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Decoding Culture is a We Believe in Africa project, focused on documenting, celebrating and sharing minority group experiences / culture across the world.
Please, would you share your ideas and “Lived experience” with us. We will be giving credit and acknowledging all contributors on all our media as well as at our first event in December 2019.
We will also be approaching some of the contributors to share more of their ideas and experiences of their cultures with us. For example, a photo of a social norm or the receipt of their favourite cultural meal or an audio recording of a common language phrase.
Wikipedia description: Culture is a word for the ‘way of life’ of groups of people, meaning the way they do things. Different groups may have different cultures. A Culture is passed on to the next generation by learning daily practices, and thinking modalities with which tasks are resolved whereas genetics are passed on. Culture is seen in people’s writing, music, clothes, cooking, and art.
We look forward to receiving your contribution and feedback. Please note you can also send us your feedback in video format.
On Saturday, 1st December 2019, we attempted hosting a hackathon (workshop) to unpack our ‘Coloured Culture”. We invited all youth groups, church groups, community bases organizations and individuals who identity with the label “Coloured” or who have been label ‘Coloured” or Mix race. Or anyone who was interested.
We aimed to collect ideas and delegating the cultural points for researching and exploring. We looked to build a team of researchers, to explore each cultural point, its history, how it looks, the receipt and how it is consumed.
Our purpose was to document, celebrate and share our incredible culture. The outcome is a full multimedia campaign and platform at the end of October 2019.
Unfortunately, no body attended your hackathon event. Only the We Believe in Afirica team, consisting on Zenadia Martin and Darryl Pitt.
Origin of Decoding Culture.
On the 3rd of July 2018, the 702 radio journalist, Eusebius McKaiser, mention on air during a talk, “What culture, Coloured people have no culture. (Sarcastic laughter)”. The founder of We Believe in Africa found this quite offensive.
This led to a conversation between, the founder, board member, Zenaidia Martin and Marvin on 4 July 2018. Which lead to an email to like-minded individuals on Saturday, 20 October 2018.
We wanted start to celebrate and share our culture and create a multimedia campaign around it, possibility a series and book at some later stage. As with our other programs we would like to start to document and record our culture and legacy, so the next generations have a more stable foundation for them to build on. We would like to add it as one of our Spaces for Youth programs as well as part of We Believe in Africa, to celebrate and share all our culture as we build up, share and document marginalized groups globally.
We built a list of individuals who believe would share and work on this with us as we could not do it on our own and we didn’t want too either. We opened this idea to everyone who wanted to and could contribute and is willing to do so, so that we celebrate and share in it all together!
The previous generations of Coloured people have given us seeds to work with, it’s time they germinate and blossom. So, we can give the next generation better seeds and more fertile soil to work in. We aimed to attract and invite the bees too, to help us cross pollinate too.
The next steps:
- Please let me know what you’ll think
- Please add to list our culture list below and its history and story. I would like us to go as deep and far as possible Similar to the model of Golden Passages, celebrating the history and identity of our communities and people.
- Please invite others who will be interested to contribute.
- Koesisters on a Sunday morning
- Pickle Fish (Marvin mentioned 🙂
3….
I hope you hear back from all of you.
*Please if you not interested in being part of this journey, please let me know and I will remove you from our list.
Have an incredible weekend!