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Botho: All Our Names Are Here<\/strong><\/em> is a hymn to Afrikan belonging, Black personhood and the sacred bonds between the living, the ancestors and generations yet to come. It reclaims Botho and Ubuntu from demands for endless welcome and forgiveness, affirming a community\u2019s authority to set boundaries, demand restitution and cherish its own. Within this melanated cosmology, belonging requires no proof of wholeness: the wounded have a place, joy has room to unfold, and children inherit possibilities beyond repair.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Botho: All Our Names Are Here<\/strong><\/p>\n Botho. Ubuntu. We have spent too many evenings Tonight the family gathers. Our Blackness is sufficient Botho. Ubuntu. The invitation to the cookout is withdrawn. Take your hand from the latch. We call ourselves home from the long labour Our personhood precedes their question.<\/p>\n Long before the ships sailed, That knowing lives.<\/p>\n It enters with the aunties, with the cousin returned after years, Pull up a chair. Come with what still aches. Motho: a person. The sacred obligations Our humanity is already ours. Here is a theology of Blackness: Here is our cosmology: The earth holds our dead. Even those we shall never meet We speak, and generations lean close.<\/p>\n Afrika is sufficient to begin the thought. There is room for that. We reclaim Black personhood in its full and difficult life: We will have our land. What is owed to the dead remains a claim upon this world. We will also have an evening in which nobody asks us Let the cousins laugh until the old grief loosens. Botho. Ubuntu. The gate is closed. Botho. Ubuntu. Here, a theology of Blackness Let this be a hymn to Afrikanness, sung in the many tongues A melanated cosmology: Worlds where they are home Let there be room for what we have yet to become, Botho. Ubuntu. Our people are here. We draw our chairs closer. Botho. Ubuntu. <\/p>\n (By Liepollo Lebohang Pheko)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Botho: All Our Names Are Here is a hymn to Afrikan belonging, Black personhood and the sacred bonds between the living, the ancestors and generations yet to come. It reclaims Botho and Ubuntu from demands for endless welcome and forgiveness, affirming a community\u2019s authority to set boundaries, demand restitution and cherish its own. Within this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[5530],"class_list":["post-27820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-liepollo-lebohang-pheko","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27820"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27820\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27822,"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27820\/revisions\/27822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.womeninandbeyond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nClose the gate, beloved.
\nEntry was never a promise of belonging.<\/p>\n
\ntranslating the meaning of home for those who would not stop
\nrearranging the furniture.<\/p>\n
\nLet the food stay warm.
\nLet the conversation go where it needs to go without explaining itself.<\/p>\n
\nunto this gathering.<\/p>\n
\nWe withdraw the invitation.
\nWhiteness has mistaken the spoils of conquest
\nfor a place in the family,
\npassed theft from hand to hand and called it inheritance,
\ncalled it belonging.<\/p>\n
\nConquest gives you no seat at this table.<\/p>\n
\nThere are things we must say in the company of our own.<\/p>\n
\nof making our humanity intelligible
\nto those who profited from its denial.<\/p>\n
\nwe were.
\nBefore the borders were greedily carved, we belonged.
\nBefore the inventories of bodies, gold and stolen art,
\nsomeone knew exactly whose child this was.<\/p>\n
\nwith the one whose name the family is learning anew.<\/p>\n
\nYou do not have to earn your place by being unbroken.<\/p>\n
\nYour place is already yours.<\/p>\n
\nBatho: people.
\nBotho\/Ubuntu: personhood\u2014
\nour philosophy of becoming, the self growing spacious
\nin the keeping of its people.<\/p>\n
\nthrough which we hold each other in the world.<\/p>\n
\nOur becoming is the work of learning how to honour it in one another.<\/p>\n
\nour bodies bearing sacred worth,
\nour dead remaining kin,
\nour children arriving into a creation where they already belong.<\/p>\n
\nthe living, the departed, those whose first breath
\nis still ahead of us-
\na family larger than the visible world.<\/p>\n
\nThe waters enter our bodies.
\nWhat we wound returns through the lives we love.<\/p>\n
\nhave a claim upon our conduct.<\/p>\n
\nOur languages can carry the weight of existence.
\nOur elders have considered eternity.
\nOur children may ask questions for which we have no answer yet.<\/p>\n
\nThere is room to become.<\/p>\n
\nthe mind, the body, the pleasure, the quarrel,
\nthe right to rest, the right to decide
\nwho crosses the threshold.<\/p>\n
\nWe will have our dead returned.
\nWe will have the wealth taken from our lives
\nrestored to the living.<\/p>\n
\nWhat we recover must sustain those still to come.<\/p>\n
\nto account for our joy.<\/p>\n
\nLet someone tell the story in the language it happened in.
\nLet the youngest fall asleep against a body they have never had to fear.<\/p>\n
\nBring your whole Black self.<\/p>\n
\nThe family is here.
\nWe are enough to make a world,
\nand worlds within it,where Black life unfolds
\nat the full length of its dreaming,
\nwhere our names open doors into rooms we have imagined
\nfor ourselves.<\/p>\n
\nOur personhood deepens
\nin the lives we hold, each of us becoming
\nwithout disappearing into the whole.<\/p>\n
\nrises in the family\u2019s breathing:
\nthe sacred taking flesh in these beloved bodies,
\nour many shades gathered in the evening light.<\/p>\n
\nthrough which we know creation, our breath carrying
\nwhat our people have known and what we are becoming.<\/p>\n
\nour skin among the surfaces through which the universe
\nfeels its own warmth;
\nour bodies holding waters that have travelled beyond memory;
\nour dead still moving through the names we give our children.<\/p>\n
\nin the earth, where the living have time
\nto love beyond endurance, where children inherit
\nmore than the work of repair.<\/p>\n
\nfor the thought still gathering, for the joy
\nthat needs a larger language.<\/p>\n
\nWe belong deeply enough to make room for one another\u2019s unfolding.<\/p>\n
\nThe ones we remember.
\nThe ones we are learning to hold.
\nThe ones whose arrival will change the shape of the gathering.<\/p>\n
\nFor our children\u2019s children, we keep a place.<\/p>\n
\nAll our names are here. Batho ba botle. M\u2019Afrika.<\/p>\n