THE GRIOT
I recently went back to drawing and painting. After years away - decades, if I’m counting honestly - I signed up for a class and picked up a pencil again. I felt my mind and fingers creaking as the muscle memory came back. I was an art student once, before life redirected me. My father had other ideas. Law, he said, with the particular conviction that Nigerian fathers reserve for decisions they’ve already made on your behalf. Those who know, know.
I negotiated -ish. Landed on English Language and Literature. He was, just about, satisfied.
Of course, I did go back to Law in the end - drawn to justice and the places where it was most absent. My Dad won. On a technicality - if I was going to lose that argument, I was at least going to make it count.
It was the best decision I never quite got to make for myself - and I’m grateful for it every day. Because it turned out that literature was the thing that explained everything else. The law tells you what the system is. Literature asks whether the system is right. And a career in media taught me that who tells the story, and how, shapes what people take to be true.
Coming back to drawing and painting now, I notice it makes me think differently. Slower. More critically. I’ve been thinking about literature the same way - plays, dance, art in all its forms - each one forcing us to reflect, to question, to realise something we’d been moving too fast to see. In a world running at a speed that leaves very little room to catch your breath, making something slowly is its own quiet form of resistance. Who says critical thinking is dead? It just requires you to put the phone down.
I was in a room this week when the author Elif Shafak made an argument I’ve been turning over ever since. Literature and art, she said, are the tools that give us our voice. Not a luxury. Not decoration around the edges of more serious work. The primary tool.
I’d been having a version of this conversation all week - in different rooms, with different people. Sharp, capable, accomplished people still asking the same quiet question: how do I hold my ground in a space that wasn’t built with me in mind? How do I challenge from a position where the system doesn’t automatically hand you the authority to do so?
The question is always some version of the same thing. Whose frame are we operating in - and who decided it was neutral?
Steve Biko put it plainly: “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”
That line has stayed in circulation for decades because it keeps being true. What Black Consciousness understood - and what too many diversity conversations still miss - is that the work doesn’t begin with the system. It begins in the mind. Before you can change what’s around you, you have to stop letting what’s around you define you. The frame is the first fight. And if you don’t notice the frame, you spend your energy trying to fit inside it rather than questioning its dimensions entirely.
This is where literature comes in. Not as escape - as excavation.
The writers I keep returning to were not, in the main, writing to be included in someone else’s canon. They were building their own.
Wole Soyinka writing into the collision between Yoruba ritual and colonial disruption wasn’t making a complaint. He was insisting on the full complexity of a civilisation that predated - and outlasted - the disruption. Death and the King’s Horseman is not a play about colonialism. It is a play about what colonialism couldn’t reach, even when it tried.
Buchi Emecheta spent her career making visible the women the mainstream literary world had decided didn’t quite fit the frame. Her characters don’t wait for permission. The exit isn’t always clean - but it is theirs. Visibility, she understood, is its own form of power.
Bernardine Evaristo made the argument formally. Not just in what Girl, Woman, Other says but in how it’s built. Twelve characters. Overlapping, plural, none of them given the luxury of being a single story. The form is the politics.
What all of them share, and what Chinua Achebe argued before any of them, is an insistence on who holds the pen. “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” The story is never neutral. Neither is the decision about who gets to tell it.
I have spent enough time in rooms where the architecture wasn’t designed for me to know exactly what that feeling is. Not always dramatically. Sometimes it’s a register. An assumption baked into how the conversation flows - around you rather than towards you. The room wasn’t hostile. It just wasn’t built with your presence factored in.
Literature, and art in all its forms, was the place I found language for that before I had the words myself. James Baldwin understood the mechanism: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Facing requires language. Language requires someone to have written it first - or painted it, or performed it, or danced it into a shape the body recognises before the mind catches up.
Audre Lorde wrote her Litany for Survival for those of us who were never meant to be here - and wrote anyway. The poem isn’t a lament. It’s an instruction. The artists didn’t wait for the room to make space. They built a different room and left the door open.
There’s a word for the person who did that work before the printing press made it possible: the Griot. The keeper and carrier of community memory - the one who held the stories so the community could hold itself together across generations, across distances, across whatever disruption arrived next. An infrastructure.
Black History Month this year celebrates community - and the Griot is exactly that. A community that cannot tell its own story cannot sustain itself.
What’s changed is the reach. The tools available now mean that the Griot’s work doesn’t stop at the village edge. A story made in Lagos can land in London the same afternoon. What hasn’t always scaled is the ownership of it - who controls the platform, who shapes what travels and what doesn’t. That’s the work worth investing in. Building the infrastructure so that stories reach the people they belong to, owned and directed by the communities creating them.
Back to the rooms and the conversations about how to hold ground in spaces that weren’t designed for you.
The answer isn’t to fit better. Fitting better means accepting the specifications as neutral, and they never were. What the writers knew, what Black Consciousness knows, what Shafak said this week, what I feel every time I sit down to draw something slowly in a world that rewards speed above almost everything else: the voice comes first. Before the platform, before the strategy, before the seat at the table - you need to know whose story you’re telling and why it matters.
Then you build the room yourself.
Community is the antidote. Not as sentiment - as mechanism. Stories travel through people. They accumulate meaning when shared, when someone recognises themselves in the telling and passes it on. The Griots understood that a story only works if it moves.
I’ve spent a good part of my career building communities that move on that principle - spaces where we don’t have to wait for permission to take up room. The Intersection is the latest - a community built on the belief that when people bring their whole selves into the same space, the thinking and the work gets richer.
Black History Month is not a memorial. It is a reminder that the story is still being written - and the question of who holds the pen, pencil or brush, remains very much open.
Pick it up.
Elizabeth Anyaegbuna is founder of Buna Street Collective, a strategic growth and marketing consultancy, and co-founder of Join Our Table and The Intersection.
