Meeting Our Griots: Community as Strategic Intelligence

Meeting Our Griots was a three-part live inquiry examining African literature, spiritual philosophy, and community leadership as sources of practical intelligence for navigating modern fragmentation.

Centred on the work of Sobonfu Somé and her book The Spirit of Intimacy, this series treated Dagara teachings not as symbolism, but as applied frameworks for relational design, conflict resolution, and collective development.

Across three weeks, we explored three core questions:

• How do African writers and community knowledge keepers function as strategic analysts of human systems?
• What actually makes communities resilient, intimate, and durable?
• How can ritual, ceremony, and myth function as technologies of care and coordination?

Rather than romanticising tradition, the series examined Dagara philosophy as a sophisticated model of social infrastructure — one that integrates identity, conflict mediation, role clarity, and interdependence.

Themes included:

• Initiation and epistemology: expanding what counts as legitimate knowledge
• Intimacy as a structural property of strong communities
• Conflict resolution as communal ritual rather than private rupture
• Naming, role, and responsibility within collective systems
• Myth-making as a tool for shaping shared futures

Meeting Our Griots is part of Ijeruka’s Field Notes archive — our practice of studying Black intellectual and cultural traditions as living sources of developmental insight.

Originally convened live, the full recordings are now exclusively available to Ijeruka Village members.

This course was co-designed by Keren Lasme and Anwulika Okonjo, and taught by Keren Lasme.