Thinking Like an Ancestor
Thinking Like an Ancestor is a six-day experiential retreat in Salvador, Brazil, for people who want to live with greater care for what they inherit, what they interrupt, and what they leave behind.
We gather in Salvador, Bahia, during Black Consciousness Week, in a city shaped by displacement, survival, and extraordinary cultural continuity. Here, African creative, spiritual, and cultural intelligence did not simply endure; it adapted, evolved, and remained life-giving. Ritual, aesthetics, devotion, rhythm and relationships were carried forward not for recognition, but so that life itself could remain vivid and whole. Bahia does not explain this — it embodies it.
The Philosophy: What It Means to Think Like an Ancestor
Being a good ancestor is not a one-time intention. It is a way of returning — again and again — to what matters.
An ancestor is not only someone who comes before, but someone whose way of seeing continues through others. Lineage is not only blood or culture. It is orientation, ethos and practice. We are already becoming ancestors through what we normalise, preserve, and pass on.
This journey asks you to notice: What orientation am I embodying right now? What way of seeing, being, and creating am I already passing forward? And what would it mean to do this with intention?
In the embrace of Salvador, we will listen for the conditions that help us come back into alignment — with our values, with what's alive in us, with what wants to move through us into the world.
A Note: Deep gratitude to Veronica Ifásadùn, whose work and early contribution as a guest speaker in Ijeruka's inaugural program 'Radical Hope' was a starting point for our research and thinking on this theme. Veronica's work continues to serve as a helpful primer. We encourage you to review ancestorsintraining.org
What we'll cover
Continuity
Learning to notice what endures across rupture—how ways of seeing, relating, and creating survive and adapt through time.
Adaptive & Creative Intelligence
Exploring the forms of intelligence that sustain strong communities, especially those shaped through constraint, creativity, and relationship.
Meaning-making
Expanding how we understand meaning, guidance, and power by encountering spiritual intelligence as a lived orientation.
Collective Memory
Engaging collective memory with care — honouring what was preserved while remaining free to evolve with dignity.
Stewardship
Distilling a personal stewardship orientation—what you choose to carry forward, interrupt, and reimagine.
This Journey is for you if...
You’re Done Optimising
You are drawn to ground your work and life in something deeper than urgency or individual achievement.
You Want Wisdom, Not Doctrine
You want to understand ancestral intelligence not as nostalgia or doctrine, but as a practice relevant to how you lead, steward, relate and create change.
You Trust Emergence Over Answers
You are willing to slow down, sit with questions that don't have quick answers, and let insights emerge through experience.
You Learn Through Place and Presence
You're drawn to learn in a place where history, culture, and beauty are woven into daily life, and you're excited to spend a week in Salvador.
Hosts / Contributors
Journey Schedule
Day 1
Arrival
Arrive in the morning with time to settle into Bahia’s pace and take in Hotel Fasano's beauty.
In the evening, we gather for a welcome dinner where we name the purpose of this journey together, set simple agreements, and offer an orienting question to carry into the week.
Day 2
Continuity
Step into Salvador. This day is about witnessing continuity — how African creative, spiritual, and cultural intelligence persisted and flourished under the most extreme conditions.
We explore the historic centre's most significant sites: Pelourinho's colonial streets where Afro-Bahian life animated the margins; São Francisco Church; Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos, built and maintained by enslaved and formerly enslaved Africans as a space of dignity and resistance; and the African Museum and Pierre Verger Foundation. Lunch is shared as we process what we're witnessing.
In the evening, live samba-reggae percussion awakens your body to rhythm of Bahia — followed by a guided conversation.
Day 3
Adaptive & Creative Intelligence
This day celebrates the resourcefulness, creativity, and adaptive intelligence that has allowed African diaspora communities to flourish.
Begin with journaling to notice what's drawing you this week. Then immerse yourself in São Joaquim Market where you'll cook alongside local chefs, learning how they transform simple ingredients into dishes infused with history, love, and vitality. Shared meals become a slow, relational practice.
