Intentional: A Reflection
How a Trip to Africa Empowered My Art and Recalibrated My Direction

Author’s Note: In February of 2017, I took my first trip to the continent of Africa. There is something to be said about the “Africa” that we are made to understand and what one actually experiences. It has been tough to explain this difference to my family, friends, and colleagues in brief conversation - so I wrote this treatise in an attempt to do just that.

Since middle school I can remember having a fascination with the continent of Africa. I still find it ironic that the origin of that fascination had nothing to do with what I learned in school or at home. As an African American growing up in South Carolina, I experienced no conversations, lessons, or substantive teaching about Africa, which, over the years I’ve found to be a common theme with many African Americas. No, my fascination with the continent was inspired by one thing and one thing only.

Hip-hop music.

It was during those early teen years that I heard songs from artists like Big Daddy Kane, KRS-One, and Stetsasonic that put thoughts in my head about Botswana, Mozambique, Patrice Lumumba, Steve Biko and Shaka Zulu. So, almost twenty years later, having been presented with the opportunity to visit and possibly work in this place I have fantasized about since middle school, made me excited, intensely introspective...but also incredibly nervous.

What would Africa be like? What are the people there like? Will I fit in? Will I be inspired? Disappointed? These questions filled my head despite the fact that, unlike many African Americans I knew, by 2017 I had quite a lot of knowledge of the African continent. One of my closest high school friends was Nigerian, I minored in African Studies at the University of South Carolina, was well versed in icons like Chinua Achebe and Kwame Nkrumah, and was a music fan of Fela, Angelique Kidjo, Black Coffee AND Davido. Even my lady is Congo Kinshasa born. She, her father, and I often talk African politics and the African Diaspora. I have deep roots in South Carolina and a family history that is 90% likely to have started its American journey through the Charleston port. My DNA and family history traces my ancestors back to the Congo Kingdom, so most likely, my ancestors were from present day Cameroon, Angola, or Congo.

With all of the above in my head in 2017, to Ethiopia and Senegal I went - one part media literacy educator/filmmaker, one part girlfriend courter, and one part tourist. Interestingly enough, I quickly realized once I arrived IN Africa, that NONE of the information I had prepared me FOR Africa.

The 9-hour flight that changed everything

Most of the time when people I knew referred to Africa, it was as a monolith, remarkably similar to how I hear white Americans talk about Black people. For example: just because I AM black, doesn’t mean I know what ALL black people like to eat...or wear...or listen to. Black people, especially Black Americans - come in every shape, color, size, political and religious ideology that you can imagine. To think that we are all the same demonstrates exceedingly small thinking. It’s the kind of thinking that has a reductive quality and often has the result of making something appear smaller or simpler.

I feel similarly when I think of how people throughout my life have talked about Africa. Reducing the continent to one singular assumption shrinks it in size, makes it monolithic, and quite frankly reduces its significance. Fun fact - there are fifty-four countries in Africa. There are about 1.216 billion people on the continent. By comparison, there are only about 319 million people in America and only 579 million in North America.

Alas, with all of this knowledge I had about Africa, it didn’t resonate with me either how huge Africa was until I was actually there. Case in point - my flight time from Dulles Airport in Washington, DC to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia - was about fourteen hours. My flight time from Ethiopia to Mali (essentially East to West Africa) was nine. For perspective, flight time from LA to New York, is only five and a half hours. I flew for nine hours across Africa, and I didn’t even fly end to end.

I spent all of my time in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, and Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, in 2017. The people I saw and engaged with were of an incredibly wide variety - identical to the wide variety of Black people in America...in every way. I met an IT student and an aspiring rapper at a Kaaris coffee shop in Addis Ababa, a Donald Trump loving tailor, and a young female art event planner in Dakar. I met Muslims, Christians, vegans, tourists, college students, bankers, social rights activists, as well as young people who just sit around and chill all day. It became even more obvious to me that Africa and Africans are truly diverse...and that they live in many countries...all on one continent. The same continent that can fit all of China, the U.S., Eastern Europe, and most of Western Europe inside its borders.

Capri pants, Sandals and Dashikis

Throughout my travels in Addis Ababa and in Dakar, one thing became noticeably clear...Africans are about that fashion life.

