Earth, I have only just remembered that I am of you.[1] I can trace the psychological origins of my ignorance to that period when gunshots were first heard, to own, in huge numbers, your indigenous bodies. Your beauty was loved for ownership. Your immense divinity was marginalized. Earth, I grew up fostering my indigeneity in the same conditions. Searching for your love through rubble rock and concrete metal landscapes. It’s cruel how inaccessible your lush green body has been for the custodians of your rivers and trees. But your sun always arises, and I faithfully look up at your sky to witness your colour theory and to meditate on your art. Earth, it’s important to believe in something. I believe in you. I believe in your mystery and believe that in each moment you have everything that I need.
The third world is the traces they left behind. The inner workings of their wealth. Their distasteful choice of values and their unhealthy obsession with dominance. Earth, we became the reflections of your troubles. In the court of divine judgment, we are the evidence that their imperialist theories did not work, were flawed, and lacked harmony. Catastrophe is what we are living in with you, and as people of the land, we are woven into your expressions of change. Our lives are the enactments of what unfolds after your endings. Out of those great graveyards of deforestation, emerged cursed seeds that grew spoilt fruit. The dusty cloud trail grew thinner over time, and as it did it revealed what capitalism left behind. The post-anthropocenic architecture of its shadow.
In those days when they prophesied the coming end, I wonder if the elders saw my name and my body and my sin as consequences of the coming invasion. And if they did, did they send me love? It must have been a great love from the mountain peaks, great love from the lakes, great love from the rivers, great love from the hills that sent my ancestors warnings through dreams. A great love which understands the meaning of change. Even now I ask you to teach me your reasons for peace. I ask you to guide me on your love so that I may comprehend your forgiveness and compassion. Help us our land.
black eyes stare at black bodies behaving in unblack ways
asking who are you to be free?
and
who are you to say that this love I gave was wrong?
who are you to put
tattoos on your body?
and
piercings on your face?
who are you to claim your body
as sacred ground?
The rare black leopard was spotted in Laikipia county in 2013 with special night vision cameras,[2] but even before then, local herders had reported seeing the shadowy feline on the land. Melanism is a rare genetic mutation for the african leopard and its previous recorded sighting was in Mount Kenya around 1989-1990. I feel humbled that this rare occurrence is happening in the same era of my life, that my blackness and theirs can meet on the same land and exalt each other, after many years of black pain.
In the times before the invaders came, when the dryness of the Turkana sand was moist with the waters from the ocean[3] and the Narioktome Boy[4] was born, leaders must have been born non-human in nature. Of them few records remain through myth and fable, because even bones do not reveal the truth of that time, nor do they help us understand the non-human structures which existed and the interspecies relationships which they formed. Some things can now only be pure speculation, like how the thick suit of armor that the rhino has for its skin could have made it a knight in the pre-homo erectus realm. Or, how the striking melanation of certain leopards could have meant more than just a recessive allele in the gene on a chromosome of a leopard. Could it be that the birth of the black leopard was known beyond the leopard community? That leaves recognised the black leopard, soil, water, lichen? Is it possible that the black leopard was acknowledged by the entire non-human realm? That its blackness set it apart and that even then, it was known that blackness is only dark matter.[5] I bet they pondered on the black leopard’s mystery and of it formed myths of ownership. Myths about it’s return, myths about it’s presence. Acknowledgements, processions, coronations at its birth, prayer and fasting, festivities, ceremonies[6] pilgrimages could have existed for it and are now all endangered because the time of the homo erectus came and of that time came imperialism.
Fig. 1: The black leopard shows its true face, 2023, acrylic and pastel on paper. Courtesy of the artist.
Fig. 2: mausiku na mauchana, 2023, acrylic and pastel on paper. Courtesy of the artist.
All leopards of young have heard the tale of the black one. Some cubs grew up holding the faith that their pigmentation may supernaturally change, anointing them as the black leopard. All kins, lineages and packs respected black leopard’s divinity and believed in it’s mythic ownership that is embedded in the promise of it’s return. The black panther is that which stands out from the others. The season of the black panther returning is the season of blackness thriving. With histories lost, and histories erased, I ponder on the black leopard and wonder if through its lineage, it can remember its first time in blackness. Our nation’s patriots were men, who were learned and excelled, in the same colonial system, which oppressed them.[7] A return of the black leopard means an end to the times of lion dictatorship, of power gained through violence and dominance.
In this land that is not yet free, I invoke the black leopard’s mystic ownership. I ask the land to return the wise, so that we may be led by those who carry their lineage and ancestral memories like shrines. Land appointed leaders. Those who the sun shines upon. Mythic ownership is kept alive through prophecy, it is a type of ownership which occurs through death and resurrection, through a chosen one. A destined savior. Before that period when gunshots were first heard, black leopard was seen, named and respected. Black leopard was known for its blackness. Exquisite blackness that has been forgotten through lineage. Exquisite blackness that returns. Like me.