Afternoon is free for rest, the beach, or the spa. In the evening, a story circle over dinner creates space to explore: What is created for life? What kinds of intelligence do we value (or undervalue) in ourselves?
Day 4
Spiritual Intelligence
This day invites you into one of Salvador's most vital dimensions — the emergence of Afro-indigenous spiritual traditions. In Salvador, spirituality is not separate from daily life; it is woven through it.
You will be welcomed into a Candomblé terreiro—a space of community and devotion where you'll encounter the Orixás as a system of meaning-making and collective flourishing. Here, we will witness how African cosmology honours the unseen, not to convert you, but to expand your understanding of where power, grounding and guidance can come from.
Afternoons are unscheduled, honouring the integration that happens in silence and solitude. In the evening, we gather for a somatic practice, followed by a guided dialogue.
Day 5
Collective Memory
Black Consciousness Day is the energetic centre of our week — a day where history is not in museums but in bodies dancing through lively streets.
We participate in Black Consciousness Day celebrations and move through the Liberdade neighbourhood. Informal conversations with community members offer windows into how people carry, preserve, and evolve their inheritance with dignity and freedom.
Day 6
Stewardship
On our final day together, we gather for a carefully facilitated Stewardship Intensive where participants distill the week into a personal orientation they can carry forward. Using the journal, guided reflection, and witnessing in small groups, each person articulates their own ‘Thinking Like an Ancestor’ orientation — a personal protocol you can return to when notice yourself slipping back into old defaults.
Day 7
Departure
- Breakfast
- Goodbyes
- Optional Praia do Forte extension begins
Key Information
What to Expect
The Environment
Our sanctuary is the Hotel Fasano Salvador, a restored colonial masterpiece and Salvador's most prestigious address. Expect white linen, rooftop views of the Bay of All Saints, and ample time for rest, the ocean, the spa. Comfort, beauty and collective joy are part of the journey.
We handle the logistics, the translation, the reservations, and the safety. You simply have to arrive.
Who Holds This Space
The journey is facilitated by Ijeruka's hosts alongside local guides, artists, historians, and cultural practitioners whose lives and work are embedded in Salvador.
How You'll Learn
This journey is held as a developmentally intentional shared expedition, not a top-down curriculum.
Learning unfolds through shared inquiry, cultural encounter, guided reflection, and unstructured time for rest and connection.
Because this is a retreat, relaxation, beauty, and free connection are not breaks from the learning, they are part of it. While the week is thoughtfully curated, it is intentionally spacious — designed to be shaped by the people, the place, and what emerges in real time.
It takes a village.
Make ours your advantage.
Grow your circle of collaborators, mentors and champions. Join the purpose-driven Pan-African community maximising their impact by learning, growing and rising together.
The Ijeruka Space and platform felt like coming home. The sessions were well organised, the online platform was very interactive, and they provided multiple modes of learning.
It’s been a long while since I’ve joyfully anticipated showing up for collective study, eager to listen and reflect with others. Each session felt like a communal gathering, which takes skill and trusted intuition to facilitate through virtual spaces. I’m continually grateful for the many resources, questions and frameworks woven throughout that I know I will return to again and again.
The best part of the Ijeruka for me was being in community with people across the Diaspora, hearing their perspectives, and understanding our shared and stratified histories. I will always carry this particular experience with me.
Anwulika and Gabby were excellent facilitators, and brought so much space and life to the exploratory discourse. I enjoyed and learned so much from every rockstar presenter, and everyone's contributions to the resources that underpin their work.
The organisation, as well as the speakers that were invited were varied, interesting and enlightening in thematic scope. For me, the course opened up a new world of ways of living, doing, and understanding that is so necessary for these transition times we live in. Thank you so much, Anwulika, and your team.
I wish this existed years ago! I feel so happy for the younger black generation. I really do!