While in Addis, I saw a unique mix of traditionally western styles - jeans, tees, and sneakers -  across all ages and genders. But frequently in Addis, I would also see women in traditional long dresses with shawls, both ornamented with patterns across the bottom or near the edge of these mostly white garments. Dakar is in Senegal, which is one of the many Muslim countries on the continent. There, many women of all ages wear traditional African print dresses or wraps with a hijab - but it was quite common to see very traditionally western high heels or sneakers, jeans, extra-long hair weaves or print tees. Men, of all ages, traditionally wear boubous, long or short sleeved matching pieces with slip on style dress shoes, but this style is mixed in with your average western flavor of tees, jeans, designer sneakers, and snapback hats too.

I can tell you what I did NOT see in Dakar or Addis Ababa - Dashikis. Not only did I not see any Africans wearing Dashikis, but I also only noticed them for sale in markets specifically targeted to tourists. What I found amusing was that when visiting a market, if a vendor would get a whiff that I was American...they would immediately begin to push Dashikis towards me. This was particularly interesting because, in America, many African Americans wear Dashikis to have some connection to Africa.

There is an obvious disconnect here.

The Africans I saw, of all ages, wore printed fabrics. These bold colors and evocatively patterned fabrics are sold in the open-air markets and along the road and fashioned into glamorous pieces by local tailors. My lady and I had a few pieces made for me, my family, and friends while I was there. You simply hit the market, pick out the fabric you like, which generally costs seventy cents and more per yard, then hit a local tailor, of which there is almost one on every corner. T-shirts, skirts, dresses, shoes, hats, in any design you can imagine, are the most popular look for traditional print fashion. And it is all custom made. So, instead of buying a Dashiki that anyone can have, you can have your very own one-of-a-kind piece made, for usually a lesser price.

Dibi Over Everything

If there is anything that I miss about my time in Dakar the most...it’s the food. Dakar is a very modern city, and you can very easily go to a sushi restaurant or a grocery store to eat like you normally would in the States. But if you do that, you’re an idiot.

Dakar is an astonishingly vibrant farming and fishing town. There are endless amounts of fruit and vegetable stands in addition to the daily fresh catch that is brought in by the fishers on pirogues - these long, narrow boats that you see by the hundreds along the coast, surrounded by large fish stands and sometimes, markets. There is not an item of seafood that you could not find - lobster, shrimp, snapper, perch, shark, mullet, grouper - you name it, for dirt cheap. You can literally walk home with a few pounds of shrimp, 2 or 3 snapper and grouper for about $30. And they will descale it and cut it in any style that you want right on the spot for another $2!!

There are three main dishes that I had regularly in Dakar - theiboudienne (or ceebujen, pronounced cheh-boo-jen), which is a whole grilled (or fried) fish on a bed of rice with steamed vegetables; yassa poulet - grilled chicken marinated in onion and lemon/mustard sauce over a bed of rice; or my favorite by far, dibiterie or dibi for short.

Dibi is roasted sheep, that’s spiced, grilled with onions, and usually smothered with a dry piment (pronounced pee-ma, a ground hot pepper blend). It is typically sold by the half kilo at dibitieries, stalls, or street corner grills in just about any neighborhood in Dakar. These small shops reminded me so much of the small corner restaurants we had around my neighborhood (Ridgewood) in Columbia as a kid - which were literally someone’s kitchen window or a makeshift shack next to someone’s house with a handwritten sign with whole plates of food for sale. You can get a kilo (about two pounds) of dibi, at literally anytime day or night - for about $8 US Dollars. A heaping plate of ceebujen at a local restaurant can run you $2.50! 

After experiencing cuisine like this for weeks, I realized, we are doing food all wrong in the States. Nothing pissed me off more than being back home in Columbia, with $5 in my pocket to get a quick bite to eat, and my only options were fast food chains. I literally rode around with a face full of disgust. How did we get accessible food so wrong in the richest country in the world? Because the majority of Senegalese eat at home, I had gotten used to eating good, cheap, real food every day! Fresh food that is actually good for you not Big Mac’s, Whopper Juniors, spicy chicken nuggets, or Zax Snax. Fresh affordable food should not be a luxury in the richest country on earth.

Am I in Europe or Africa?