In my histories of violence, I consumed not once, but in multiplicities, the red apples of sin. My generation was raised between the western morals of that time and the survivalist silences of Moi’s one party regime. Red apples of sin were intertwined with freedom and were subjective in the case of the privileged. When I was born, Richard Leaky had already burned more than one hundred tons of ivory [8] and Christ had already returned to the Western province.[9] You might not disagree with my thinking that I was born in the post-anthropocene, on a land that had changed severely, as a person, post-apocalypticly detached from their culture, bearing an english name.
When did domination become my norm? When did it become my birthright, my lineage? I, who caught myself playing the role of the dominator, caught myself playing the role again. Turns out this character I’m playing is complex and domination is a wounded heart in many ways. I keep on unlearning, I keep on healing. I know how this journey goes, I fall. Fall from whatever cloud I thought was reality. This time, the fall is gentler, because I know what to do after my bones hit the ground and shatter and I feel pain all through my body, and the greatest pain of it being the pain that I’m still alive. How am I here? Bones broken but still alive. Bones broken from falling. Falling out of the role they gave my body because it was born. Born black. Born with the blackness of the black leopard, and born with its myth. With the role capitalism had me play, I was cursed away from my lineage. My black paw on earth lineage. The lineage of my blackness. Blackness that came before me. Blackness that is the land’s[10].
violent judgments
of self and others
make young black bodies
grow
Overconscientious
until
lineage is
black body bondage.
Have your lands ever been commodified to the point that your elders and leaders have lost wisdom on how to create a sustainable relationship with it?[11] Are your land’s plantations still in use?[12] Are your elders accepting of this imperial oppressive hardship as a God given suffering on their life?[13] In that body, that belongs to you, can you feel how the wrongness of it all was given to you? The emotional exhaustion and undocumented pain of how not okay it’s been. My ancestors wouldn’t even look at me before I swore my oath to the land. It’s not an over exaggeration. They wouldn’t surround themselves with someone who was white loving and hating of their blackness. How dare I let capitalism take a hold of me? How dare I be lied to? How could I play the role of the self-hating black woman? Ancestors, I understand you not wanting anything to do with me. Yet you still gave me your love, and guided me. You still taught me how to be free. Even though I cannot yet speak your language, the language of the trees, you hold patience for me.
May I learn to balance compassion in me. That I may love others through their ignorance of their blackness and their black pawed ancestors. Let compassion move through me because I too was ignorant and I fully acknowledge in all angles of dominance, why this happened to me. Why I grew up to be self hating. Why I carried this norm; that it was okay to hate my blackness, black leopard skin indigenous blackness. That it was okay to hate the things that it reminded me of. That even the land that held me was not good enough because of all the blackness it obtained. I have been ignorant. Recently unlearning. Trying to heal from the wounds that caused it. Wounds that didn’t belong to me but were pushed down through semen and placenta to birth me. Knives that were mine to carry. Hereditary sharp knives of violence[14]. Healing the lineage is having a crowd of ancestors gathered around me. Their arms outstretched, to hold me, with glowing faces. Mothers carrying infants are there, wise ones, warriors, deities and the black leopard. Their ghostly touch tingles my skin and sends chills down my spine. If not in invocation then it is in dreams that they come to see me. Black leopard came twice, one time injured, limping with crutches along our ancestral home in Makueni.
Who my people were and who they are now has been a question on my mind. It has led me to the land’s wisdom and I think I understand its reasons for peace. I think I understand its willingness to let itself be transformed through the heated violence of change.[15] With its ancient experience of being, it best knows that an end is not an ending.[16] It best knows that what ends, returns, like the melanin of a black leopard. What else returned with the spirit and melanin of the black leopard? And what does it mean for those who swore oaths to return to the land in that time when one’s best defenses were defenseless against bullets? Those whose only best chance of victory would be in the new millennium. For this war whose battlefield has been both soil and emotion. This war that we fight in earthly ways of slowness of pace, on earth, and for earth’s sake. To those whose ancestors are buried on stolen land, I think about your dead who are not remembered and your dead who remain mysteriously alive. I remember your fertile lands which were granted 999 year leases in 1915.[17] I remember those who miserably died of hunger and thirst during the great famine and I remember how those who survived were trapped into submission by the missionaries through the food and water they gave them.[18] I think about how your bodies and lives were enslaved to a supreme law called the constitution. When rights have no morals.[19]
black body bound.
what pretty peace had i to offer
when i was a black body bound?
indigenous, with no land
in this country of white ghosts.[20]
Earth, your patient sense of justice invites me to surrender to your subtle movements. Your joints only now stretching to reach, your lungs only now exhaling. For many days and many nights, I am cradled by your becoming. It evokes out of me divine joy, through which I can envision the times my ancestors had by surrendering into you. Nairobi’s rivers carry all the toxic waste we give them. I know what it’s like to be like them. I know what it’s like to carry what others have dumped on me. Polluted things which take time to leave. Things passed down through lineage. Things like plastic.[21] What I am doing, like the river, is my best. Doing my best to clean myself overtime and transform the waste I was given—to make something else of it which is different. Just like the river, they will think I am suffering, of which I am, but within my suffering most will fail to see that I’m trying as hard as I can. That I am silently working and that time is my process.
