I’m Kai. I am the founder, curator, Chief Visionist [I really like that one] and editor of Somayina CoLabs – ‘CoLabs’ for short! Thank you for stopping by. I’m really glad you came.

What is CoLabs? I mean, that’s an excellent question – and I think still very much under construction. But at this current juncture I think somewhere between an activist magazine, an independent journal and the best parts of an online magazine I used to edit and curate called The African Feminist Standpoint. 

I am a Black queer thinker, dreamer and medium [not yet long] term activist. For most of my public career I have been a comms and advocacy person. I have worked across the sector from local to regional to global. From grassroots to regional networks to philanthropy. I have had an interesting time in the NGO industrial complex. Two moments or time frames in my career cling to my heart. When I was part of the One in Nine Campaign – and I got to spend everyday with beautiful, bold, loud, fucking unruly Black feminists – just glorious and the most grounding space to grow a nuanced, critical and intentional politics. And then when I was at the Coalition of African Lesbians – similar reasons for loving it there, but perhaps this time I was a little less of a baby queer feminist, I had a little more to give and I got to add ‘Pan-African’ to my repertoire. Continental gay anyone??

Maybe CoLabs is a piece of nostalgia, a long overdue love letter to Black queer feminists and an expansion of a politics that is so beautifully woven overall, so taut and so slack in some parts, notoriously difficult to embody – and so integral and important to our liberation, and our creation. 

I have also been devastated by feminism as it’s practiced in the NGOs. Some of that is due to the ways NGOs need to function and that running antithetical to feminist praxis. Some of that is due to a difference in political depth. I know how that sounds, but, it’s true. It is a job at the end of the day – it’s taken me a long time to understand that … a little bit. But job, work –  means more to some than it does to others. It means different things to different people. But I think most of it is due to the very boring – but brutal – fact that we are all wounded people trying to build something together and sometimes we don’t trust one another and we hurt each other. 

So!! NGOs and philanthropy that uses feminist frameworks and practices feminist politics are incredibly necessary. They also can’t be the only public space a feminist praxises. I can’t believe that’s a word! Lol! And so CoLabs is also that – the place that holds our feminist, critical, nuanced, liberatory, creative OVERFLOW

YES OURS! Me and you reading this. 

Yes, you are hearing my voice now, and you will hear my voice often but my every intention is not for CoLabs to become Kai’s blog. I mean that sounds nice, but – no. My every intention is to have this be a space where I speak to other like hearted, like minded and like spirited people, also a space where others can do their own writing and speaking – and – every so often, maybe a little community shandis for us to speak, think and write together.

BUT KAI!! WHAT WILL WE TALK ABOUT!! 

Everything?? * grins shyly and shrugs *

Deep breathe. I recently posted on my IG stories that my favourite type of political analysis is the kind that makes most people roll their eyes and say ‘it’s not that deep’. And I will tell you why. Try not to roll your eyes. The world is a complex, deeply entangled, heavily layered jumble of fuckshit. And so much of it is working to keep us quiet, keep us hungry, keep us yearning, keep us unhoused and uneducated – and – complicit and compliant. And it sucks to 1. Have to parse it all out and 2. Come to the terrifying realisation that white-supremacy, misogony, classism, colonialism and imperialism [what we will now call ‘the-software’] are entrenched in e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g. And that you have and have had such a minuscule amount of autonomy its tear inducing. And not because of anything other than the fact that the-software lives in all the places we look, all the places we don’t, and all the places we don’t even know exist yet. And so it is that deep! And we need to get or continue excavating. 

Shuu, hope that clears it up!

Come for the vibes, stay for the prose, the community and the unearthing

chat soon!

Kai