One thing is certain, despite all my learning, I did not understand the complex effects of colonialism on modern day Africa before my visit. My visit changed my perception of the effects of slavery on the African Diaspora as well. There are parallels, across African people in Africa and America, that I never saw as clearly as I do now.

It hit me all at once when I was walking around Dakar on my first day there. Almost every single road sign, advertisement, store sign, menu, billboard, street banner, or way signage was in French. Almost every packaged product, from coffee to water, potato chips to cookies, dish detergent to cereal were French or European products. There were two main cell phone companies in Dakar - Tigo and Orange - one Swedish the other, French. The currency in Dakar? The franc CFA  - the same currency the French used in all French occupied African colonies.

What’s the currency in France today? Euros.

I was stunned that Senegal -- which gained its independence from France in 1960 -- was still using French currency in 2017. Have trouble getting around Dakar? While most of the population speaks Wolof, the official language of Senegal? You guessed it - French.

Growing up in mostly black communities on the East Coast -- Columbia, Atlanta, and New York -- I was used to most of the businesses in Black neighborhoods being owned by non-African Americans. The gas station, the grocery store, the corner store (bodega), most of the restaurants, practically anything outside of a barbershop or beauty salon, was (and often still is) usually owned and run by someone who isn’t Black.

I wasn’t prepared to experience that exact same reality on the continent.

Don’t get me wrong, there were Ethiopian and Senegalese goods and shops around, but largely the economy was run by colonial powers. It made me think long and hard about not only the effects that colonialism still had on Africa, but it also made me think of the global  economic oppression of Black people in a new way.

We own or control practically nothing in our neighborhoods back in the States -- and we own or control practically nothing in Africa too?

I was starting to believe that this isn’t a coincidence.

Discovering a Lost Personal Identity

As an African American growing up in the South, there are some things outside of the Black experience of which I was just not aware.

Case in point.

Recently I discovered that if you have at least one parent recognized of Jewish descent, do not actively practice another religion, and are between the ages of 18-26, you can take a 10-day trip to Israel - for FREE. The trip includes airfare from a major city, hotels, most meals, all transportation within Israel and costs associated with touring the country - all for a $250 refundable deposit.

It’s true.

According to birthrightisrael.com, during the trip, participants, most of whom are visiting Israel for the first time, are encouraged to discover new meaning in their personal Jewish identity and connection to Jewish history and culture.

Ummm. What the what?

Let me be blunt. If there are any people, in the WORLD, that need to “discover new meaning” in their personal identity and connection to their “history and culture” - it is the descendants of enslaved Africans. Shouldn't at least one of the American corporations that were built on slave labor have to foot the bill for this annual free trip? In partnership with a city or two whose entire economy was created on the backs of those enslaved? Perhaps with some help from the House in Washington, DC that was literally built by slave labor?

There is something that happens to you physically and mentally when you get off of a plane and you see that everyone, everywhere you look, looks just like you.

In every store, every employee, taxi driver, cashier, bank manager, security guard looks just like you. Same kinky hair. Same full lips. Same sunbaked skin tone. Same sharp brown eyes. Looking right back at you.

Many African Americans, like myself, deal with severe psychological and physical identity crises. I was taught from an early age how I should talk, walk, look, move, wear my clothes, and wear my hair. So was my mom and her mom before her, going back hundreds of years.

If you have distinctly “African” features like I do -- lips, kinky hair, darker skin -- you’re usually the subject of endless jokes, from children and adults of all races. Growing up in America I became used to trying to find ways to make my African-ness more invisible than actual. In addition, growing up in a place where racism is common, you psychologically develop a mandatory split personality: one that you use to operate in the white world and another that is more of who you really are when you’re alone or with your own family and friends. You take extra care not to scare or offend, not to be too loud or move too quickly. You get used to being two people. Everyday.

When I was in Africa...I. Felt. Free.

I don’t know how else to really describe this. I’m not a writer by trade, so I’m not sure I know how to put these feelings into the right words. I never walked anywhere in Dakar and felt like an outsider or like I didn’t belong. Don’t get me wrong, I sometimes wondered if I looked too American, but never did I wonder if I looked too African. I remember when I walked in the barbershop for my first haircut in Dakar and I thought, “man….I wonder how long they been cutting black hair here?!” I can’t find the words to say what it was like when that thought rippled through my body. For one moment in time, I felt that everything about me was right. My hair, my body, the way I danced, the way I moved my hands when I talked, how loud I was; it was OK.

