation from life to death. Gaza in 2023 and 2026!

And not just in politics!

@LarryMadowo I can’t wait for the Kenya-Europe Summit to be hosted by Paris, where the guest Kenyan president will stand up, take the mic from the MC, and tell the national delegations of 30+ European countries to shut up and pay attention!

Why did France summon 30+ African leaders to Nairobi? I asked the Zambian president Hakainde Hichilema and this was his response

It was called “France-Africa Summit” up until the eve it was changed to “France-Africa Forward Summit”, then finally “Africa Forward Summit”. Even the news outlets got confused. Let’s be real.

The hardest thing is to push start.. and finish!

@LarryMadowo The reaction would probably be very different if the roles were reversed, and that’s why many people are debating it. Leadership and maintaining order are one thing, but tone, history and power dynamics also shape how actions are perceived especially in Africa-Europe relations.

Ga

Going back to building like our “primitive” grandparents and calling it eco-sustainable design that foreigners are now training us on. Full circle.

— The Ladies' Home Journal, September 1948

@Farida_N Heavy is the head that wears the crown. But knowing is, in and of itself, an act of revolution. Courage!

There are days I envy those who carry no political consciousness whatsoever. Those who move through the world unburdened by the knowledge of the systems producing their suffering, indifferent to the past, unconcerned with the future, existing in the simple present of their own lives. There must be a peace in that innocence that I recognise from a distance and will never again be able to reach. And there are days, more than I care to admit, when I wish I could unlearn everything I have learned, unsee what I have seen and return to the person I was before the knowledge settled into my bones and made indifference permanently impossible. Because what nobody tells you about political consciousness is that it is not a gift but a weight. It does not liberate you from suffering. Rather, it adds to your suffering the particular anguish of understanding exactly why you are suffering and watching the vast majority of those around you remain unreachable, not out of malice but out of an exposure they never had, an experience they never lived, a set of doors that were never opened for them. You cannot share what you carry with people who do not have the vocabulary to receive it. And so you carry it largely alone, in public spaces that mistake your urgency for performance and in private moments that offer no relief. There are days I genuinely want to go back to not knowing. I understand why that is impossible but I want it anyway.

It is quite satisfying to watch the antelope loudly proclaim its friendship with the leopard. But the entire savanna knows, that this friendship has never existed anywhere but in the mind of the predator searching for a more comfortable way to feed, and that of a prey so foolish it has mistaken the beauty of those spots for something other than the last thing it will ever see.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​.

Richard Nadler.

Ghana, 1970, ph. Owen Franken

The nation that arranged the poisoning of Toussaint Louverture of St Domingue ( Haïti) for demanding the end of slavery and the liberation of his people in 1803; that assassinated Ruben Um Nyobe, the Cameroonian independence leader hunted down and killed in 1958 by French forces before independence was even formally granted, that had Felix Moumie of Cameroon, poisoned in Geneva by his intelligence in 1960, that orchestrated the assassination of Sylvanus Olympio of Togo by soldiers of his colonial army in 1963, that armed and protected the man who murdered Thomas Sankara in 1987 and sheltered him for decades, that supported the destabilisation that led to the overthrow and death of Modibo Keita of Mali, that printed millions of fake currency to destroy the Guinean Franc after 8 failed assassination attempts at Sekou Toure because he stood his grounds and demanded independence, that stood behind the forces that removed and destroyed Patrice Lumumba, coordinating with Belgium and the CIA to ensure Congo’s most visionary independence leader did not survive his own government, that massacred at least 100,000 Malagasy people, 250,000 Cameroonians, 1.2 million Algerians between 1955 and 1962 simply because they demanded their independence. The president of that nation, less than half a century after committing such atrocities stood before a room full of African heads of state in 2026 and declared itself the true Pan-Africanist. And not one of them stood up.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Not one said: you cannot use that word: not here, not with that history on this continent. Not a single one had the dignity to say what any person with an elementary knowledge of what Pan-Africanism means and what France has done to those who practiced it would have said immediately and without hesitation. It is the equivalent of a Nazi leader standing before a Jewish assembly and announcing that Germany is the true defender of the Jewish people. There are words that carry such historical mass that no political convenience, no diplomatic ambition, no funding arrangement justifies allowing them to be stolen and worn by those who spent generations trying to destroy what those words represent; Pan-Africanism is one of those words. And it was surrendered in that room without a fight, by men who were supposed to be there representing us. France is not even a formidable power anymore. It cannot impose its will on its own European neighbourhood. Its economy is strained, its global influence is null, its African military presence has been expelled. It intimidates no one who has chosen not to be intimidated. And yet these boneless, prideless, senseless humans we call Africa leaders sat and applauded this humiliation ritual. What breaks me is knowing that every generation, without fail, produces its quota of leaders who will trade the dignity of their people for a photograph with a western head of state, for a seat at a table that was never set for them. They dress it up as pragmatism and call it diplomacy. But it is the oldest and most contemptible transaction in the postcolonial playbook: the surrender of collective dignity for personal visibility. And these are days, I will not pretend otherwise, where I genuinely wonder if we will ever be free.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Not because the struggle is not real or the people are not capable, but because freedom requires leaders at the decisive moment, and every decisive moment seems to find us represented by spineless, glory-hunting, photograph-chasing men who would sell the graves of their own predecessors for a handshake with those that tried to erase their people. Every generation inherits the fight for freedom but also produces the cowards who auction it.