For the past 27 years, I have been deeply submerged in West African culture. Throughout that time, I have lived on and off the Continent; spending time with cultural royalty, spiritual royalty, griots and Medicine Men/Women. Relentlessly, I pursued the truth about our enslavement. I  received my birthright of ritual, ceremony and initiation. My greatest gift has been relearning how to live as an indigenous woman, in egalitarian society, as a wife and 

I am a Chief in the village of Ouidah, West Africa and a High Priestess in the African Vodoun (Yoruba, Orisha) way of life. In traditional ceremony, I was bestowed the title of Iya, which means Holy Mother. The ancestors named me Wekenon, Mother of the universe.

When away from Mother Africa, her navel string continues to nourish me. I find solace in her womb of culture and spirit. If we, as a people, are to return to grace, we must go back to the soul of the Continent. Only in Her soil will we take root in ancestral land, fertilized by ritual, tradition, spirit and identity. Then we will blossom into a harvest of productive, happy, peaceful and evolved African people. We must rely on the great Mother to heal our men from castration and restore our women from rape and oppression. Only then, can we revitalize our familial and societal foundation. We must all remember how to live in a society where "the we is greater than the I." We must recount the reality that we are all equal and must stay arm in arm for progress to occur.