I must forgive me. I must. The future of my sanity depends on it. May the here/now be my place of complex remembering and radical loving forgiveness. In the here/now, may I be captured by the spirit of radical joy. May I remember the childhood moments of play. May liberation know me. May I have what it takes to move on and keep growing into this incomprehensible human. More-than-human. Black from the lineage of forest,[22] descendent of the living ancestor, black leopard. On my black body I speak love to support myself as I grow. Might I transform to that which no longer needs healings. That who can embody the justice of the present moment. That who can feel liberation. That who is not afraid to grow and to be massive and to just be themselves in their blackness. I am getting to know myself because through my body, I speak love. My rituals for showing me love. My loving of me. My being loved. I speak sacred love onto my body.
What if my spirit was a black leopard? What if I had returned? What if my existence was lying dormant through lineage, waiting for the right time to be born, alive in the season of the black leopard thriving? What if my living was desired by the earth and fated like a prophetic dream? If my spirit was a black leopard, and I had returned, that would mean that what is ancient is alive in me. That this post-colonial body is a sacred abode for ancient life to return to, even if the ground I’m standing on is ruins.
black body freedom
to change
and grow
haphazard
over patches that used to be green.
Fig. 3: watu wa mwituni, 2022, oil on paper. Courtesy of the artist.
Fig. 4: 5 or Orphelia, 2023, digital collage (by Gek0). Courtesy of the artist.
I now hate that which made me hate myself. I want to pull out choking the liar and abuser in me. The legacy of the colonizer. The inner home guard. Pulling me out, lovingly. Lovingly with force. With a loving gentle force that kills my internal domination of self and others. An honorable death it will be. A sacrifice I will be making. The death of who I used to be. Even now I am dressed for death. Ready to bow and embrace the beheading of who I was. How do I lovingly tear me from me while giving gratitude to life’s generous givings. Is it like how you, Earth, move in similar conditions? Growing through your changes. Carrying out death and funerary rites of decomposition. Teach me how to die slow. To transform to nutrient rich bearing ground.[23] Teach me to give as I die. Teach me to give lovingly, generously, overabundantly as you do. Even if I cannot yet speak the language of trees, teach me how to show up in impactful meaningful ways and how to always know what to say, and when to say it. Teach me your beautiful peace.
Fig. 5: There once was a black leopard and it was me, 2024, digital collage. Courtesy of the artist.
Fig. 6: Sunworshipper, 2023, pastel on paper. Courtesy of the artist.
My sacred body is a loving ground, an altar for liberation. Let these tears I have cried work out. Let me stop being upset by blackness. Blackness that is I. Blackness born from the land. Sovereign with its indigeneity. Holy ground. Let this self-aware liberated black body grow to be that who the land wields it to be. Let this black body be like earth. And decay. And die. My death is transforming me. My death will guide me into new life. I am grateful for the ending that is me. The cost of liberation. In this battle we fight with the militant support of love. Equipped in guerilla tactics for this fight for freedom. The sovereignty for the land that is my black body. My sacred body of forest lineage. Descendent of the living ancestor black leopard. For all my deaths, I will be reborn like the black leopard. I will arise like the sleeping gene of melanation.
The times of the lion are over, goodbye to tyranny. Goodbye leadership being a contest of who was the loudest and most carnivorous. Goodbye to a crown won through battle and death. Who said the lion was king? The times of the black leopard are here. That means, black divinity is returning—black sovereignty. On my black body I speak love. I speak of a she-leopard born with black paws that know the land.
in my anthropocenic ending
i consent to being something new
presently present,
grounded & aligned
to my more than human.[24]
The earth beautifully moves me. Fills my organs with breath so I can grow. My search for ancestors has led me to the land on which I have found forgiveness for being born in this generation. The generation with the missing teeth of a mouth that speaks on culture[25]. Born with gaps in our lineage. With conflicting beliefs on culture and morals[26]. I sing a convoluted praise that I am here. With feet like roots which dig into the soil, I found my lineage.
