❤️🖤💚 Do For Self 2.0: Marcus Garvey’s Vision in Creole & Digital Spaces
Marcus Garvey told us: “One God, One Aim, One Destiny.”But what does that destiny look like in 2025 in the age of TikTok, Instagram, and global Creole culture? On this special BBE Podcast episode marking Marcus Garvey’s 138th birthday, we explore how his Pan-African vision continues to live and breathe through the words we speak, the cultures we protect, and the digital tools we now hold in our hands. 🔥 In this episode, we break down: Why Garvey’s blueprint of “Do for Self” is still urgent today. How Creole languages like Jamaican Patois, Haitian Kreyòl, Nigerian Pidgin and others carry the heartbeat of Pan-African unity. The ways social media has become our new printing press allowing us to connect the diaspora in real-time. What you can do to carry Garvey’s fire forward in the digital age and in real life. From Kingston to Lagos, Port-au-Prince to London, Harlem to the Gram — Garvey’s dream is still alive. This is not just history. It’s movement. It’s language. It’s culture. It’s power. Tap in, share the vision, and claim your part in One Destiny online and beyond.
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Asake, Yoruba, and the Lingering Legacy of Colonial Language Control
In this episode, I dive into the recent backlash against Nigerian artist Asake for using Yoruba on his Gunna feature and why the anger reveals something deeper: our communities are still wrestling with internalised anti-Black linguistic racism, a legacy of colonial language control that refuses to die quietly.I unpack the colonial history that positioned European languages like English as the “proper” or “respectable” choice while devaluing African and Caribbean languages as inferior or unprofessional. We explore how this thinking lingers today, even within Black spaces, when artists unapologetically use their native tongues.Fresh back from Antigua, I reflect on what it meant to be fully submerged in Blackness: walking through spaces where the majority looks like you, where Caribbean English Creole flows without side-eyes or corrections, where music is drenched in local expressions and history. And I ask why, in Britain and beyond, Black language still needs to fight for space when it is the heartbeat of our culture.From Yoruba in Afrobeats to patois in dancehall to Black British English in grime, this episode is about how music has always been a site of linguistic preservation and resistance and why every verse, every hook, every bassline that carries our words is a pushback against the colonial idea that only one kind of English is valid.Because when we lose a language, we do not just lose words. We lose ways of seeing the world. And we are not letting that happen.
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Black Language, white systems: How schools police Black speech !!
What do a courtroom in 1979 Michigan and a government report in 1985 Britain have in common? The answer: Black language, and the systems that tried to silence it.This episode dives into why the way we speak is about so much more than grammar — it’s about race, power, and who gets to be heard. From the Ann Arbor AAVE case to the Swan Report in the UK, we’re looking at how schools, governments, and institutions have treated Black English as a problem instead of a culture.Language isn’t neutral. And in this episode, we’re saying it plainly: language justice is racial justice.
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Is Black British English a form of Time Travel via Afrofuturism?⏳
What does it mean to speak the future while carrying the past? In this episode, we dive into Black British English as an Afrofuturist language, one shaped by migration, resistance, and imagination. We explore how the hybrid dialects of Black Britain remix ancestral languages, colonizer tongues, and global Black languages to create something radically new: a sonic space where survival and style converge. Using the visionary work of Janelle Monáe especially her android mythology via albums like The ArchAndroid and Dirty Computer we think through how language itself can be cyborg, insurgent, and speculative. Just like Monáe constructs a Black queer future through sound, costume, and narrative, Black British English crafts a world beyond Empire through voice and vernacular. From “mandem” to “allow it,” every utterance becomes a glitch in linear time, a tool for refusing the present and imagining otherwise. This episode asks: What does our accent say about our future? And how do we use language to hack the system just like Janelle does?
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The Diaspora Loved It 🇯🇲🇸🇷🇸🇱 Nigerians Dragged Me Over Sabi & Pikini 🤓
What if Jamaican Patwa and West African Pidgin aren’t broken English but living African languages? After my viral interview with Professor Hubert Devonish on the Caribbean roots of words like “pikini” and “sabi”, the diaspora responded with love — but not without backlash. Some people in the comments called us liars and a conversation about language and unity became distracted by a fight about identity. This podcast is my response. Join me as I unpack why I stand by the theory that Caribbean languages like Patwa and surinamese creole carry a deep African linguistic history seen in west African pidgins till today! It is the reason why we must unlearn colonial ideas about what counts as “proper” language. We’ll explore linguistic resistance, the Middle Passage, and how African languages didn’t die they adapted, survived, and returned. This is about more than words. It’s about memory, power, and reclaiming what’s ours. Follow us on instagram
A podcast by your favourite Creole Polyglot Ife Thompson talking all things Black British English, Language justice & joy and Black Language practices.
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