It should be mandatory for every descendant of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade to experience that feeling.

That is the reason I saved this final thought for last intentionally. Because, out of all of the moments I had when on the African continent, this one I felt the most. As a student of African and African American history, there was one place that I knew I was going to go if I ever went to Senegal and that was Goree Island.

For the uninitiated, Goree Island was one of the many slave-holding warehouses in West Africa. Goree was at the absolute center of the trade of African men, women, and children for West and Central Africa. An estimated twenty million Africans passed through the Island between the mid-1500s and the mid-1800s. For over three hundred years Africans were brought to Goree Island, sold into slavery, and held in the holding warehouse on the island until they were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean. They were sold in South America, the Caribbean, and North America to create the new world.

There is a door at Goree and almost all West African slave castles known as “the door of no return,” because it is essentially that. This door, at the rear center of the first floor of the Maison d’Esclaves (House of Slaves) is where ships would conveniently pull up to the rear of the house and let out its dock right to the door. Slaves, in chains, would exit the door and walk directly onto the ship. There are hundreds of stories of the enslaved, although chained to others, diving into the water upon noticing what was happening. Goree, for hundreds of years, was known also as “shark island” because of the many African bodies that either jumped, fell, committed suicide, or were murdered and dumped into the ocean or discarded among huge rocks, big boulders that are still there at the rear of the island today.

I touched some of those boulders.

It is one thing to read about Goree, but it is another thing to stand on it. To touch the very walls where enslaved Africans were held, beaten, raped, sold, fed like cattle, and fattened like pigs. But it was when I stood on the threshold of that small door, that I knew I would write this memoir about my experiences in Ethiopia and Senegal. Right there. In that moment.

I actually posted this on Facebook the night after we got home from our visit to the island:

“I've seen a lot of things in my life. Death, Life, Heartache, Joy...but nothing prepared me for this moment. As I stood before the exit, I thought about which ancestor of mine possibly walked here. What was he thinking? How did she feel? Then, I thought about my family members that had passed on...my grandfather and grandmother...my older sister...my cousin Mandel...I thought about my family, what it was like for them to grow up in the South thinking we were JUST from South Carolina. I thought about the Civil Rights movement, lynchings, Philando Castile, crack cocaine, Cointel-Pro, the projects, the 13th Amendment, Haiti, Jamaica, South America...all the side effects that colonialism and the slave trade has had on people with dark skin and kinky hair and full lips and big hips and wide nostrils. I thought about what could have been. What my religion might have been, what my family name should have been, what my language might be.”

And it hurt. And I cried. But then, I thought about this:

“Despite the best that they threw at people that looked like me...here I was standing here. And I smiled. We took this and made John Coltrane, and Nikki Giovanni, and Jay-Z, and Muhammed Ali, and Miles Davis, and Michael Eric Dyson, and Tupac Shakur, and Beyoncé, and Michael Jordan, and Ghostface Killah, and Ava Duvernay and Michael Jackson and Charles Bolden, and George Washington Carver...etc.”

And I laughed.

Once I came back from my trip, I realized that what stuck with me most was this pulsing feeling that I still feel throughout my body: every African American HAS to go to Africa. My trip to Ethiopia and Senegal felt a lot like it did when I finally found my father at 32 years old, someone I hadn’t seen since I was three. I realized that a part of me that I didn’t know was missing, had been found. Outside of our obvious outward appearance, African Americans have no real ties to the continent anymore. Similar to how, at 32 years old, I had no real ties to my dad. By that time, I was a man, I was an adult, I had developed my own likes and dislikes, behaviors, and characteristics. But it wasn’t until I met my father that I realized that those behaviors, characteristics, and tastes that I had developed, weren’t mine at all. It wasn’t until I connected with my father that I realized where I got it from.

For this one reason alone, I think it should be absolutely mandatory for every African American male and female to reconnect with their own African history and culture.

Epilogue

There is an old saying that you never know where you are going, until you know where you’ve been. For many African Americans like me, we thought our “been” was  Columbia, Chicago, or the Bronx or Birmingham. That was not our origin. Myself, and many African Americans like me deal with a daily stream of identity issues about who and what we are. But I believe that when you go to Sub-Saharan Africa and you look at people that look just like you, everywhere you go, you know exactly where you come from. And there is no doubt that who you are and what you are is too big for American history to hold.