In this absence of names, legacies and tales, the title of ancestor goes beyond those who are immediately remembered. It trails beyond, beyond what is known and trembles in the intuitive areas of memory. How those times were long ago. When Kikuyu, Kalenjin and Luo were still in Egypt[27] and Kenya still belonged to the land, and black leopard was walking in its blackness.
With my ancient understanding as the black leopard I would retell some of our ancient tales. Tales where our ancestors are living in trees and the spirits of the departed form like clouds in the sky, wafting around, fulfilling the sun’s prophecies. I would tell the tales of sun men and wood boys and river water families. I would reimagine my physical borders and expand beyond my human. Into my more than human, where I have radically made kin with the land and exist in my half-bark/half-soil body.
I would tell the tales of everyday Kenyan life and invoke in them the ancient truth of more-than-human realities. Everyone who would hear my ancient tales would be tempted to reimagine what they’re seeing. When they reach their bus stage at Kencom, they’ll look up at the mugumo trees and remember what they heard. How, in between the leafy dreadlocked branches of the migumo along Kencom, silently sit our remembered and displaced ancestors. Through their more than human eyes, they observe the long City Hoppa and K.B.S buses get vacated and in-vacated by the tides of the living. The unnecessary chants of the makangas form the syncopated choruses to their very mysterious afterlives. They are accustomed to the daily and nightly sights of students and lovers, mothers and babies, hard working fathers, hands communicating in sign language, raised heads and eyebrows to mean yes, thumbs scrolling on phones keying in mpesa passwords to buy tiny packets of biscuits and crisps sold along the aisle of the bus before it moves.
About the Author
V for 5 is a multidisciplinary artist based in Kenya. Her practice spans across web-building, poetry, essays, fiction, music production, painting, and rapping. Drawing inspiration from the intersection of technology and nature, V for 5 creates both digital and analog work to contemplate more-than-human personhood, colonial legacies and community.
[1] Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive: After the End of the World (Durham (NC): Duke University Press, 2018).
[2] Smriti Vidyarthi, “Kenyan who captured black leopard one year before photos went viral”, NTV, February 18, 2019.
[3] Tristan McConnell, “A Whale in the Desert,” Emergence Magazine, 24 Aug. 2023.
[4] Narioktome Boy is one of the oldest human fossils found. They estimate that he died when he was around 7-11 years. He was dug up by Louis Leaky and his team of archeologists on the bank of Nariokotome river, Turkana.
[5] Simone Browne, “Introduction,” Dark Matters: On The Surveillance of Blackness (Durham (NC): Duke University Press, 2015).
[6] V.S. Naipaul, “Children of the Old Forest,” The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief (London: Picador, 2010), 217–277.
[7] Oginga Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru: autobiography (London: Heinemann, 1967); Montagu Slater, The Trial of Jomo Kenyatta (Nairobi: Heinemann, 1990 [1955]).
[8] Richard E. Leakey and Virginia Morell, Wildlife Wars: My Fight to Save Africa’s Natural Treasures (New York (NY): St Martin’s Press, 2014 [2001]).
[9] The Christian sect Legio Maria, founded in Kisumu believes that Jesus already returned as Luo man. According to some, an African Jesus was one of the three secrets of Fatima. Bethwell A. Ogot, Reintroducing Man into the African World (Kisumu: Anyange Press, 1999).
[10] V.S. Naipaul, “Children of the Old Forest.” in The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief (London: Picador, 2010), 217–277.
[11] Billy Kahora et al. Kwani? 05 Hung’arisha Haswa! Part 1, Kwani Trust, 2008.
[12] John Mbaria and Mordecai Ogada, The Big Conservation Lie: The Untold Story of Wildlife Conservation in Kenya (Washington: Lens & Pens Publishing LLC, 2017).
[13] Ogot, Reintroducing Man into the African World.
[14] Kahora, Kwani? 05 Hung’arisha Haswa! Part 1.
[15] Gumbs, M Archive: After the End of the World.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Samuel N. Waruhiu, Corridors of British Colonial Injustice: chronicles of the 1952 assassination of Kenya’s Senior Chief Waruhiu and of the two men hanged for his murder. (Nairobi: Horizon Publications Limited, 2011).
[18] Ibid.
[19] Mbaria and Ogada, The Big Conservation Lie: The Untold Story of Wildlife Conservation in Kenya.
[20] Out of Africa, directed by Sydney Pollack (Universal Pictures, 1985), DVD. Elspeth Huxley, The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987).
[21] Sara Bonaventura, “Iconoplast Meshes,” in We? PIP2023 (Madrid: Cthulhu Books, 2023).
[22] Naipaul, The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief, 217-277.
[23] Gumbs, M Archive: After the End of the World.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ogot, Reintroducing Man into the African World.
[26] Kahora, Kwani? 05 Hung’arisha Haswa! Part 1.
[27] Ogot, Reintroducing Man into the African World.
