Black Excellence: Paula Kahumbu

August 1, 2023

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Kahumbu

Paula Kahumbu is a wildlife conservationist and chief executive officer of WildlifeDirect. She is best known as a campaigner for elephants and wildlife, spearheading the Hands Off Our Elephants Campaign, which was launched in 2014 with Kenyan First Lady Margaret Kenyatta. She has recently in 2022 been appointed as the first National Geographical Explorer as a board of Trustees member[1] at the National Geographic Society.

Black Excellence: Peter One

August 1, 2023

About

https://www.npr.org/2023/07/27/1189984754/peter-one-tiny-desk-concert

One way we might understand the global Black diaspora is through the notion of arrival—the idea that Black folk in the Americas, in Africa, in Europe, and elsewhere, are and have been, in one way or another, always and already arriving. That is, they have moved or been moved, willingly or otherwise, from one place to another, and in so doing, have adapted, changed, and necessarily reconstituted their own selves as well as the places that they have found themselves, forever. Arrivals are a kind of renewal, signaling birth, beginning, and promise, and—as the scholar Werner Sollors has written—American culture in particular has always emphasized arrivals, arguably more so than points of origin. Literal and metaphoric mobility, perhaps not solely definitive of the American identity, may indeed be close to the essence of global diasporic Blackness as well.

Peter One’s journey as a musician from Cote d’Ivoire to Nashville, Tennessee to today is no different. His life contains its own series of arrivals—again, literal and metaphorical—and each one more surprising than the next.