⁣Link Up Podcast — Episode 4 | Featuring Ɓatɨ-Ijɔ̄ Bɛsoŋ

Hosts: Niara Esi Ìjèawelē Ọmọlará Kwento & Bakari Kwadwo Ọbatayé Kwento

with a special Abibitumi 20 Year Anniversary testimonial from Agya Kwasi Datɛ

Akɔaba, Woezɔ, Oɔbaake — welcome — to another episode of Link Up Podcast, where we connect with Abibifoɔ doing Black powerful work across Abibiman, the Black Land, and the diaspora.

In this episode, we Link Up with Ɓatɨ-Ijɔ̄ Bɛsoŋ — a committed daughter of Abibiman (born in Cameroon), an active Abibitumi member, indigenous spirituality practitioner, and serious advocate for returning to Black sanity. She shares her upbringing between urban and rural Cameroon, the powerful influence of her grandmothers, the role of indigenous food, medicine, family structure, and the lessons she received from elders before fully understanding their depth.

We discuss her journey out of imposed religious frameworks, her search for ancestral grounding, her discovery of Abibitumi, and how the platform helped her resist assimilation while living in Krakkka-ville. Ɓatɨ-Ijɔ̄ also speaks on the importance of indigenous language, why she is working to reclaim Kɛ́nyāŋ and Keaka, how language connects directly to ancestral communion, and why speaking only colonial languages creates a break in Black memory.

The conversation also moves through Cameroon’s cultural struggle, repatriation, family structure, polygyny, spirit animals, palm wine, the Sankɔfa Journey, and the work required to pass Black values from one generation to the next.

** Stay tuned after the conversation for a new Animated Cartoon series **

This is a conversation about study, transformation, community, repatriation, land, sanity, and the work required to make KMT Black again.

Feel free to share your thoughts and Link Up!

Dance Performance to Make KMT Black Again (choreographed by Okuninibaa Nnemkadi)

Macron’s announcement of MansA, a new African cultural center near the Eiffel Tower, may sound like recognition. But in today’s geopolitical climate, it is hard to separate this kind of cultural diplomacy from France’s desperate attempt to rebuild influence after its humiliating fallout with several postcolonial West African countries.

The real question is simple: who will this center actually serve?

Will it give real space to African artists, thinkers, and independent cultural institutions, or will it become another soft-power corridor where African elites, diplomats, ministers, business leaders, and foreign interests gather under the convenient language of “partnership”?

Kenyan President William Ruto stood beside Emmanuel Macron and praised France’s renewed push into Africa as “inclusive” and “mutually beneficial.”

But let’s call it what it is.

France has not suddenly discovered equality. It has been pushed out of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, and now it is looking for a new route back into Africa through leaders willing to help rebrand its influence.

From the CFA franc to Niger’s fight over its own minerals, France’s record on the continent is not a partnership. It is extraction, control, and colonial power dressed up in diplomatic language.

Kenya should know better than to help France launder its image in Africa.

Macron’s visit to Kenya was a performance of colonial arrogance.

From schoolchildren being made to look at him like some kind of saviour, to a public forum where he grabbed the room, scolded Africans, and called them disrespectful, to Nairobi roads being shut down for his convoy and even his jog, Macron behaved exactly like colonial power has always behaved in Africa: loud, entitled, intrusive, and convinced that African people exist to listen, clap, and obey.

The most insulting part is not even Macron’s behaviour. It is the African leaders, institutions, and elites who keep making room for this nonsense.

A visitor does not come to your home and order you around. Macron did not come to Kenya to honour Africa. He came to perform power on African soil and everyone who rolled out the red carpet for it should be ashamed.

⁣Prof Emeritus Théophile Obenga on the African Origin of so-called Greek Education and Philosophy

⁣Borderless Horizons: Ghana's Visa-Free Gambit