We were so glad and grateful to welcome Onyango Otieno as our special guest in March and April’s #Globaldev Communicators Connect in the Healing Solidarity Collective. Part III of our interview below shows why:
Jennifer Lentfer: For over a decade, you’ve been organizing your community around arts and poetry as a mechanism for social change with Fatuma’s Voice and the Afro-Masculinity podcast. You’re doing lots of other creative content producing and convening as well. I can imagine that has been quite a journey. What would you tell your younger self about what you’ve learned over that time? And then, what would your future self say about what you’re learning right now?
Onyango Otieno: I will tell my younger self that you have to keep believing in that thing that is in your heart. Because that’s what the world is trying to take away from you. Yeah, keep believing in that thing. Keep it. Because that is what this world needs. That’s what you came here for. That is what this world is made up of. It’s made up of you.
I believed in gentleness. I believed in care. I believed in softness. I believed in smoothness. I believed in strength. I believed in strength that is respectful. I believed in sharing so much. When I was younger, I was a bit of an extrovert. Play would not happen if I wasn’t there. So my friends would come home to get me. So that play would happen, and I just loved seeing people around me happy.
In time, what was being communicated to me from different places was that isolation is the way to go. Violence is the way to go. Individualism and not individuality is the way to go. Dominance is the way to go. That’s how you survive. That’s how you amass more and show your might. Unhealthy competition is the way to go. Holding is the way to go.
They made life a business. I didn’t want to stay in the market. I wanted to stay in a community.
In the community, people who are doing business, they are clever. They want to show what they can say to give the least but get the most. I was like, “Why do I have to live like that? The world is so abundant!” There’s more than enough but I’m made to think that resources are scarce, so you have to fight. You have to battle. This is “my” work. No, it’s not true. If I look at just the geography of my country alone, where the majority of the people are living in the country and the vastness of the rest of the country, there is so much that is being unused. And the mass that is being used is owned by very few people. It doesn’t make sense.
So many of us are just bundled in very small places and we are fighting for space. We’re fighting for security. We’re fighting for peace. It just didn’t make sense to me. So I will tell that kid, “Don’t stop believing that is who you are. That nature you have to bring people together and give them joy, keep it. Because that is who you are. That is your secret, you know?
What would I tell my future self about what I’m learning today? This is your time. You’ve waited far too long. Don’t doubt it. So many things are not perfect. The world really has been waiting for you, and the stages are opening up now. You’re gonna travel, and you’re gonna meet people from places you never imagined they would know about you. And they will heal you and you will heal them. They will stay with your stories in their minds and share to their children and their family and their loved ones and their students. And you will think about them, and you will love them, even though you’ve never met them.
And that is just a guess. Being somebody who tells many of his stories digitally, I am loved to be honest. I have met people. I continue to meet people who share their hearts with me. Just last week, actually, somebody from Western Australia reached out to me and they say they want to take up therapy sessions with me. Australia is far! Just the end of the world. If the world was to end, Australia goes fast, you know? This guy just says,
“Oh, I’ve been following your work.”
I’m like, “What the hell? How did you even…?”
So it’s very humbling. I would hope that my future self would also have continued with this belief, because I think right now, the only thing that will stop me will be myself.
Jennifer Lentfer: I’m letting that sink in…We all are navigating this. I would love to hear your poem, “bing bang Kling Klang” because I think it is about how our heads and hearts have to work together to create, as you said, the system of thoughts.
Onyango Otieno: Yeah, so I love music. Like I said in the first poem, my dad used to put me on the living room table and put some music on to dance to. As I grew up, music has been a very big part of how I use my words, because it’s from lyrics that I actually learned how to express my emotions. I was growing up with a lot of African Lingala music, but most of it was coming from Democratic Republic of Congo. I couldn’t understand it, but the melodies…man, my body was just moving to the rhythms. Then as I kept going to my teenage years, now I met hip hop. I’m meeting the DMX’s of this world…and the things they were saying, I really resonated with them. Then we had some very poetic Kenya hip hop access here who were talking about places that I could see and speaking in languages that I could understand, so lyrics give me a leeway to learn how to express myself. In fact, before I began writing poetry, I was writing music. Yeah. So with this piece, I just played with words here and there to just have that musical feeling but I’m also really talking about very serious things. Here goes.
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You can listen to a recording of Onyango’s March #Globaldev Communicators Connect conversation with Joan Okitoi-Heisig in the Healing Solidarity Collective here.
#GlobalDev Communicators Connect is a monthly meeting created and hosted by Joan Okitoi-Heisig and myself in the Healing Solidarity Collective to support people responsible for external communications in international aid and philanthropy to connect to each other.
On the second Wednesday of each month, we gather to learn from other communicators in the sector, ignite our creativity, and reflect on where/when we personally might be able to take more “risks” to invite change in how our organizations communicate about our work. We dare to invite the uneasy conversations and get inspired by each other.
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