Text of the welcome address delivered by AFRE Executive Director, Sebabatso Manoeli, at Homecoming held on the outskirts of Johannesburg in November 2022. 

I greet you in my mother tongue Sesotho, and I say, “Lumelang”. Literally it means, “Say yes, and agree together.” At the heart of the greeting is not a flattening of difference or deference but an invitation to experience the open posture of “Yes.” Lumelang is a call to harmony; it is an encouragement into expansiveness and an offer to release, to offload, to let your guard down and sigh. 

The state of being in agreement, in Lumelang, is also called fellowship and so I welcome you, Fellows, Staff, friends, Board, advisors into this fellowship, this community. 

I also greet you in a borrowed tongue, the language of isiZulu which gives us the greeting–the gift really–of “Sawubona,” which many of you already know means “I see you.” And I invite you to a place of being seen in the affirmation of recognition, as well as the vulnerability of being in full view. 

I also greet you in the words Salaam and Khotsong, which loom large in our faith communities locally, both of which are proclamations of peace upon you, and invitations to a place called peace. The work we do, the pursuit of racial justice, the labour towards liberation is a search for peace, peace among us, between us and within us. And so it is with these words, Lumelang, Sawubona, Salaam and Khotsong that I welcome you here. 

At this our first Homecoming, I am mindful that we dare not use the word “home” to describe this place of returning that exists between us, if we do not recognise that only love turns stones into sanctuaries and bricks into beloved communities. And it’s in this spirit that the AFRE team and I invite you to enter, to arrive, into the embrace of us, the wide we, all of us, and that you indeed feel at home because of love. 

Every part of this experience has been drenched with heartfelt meaning and care-filled significance, and we hope you feel our team’s fingerprints on what we’ve prepared for you. 

It is an artisanal love and experience, an invitation for you.

You have arrived–we have arrived–here to celebrate five years of AFRE. And as we celebrate, we celebrate this banner, this roof under which we convene, AFRE, from all walks of life and corners of the world. We celebrate our Fellows, we celebrate our board, we celebrate our team, we celebrate our friends, our founders, our advisors, we celebrate you. In sum, we celebrate a living, a small, a modest but mighty institution that exists to further justice, but more than that, we really seek to foster wholeness. 

So while there are many things that AFRE does–we identify incredible talent, we curate conversations, we help cultivate transnational solidarity, we support efforts through small grants, we try to provide fresh perspectives.

But in all our doing, there is one thing that’s really the thread that weaves together the heart of what we do. In the diasporic and African tradition of call and response, AFRE really seeks to respond to the call of our unofficial patron saint, Audre Lorde who says, “we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals.”

In response, AFRE seeks to find new patterns that will produce new rhythms that we can dance to. And this weekend we will dance. And as we dance, we remember that pattern breaking is hard work, you may break a sweat, but it’s also creative work, and we’re all in it. 

We’re working to break the patterns of dispossession, the concentric circles of deprivation, the old habits of domination, the patterns of race itself. And as we seek to disrupt it, we also seek to remake the world anew–this is our work. 

And while the times we inhabit are riddled with deep injustices, we won’t forget Toni Morrison’s reminder that though the times are tough and problems intractable or seemingly so, she says, this, this is precisely the time when artists–and I think we would add leaders–this is the time to go to work. 

“There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how people heal.” 

And we remember the words of Manning Marable, that “Leaders are essentially people who understand the times they are in.” And this is a time to rise.

And this weekend is really about grounding in relationship, it’s about elevating to vision and mobilising to mission. So that’s why at the start, we will have time to enter an exhibition prepared with love and care called The Lineage of Luminaries, and it will enable us to look back at a longer history of changemakers who have worked and even been martyred for the sake of justice - to end racial domination. But it’s also a call and a time for all of us to rise and join that lineage. It is not enough to simply sit under the banner - under branches and leaves of trees other people planted. It is time to plant new trees too. It is a time to enter that lineage and to take our places, in service and devotion, to continue from that history, and to actively realise a more just future.

This is the time.

Welcome to Homecoming.