I called this memoir Intentional on purpose. When I constantly went back and forth about how to share this experience, I spent a lot of time asking myself why there was such a heavy burden on me to get these thoughts and ideas documented and shared with the public. The answer wrapped up in that one word: Intentional.

What I didn’t share was that when I returned from my first trip to the continent, I was in the middle of launching OTR Media Group. OTRMG is a visual storytelling, film education, and media strategy house that I own. I started the company originally in 2012 as OTR Films with, and at the behest, of my brother and mentor FatRat Da Czar. In 2015 when I made the decision to head fulltime into business for myself, I knew at the center of that business would be filmmaking, film education, and media strategy. Those were all things that I had years of experience in. I knew I only wanted to do things I was good at and things that brought me joy. I was speeding towards my 40th birthday and I had grown weary of feeling like I was constantly being pulled in a bunch of directions, as opposed to choosing a direction for myself.

I spent 25 months knee deep in thinking of what the company would look like and feel like. I knew the restructure of the company would focus on film, film education, and media strategy, but what exactly did that mean? What did it mean for me? What did it mean for the team members that would go on this journey with me? I wanted the direction to be truly clear. I needed the direction to be truly clear.

All of the answers I found came from sitting down in 2017 to begin writing this. In the midst of my writing, I spent countless hours wondering what work we wanted to do, what work we wanted to be known for and, ultimately, how that work could be a benefit to humanity. The more I wrote, the clearer the vision came to me. I knew the colors would be found in Ankara print, I knew the feeling that I wanted to come through with the fonts, I knew exactly what emotion I wanted to emanate from our work, from the website, from the work that we did. The more I wrote, the clearer the picture became. I knew I needed Black designers to make our brand happen, I knew I needed those designers to be Black women. The feelings I had were that precise, the thoughts were clear, and the purpose was exact.

And I knew why.

It was on that journey, going from the continent of my ancestors immediately into the creating process that I discovered something that felt like meaning, purpose, motivation. It was on that journey that I found something I would die for, something that inspired the way I lived my life and the art that I created. And all of that energy is what went into my business, and, what became the very basis of how I live my life now. That could not have happened without that first trip to Mama Africa.

~~~

About a year ago I stumbled on a CNN Africa video on Facebook about an Artist-in-Residency program that Kehinde Wiley was establishing in Dakar, Senegal called Black Rock Senegal. Kehinde became world famous after becoming the first African American artist to paint an official portrait of the President of the United States. That president was Barack Obama.

In that video, Kehinde made this statement, “True north for me is pointing towards experiences that matter in this world. And I think artists unlike many others are uniquely equipped to urge us all to see the things that have true merit. Senegal is the perfect place for artists to come together and have a conversation not only about their own practice, but about how Africa can function as this strange through line, this nexus, this way in which we can look at ourselves.”

I’ve never met Kehinde Wiley, but that feeling, that “through line” changed the way I look at myself and the way in which I see the world. It has informed my art, my artistic endeavors, and has afforded me the luxury to be freer than I ever have as a Southern born African American, I mean African, male. Every African American artist deserves the same energy.

And maybe every African American artist can’t be a part of Black Rock Senegal, but each one of us can take this trip to discover a part of ourselves that was lost. Because Africa needs it, and we need it. We need it so that, as artists, we can urge others to see the things that have true merit. Create the work that is generated from that complicated truth. And to reconnect with yourself. And who you really are.

Sherard “Shekeese” Duvall is a film and messaging professional from Columbia, S.C. He specializes in visual storytelling, film education, media diversity strategy, and is an advocate of Hip-Hop culture. An accomplished producer of commercial and documentary projects for VH1, Oxygen, and more - he is a 2022 SC Arts Commission Fellow, 2021 Liberty Fellow, a 2016 Riley Fellow, and one of the founders of Columbia’s Hip-Hop Family Day: Love Peace & Hip-Hop. A 2001 University of South Carolina graduate, he is a product of Richland District One schools. Sherard is the Founder and Executive Producer at OTR Media Group, and the proud dad of his son, Cairo. He is currently producing the feature length Gullah Geechee Afrofuturism Documentary: Saltwata Vibes