2 Weeks
Seminar + Lab
Language
Yoruba Language, Cosmology & Philosophical Thought
An intensive introduction to Yoruba language structures, tonal systems, and orature, set within the philosophical framework of Yoruba cosmology — including concepts of Ori (personal destiny), Àṣà (culture), and the Ifá corpus as an epistemological system. Students engage with Yoruba literature, proverbs, and sacred texts as forms of world-making and historical transmission.
Skills & Knowledge Gained
Yoruba tonal phonology
Ifá corpus literacy
African philosophy of time
Proverb analysis
Cosmological frameworks
10 Days
Seminar + Fieldwork
Writing Systems
The Bamum Script: Ibrahim Njoya & the Invention of Writing
A focused study of the Shu-Mom script, invented by Sultan Ibrahim Njoya of the Bamum Kingdom (Cameroon) in the early 20th century — one of history's most documented cases of independent script creation. Students learn the script's characters, trace its evolution through 7 transformations, and examine its political, archival, and decolonial significance as an act of sovereign knowledge-making.
Skills & Knowledge Gained
Shu-Mom script reading
Script evolution analysis
Decolonial archival theory
African historiography
Knowledge sovereignty
1 Week
Seminar + Practice
Writing Systems
African Writing Systems: Nsibidi, Tifinagh, Vai & Beyond
A comparative survey of indigenous African scripts — from the Nsibidi ideographic system of the Ekpe society in Nigeria and Cameroon, to the Tifinagh of the Amazigh, the Vai syllabary of Liberia, Ge'ez of Ethiopia, and N'Ko of Solomana Kante. The workshop interrogates the myth that Africa lacked writing and examines each system's social, ritual, and political functions.
Skills & Knowledge Gained
Comparative script analysis
Ideographic systems
Historical linguistics
Decolonial epistemology
10 Days
Language Lab + Performance
Oral Tradition
Fon & Gun: Languages of the Clotilda Corridor
An immersive introduction to Fon and Gun — the primary languages of southern Benin, spoken by the ancestors of the Clotilda survivors. Beyond linguistic competency, students explore these languages as carriers of Vodun cosmology, historical memory, and diasporic continuity, tracing surviving linguistic traces in African American vernacular, song, and ceremony.
Skills & Knowledge Gained
Fon/Gun conversational basics
Vodun vocabulary & ritual language
Linguistic diaspora tracing
Ethnolinguistics
2 Weeks
Fieldwork + Creative Workshop
Oral Tradition
The Griot Tradition: Memory, Voice & the Ethics of Transmission
Griot traditions across West and Central Africa — from Mande djeli to Wolof gewel to Hausa maroka — are examined as highly sophisticated systems of historical transmission, political commentary, and genealogical record-keeping. Students work directly with practicing griots, develop listening and transcription methodologies, and explore the ethics of recording, archiving, and representing oral testimony in academic and artistic contexts.
Skills & Knowledge Gained
Oral history methodology
Transcription ethics
Genealogical narration
Voice as archive
West African historiography
10 Days
Seminar + Fieldwork
Diaspora
Storytelling Traditions of the African Diaspora
From Anansi spider tales (Akan → Caribbean) to the Signifying Monkey (African American vernacular), from Candomblé orikis to Haitian Vodou ceremonial songs — this workshop maps the survival, transformation, and creative reinvention of African narrative traditions across the Atlantic. Students analyze diaspora storytelling as both resistance and cultural sovereignty, and develop original creative projects in response.
Skills & Knowledge Gained
Diaspora narrative analysis
Trickster archetypes
Comparative mythology
Creative adaptation
Cultural sovereignty theory
1 Week
Creative Workshop
Storytelling
Praise Songs, Oriki & the Architecture of Memory
A deep dive into oriki — Yoruba praise poetry — as a living archival form: naming lineages, invoking ancestral qualities, and encoding historical events in sonic structures. Students learn to read, perform, and compose oriki, then experiment with their translation into contemporary forms: prose poetry, film narration, soundscape, and visual art.
Skills & Knowledge Gained
Oriki composition & performance
Praise poetry analysis
Ancestral naming systems
Sound & memory
10 Days
Seminar + Lab
Sound Studies
Talking Drums, Sonic Archives & the Language of Rhythm
The atumpan, djembe, and dundun are not merely musical instruments but linguistic technologies capable of encoding language, history, and political messages. This workshop investigates the semiotics of African drum language, the sonic traces in blues, jazz, funk, and hip-hop, and invites students to develop original sonic works inspired by African rhythmic epistemologies.
Skills & Knowledge Gained
Drum language semiotics
African American sonic genealogy
Sound design
Rhythmic composition
2 Weeks
Film Lab + Seminar
Cinema
Filming the Invisible: Ritual, Spirit & Cinematic Form
How does cinema represent what cannot be seen — ancestors, spirits, oracular time, cosmological forces? Drawing on the work of filmmakers like Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Souleymane Cissé, and Sara Gomez, students explore cinematic strategies for making the sacred and the metaphysical visible. The workshop culminates in short film experiments that use African cosmological frameworks to structure narrative time and image.
Skills & Knowledge Gained
African cinematic theory
Ritual film grammar
Non-linear time in narrative
Short film production
Speculative mise-en-scène
10 Days
Fieldwork + Lab
Archives
Decolonizing the Archive: Methods, Ethics & Practice
African communities have been both the subjects and the victims of colonial archival practices — their images, objects, and stories held in European institutions. This workshop examines the theory and practice of decolonizing archives: repatriation politics, community-led archival projects, oral testimony as primary source, and the use of digital tools to build community-owned memory repositories.
