I find myself yet again heading back to Africa. This time to Douala, Cameroon. A bit of a year since my last time being fully immersed in blackness and Africanness as my time in Tanzania. I am ridiculously blessed to have found a job a prestigious African-Centered K-12 school in the coastal city of Douala with the ACE Foundation. As a part of the Teach for Africa, the ACE Foundation works to bring young recent grads of African descent from the US to their two schools in Douala and Johannesburg to work as teachers and administrators and continue to strengthen the school’s strong mission of providing holistic and humanizing education for African youth. I am particularly excited to continue to explore the intersections of Blackness and Africanness again on the continent this time more intensively and purposefully within a school. Much of my writings will focus not so much on the experiences of traveling and exploring Cameroon (which I certainly will be doing), but more about the Black identity, African identity, gender identity, and perceptions of race, ethnicity, and even class during my work at the African-American Academy. For now, I am preparing again to move slower, more purposefully, and with fewer distractions than the excessive sensory experiences as one has living in the States. It is crucial however that I do remain connected to the struggles of Black Americans as well. The movement of #blacklivesmatter exists in the US, Cameroon, Tanzania and any place in which white supremacy has eroded the possibility of a positive sense of racial identity of which Africa is not removed from the potency of the diseases of : capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, consumerism, racism, imperialism, and exploitation.
Until then,
M
mariahgoesabroad 