An introduction

Me, my names and parents.

Almost two years old here.

There’s a mountain where my mother comes from, the tallest one in Africa, and a lake where my father comes from, that borders two other countries. While both of my parents’ birthplaces are in the north, they decided to raise a family right at the centre of the country, in Dodoma, where the sun is living each day like it’s the last, so hot. I used to think I looked a lot like my father, but these days looking at my own selfies, there is a completely different woman. It’s a face I have seen in many old family photos, the face of my mom.

Me and my mom, I think it was my 1st birthday!

I happen to be the sixth child in a family of nine. Family dynamics are quite an essay of their own so we will leave it like that for now. The upside of having parents who come from two different tribes is that you might end up having two names. If they are also into religion, you are likely to be named after a saint as an official name while your tribal name will be an inheritance of some admired person’s name in the lineage. My official name is Elfrida while my tribal one is Kokunura, people at home just call me Koku. Kokunura by the way means something sweet and I inherited this name from the sister of my great great grandmother from my father’s side. Everyone who met her will tell you of her commitment to cleanliness. They say she would wash her hands by going through one nail after the other, lifting her hands up to see better in the rays of the sun before she put them right back into the water again for another round of cleansing. Well, I hope I’m doing her name justice.

Me and my dad.

I’m a young black African woman in her 20s, still in college. In the first few weeks of college I’ll have you know I cried in the undergraduate director's office when I was told I couldn't change my major, which was journalism. And maybe that’s where the unrest began and I started college applications for transfer. Since then it has been a total of 9 schools, 5 rejections and 4 acceptances which I could not afford anyway and never in my life have I felt the ache of capitalism.

A lot of things in my life have started making sense since coming across certain terms like the enneagram, sensory processing sensitivity and introversion. I realized I’m a type four, which brought a lot of peace and justification to my never ending urge of wanting to go to a hidden cafe, drinking hibiscus tea and listening to some indie-folk music. There isn't really correct translations for these terms or concepts in my language. I would either have to stumble through my Swahili or just stay quiet and let people misunderstand. It’s a lot of scattered thoughts when you have two languages playing loud in your mind. It’s a division in itself, when your native language does not feel expressive enough and neither are you perfect in a foreign language. If you ever come across grammatical errors or incorrect wording, pardon my English.

I won’t stop writing anyway, so here we are unpacking experiences and the feelings they evoke. It is my core belief that no matter how gentle or wild, somewhere someday and in someone, feelings will always find a home.