Dikenga

🌀The Joy & Creativity beyond Legacy

Legacy often hands us a script before we are even born. It tells us who to be, how to be successful, and what to value. We want to perpetuate the traditions, the roles in honor of our family or country.

But what happens when this heritage is riddled with exploitation, colonial extraction, wars and distorted narratives?

As a teen, I used to search for books to understand what the DRC was prior to the multiple colonizations and genocides. Questioning if I was Congolese enough and feeling somehow so disconnected from myself. Not realizing that those questions and sensations were the results of exploring the living libraries that my parents and grandparents are.

I could see how they disconnected from the pain of merely surviving. And being born in a different country granted me the privilege to actually feel that pain and accept my place in this bloodline.

Congolese people are some of the boldest, most creative people I ever met. And I spent my life wondering if I could live up to that standard. And this expectation kept me captive in a self-imposed cage.

Maybe it is less about what the ancestors did but more about which kind of ancestor we would like to be for the future generations.

Maybe it’s less about performing traditions and rituals but more about accepting that our life, language may be completely different but that paradoxically we are exactly what the bloodline needs at this time.

It’s about tapping into the joy of existing for ourselves, first, and create from that place.

Because our aliveness is our bloodline’s greatest gift.