Skills & Knowledge Gained
Archival theory & practice
Digital preservation tools
Repatriation ethics
Community archive design
1 Week
Creative Workshop
Experimental Film
Found Footage, Ghostly Images & the Afterlives of Colonial Film
Colonial and early ethnographic film archives contain both evidence of violence and haunting traces of African lives, faces, and cultural practices. Students work with found footage methodologies — rephotography, counter-montage, sonic overlay — to create critical and creative responses to colonial image archives, transforming instruments of domination into tools of recovery and reinvention.
Skills & Knowledge Gained
Found footage editing
Counter-montage theory
Colonial image critique
Post-production techniques
10 Days
Seminar + Lab
AI & Memory
AI, Memory & African Archives
Exploring artificial intelligence as both a risk and a tool for cultural heritage preservation — from automated transcription of oral histories and endangered language documentation to the biases embedded in facial recognition systems trained on predominantly Western datasets. Students prototype AI-assisted archival tools and critically evaluate their social implications for African communities.
Skills & Knowledge Gained
AI transcription tools
Algorithmic bias analysis
Digital heritage ethics
Prototype development
2 Weeks
Seminar + Performance Lab
Philosophy
African Philosophy of Time: Ubuntu, Sankofa & the Non-Linear Future
Western modernity operates on a linear conception of time — past, present, future as a forward arrow. This workshop explores African philosophical alternatives: the Akan Sankofa ("return to the past to move forward"), Bantu Ubuntu ("I am because we are"), Yoruba Àṣà and cyclical time, and the Vodun concept of ancestral presence in the living world. Students apply these frameworks to their own creative and research practices, fundamentally rethinking narrative, history, and the concept of "the future."
Skills & Knowledge Gained
African philosophy
Temporality theory
Ubuntu ethics
Sankofa methodology
Speculative frameworks
10 Days
Fieldwork + Seminar
Ritual
Vodun: Cosmology, Ceremony & Living Memory in Benin
Vodun is not a relic of the past but a living intellectual and spiritual system structuring politics, medicine, ecology, and aesthetics across West Africa and the diaspora. Conducted partly in Ouidah with local practitioners and scholars, this workshop offers a rigorous academic engagement with Vodun cosmology, its pantheon of orishas/vodu, ceremonial practices, and its resilience as a system of meaning-making across the Middle Passage and into contemporary art and performance.
Skills & Knowledge Gained
Vodun cosmological systems
Ethnographic field methods
Ritual performance analysis
Diaspora religion studies
1 Week
Performance Lab
Body & Performance
The Body as Archive: Performance, Gesture & Ancestral Memory
Drawing on the theories of Diana Taylor (the "repertoire" vs. the "archive") and the practices of African and Afro-diasporic performance traditions, this studio-based workshop investigates the body as a site of historical transmission. Students work with movement, gesture, and ritual performance to explore how bodies carry, enact, and transmit cultural memory — and how performance art can serve as a form of historical research.
Skills & Knowledge Gained
Performance theory
Somatic historiography
Movement research
Performance creation
10 Days
Seminar + Artistic Lab
Speculative Design
Worldbuilding & Speculative Design: Building African Futures
Using African Futurism as a design methodology, this creative intensive challenges participants to build fully realized fictional worlds rooted in African cosmological, philosophical, and social systems — not dystopian nor utopian, but genuinely other. Writers, filmmakers, architects, game designers, and visual artists work together to develop world bibles, visual grammars, and narrative infrastructures for African futures.
Skills & Knowledge Gained
Speculative worldbuilding
Visual grammar design
African Futurism theory
Cross-disciplinary collaboration
2 Weeks
Fieldwork + Lab
Genealogy
Genealogy, DNA & the Reconstruction of African Family History
Across the Atlantic, millions of descendants of enslaved Africans carry severed genealogies. This hands-on workshop combines archival research (plantation records, ship manifests, freedmen's bureau documents) with contemporary genomic tools (African DNA testing methodologies, haplogroup analysis) and oral history collection to develop rigorous frameworks for reconstructing African family histories. Fieldwork takes place in both Africatown, Alabama and Porto-Novo, Benin.
Skills & Knowledge Gained
Archival genealogical research
DNA analysis interpretation
Oral testimony methods
Bi-continental field research
Family history writing
1 Week
Documentary Workshop
Documentary Practice
Documentary Practice & Ethics: Filming Community Memory
Hands-on workshop in documentary filmmaking centered on questions of consent, power, and representation when filming African and Afro-diasporic communities. Students produce short documentary works with Africatown community members or Porto-Novo neighborhood associations, engaging with community filmmaking ethics, participatory approaches, and the question of who owns a story once it is filmed.
Skills & Knowledge Gained
Participatory documentary methods
Community consent protocols
Interview technique
Editing for testimony
10 Days
Seminar + Creative Lab
Black Atlantic
Black Atlantic Sound Studies: Music, Memory & the Middle Passage
From the West African griot tradition to the blues of the Mississippi Delta, from Afrobeat to hip-hop, this workshop traces sonic continuities and transformations across the Black Atlantic. Students analyze musical structures (call-and-response, polyrhythm, improvisation) as survivals of African musical epistemology, and create original sonic works in dialogue with this genealogy.
Skills & Knowledge Gained
Music genealogy analysis
Black Atlantic theory
Sonic composition
Ethnomusicology methods
10 Days
Seminar + Writing Lab
Identity
Naming, Identity & the Politics of African Personal Names
In many African cultures, personal names are not arbitrary labels but dense epistemological statements — encoding birth order, circumstances, spiritual identity, lineage, and philosophical worldview. This workshop examines naming systems across Akan, Yoruba, Fon, Wolof, and Bantu traditions, traces the violence of name erasure under enslavement, and explores contemporary practices of African name reclamation as acts of identity sovereignty.
Skills & Knowledge Gained
African onomastics
Identity theory
Colonial name politics
Personal narrative writing