The course was perfectly tailored and the often interactive teaching framework was great. The teachers were incredibly well versed in their subjects and a joy to engage with and learn from. This course literally changed the trajectory of my life in terms of how I plan to approach projects and relate to my immediate environment. I now have a list of books and resources that’ll take me a while to get through but I couldn’t be happier. Thank you so much for creating this very much needed platform. It is a blessing.
I am grateful for the gifts of knowledge, conversation and connection I now have from the time I dedicated to this brilliant course. Thank you to my fellow participants and major gratitude to Anwulika Okonjo for creating this space.
I highly encourage anyone curious about what Ijeruka has to offer and I promise you will not regret it! There was a great deal of engagement among like-minded individuals from different backgrounds. It was a wonderful experience to learn together, reminisce together and be awestruck by the lessons.
I cannot recommend Ijeruka highly enough! From the incredibly accomplished and knowledgeable speakers to the capacity of the facilitators to create the right environment for discussion, Ijeruka met all of my expectations. I could totally do it all over again!
Through Ijeruka I was able to challenge myself into new ways of thinking that have been very useful for the navigating some of the challenges in my professional life.
Thank you so much for a beautiful course! I was able to enrich my learning and appreciated that we heard from people based across the globe. I look forward to more courses in the future.
Ijeruka has been a joy. I came to the course seeking purposeful alignment in my work, and an alternative path to fulfillment that is not trauma-based. Through Ijeruka, I had the experience to visit different timelines, imagine and discuss alternative futures, and deepen my appreciation for Diasporic intellect, community and consciousness. I would recommend Ijeruka to anyone who is seeking futures where they exist in wholeness.
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Commonly Asked Questions
How is Ijeruka different from other leadership or personal development platforms?
Ijeruka is a learning ecosystem for people who care about their inner growth and outward impact. We don’t focus on surface-level skills or motivational content. We focus on who you are becoming, how you make meaning, and the highest impact skills and mindsets, because that determines how you lead, build, relate and shape the future.
What makes Ijeruka different is that we work holistically and developmentally. We integrate evidence-based research on adult (vertical) development, leadership, and systems change with a rigorous attentiveness to African and Afro-diasporic contexts and traditions.
Who is Ijeruka for, and who is it not for?
Ijeruka is for African and Afro-diasporic professionals who are actively growing into their next level—personally, professionally, or both—and want to expand their capacity to hold the life and impact they’re building toward.
Our participants are usually already capable, driven, and in motion. What brings them to Ijeruka is the sense that their outer responsibilities, ambitions and influence now requires inward expansion to be elevated or sustained: e.g. clearer internal authority, stronger coherence, cultural confidence and better decision-making under complexity.
If you’re looking for quick fixes or credentials without inner work, this won’t be the right place. If you’re ready to engage meaningfully with yourself, others and the world, you’ll feel at home.
How do programmes and learning experiences work? What level of commitment is expected?
Our offerings range from self-paced, short-form learning and live conversations to multi-session programmes, retreats, and longer developmental journeys.
You can expect a mix of frameworks, guided inquiry, and practical application. This is not “watch and forget” content. The value comes from engaging with the material and, where relevant, with other participants.
Time commitments are always stated clearly upfront. We design experiences to be deep enough to be effective, but realistic for people with full lives and responsibilities.
Do I need to be a member to participate in Ijeruka programmes?
Some experiences will be open to the public, while others will be reserved for members or offered first to our community. Membership is designed for people who want ongoing access to learning, dialogue, and a values-aligned peer village.
Becoming a member signals a deeper level of commitment to your own development and to being in community with others on a similar path. Membership details, benefits, and pricing will always be transparent before you’re asked to join.
You can engage with Ijeruka without becoming a member, but membership is where the full ecosystem comes alive.
How do you handle safety, confidentiality, and trust in group spaces?
Psychological and cultural safety are non-negotiable for us. While Ijeruka is not a therapeutic service, our spaces often involve honest reflection and meaningful personal insight. We set clear community agreements around confidentiality, respect, and responsible participation. What’s shared in closed sessions stays in the room unless explicit permission is given. We curate group experiences intentionally and design them to support depth without exposure for its own sake.
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