We were lucky to catch up with Wakanyi Hoffman recently and have shared our conversation below.

Wakanyi, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

After graduating with a masters degree in development education and global learning from University College London, I decided to start a project that would curate, digitize and share in an open-source format, indigenous folktales from Africa to promote African children’s literature from an African perspective to global educators, parents, and children. The African Folktales Project started as something for my children. It slowly grew into a podcast hosted and produced by my oldest kids (providing background music and making it, too). From there, it grew into a curriculum for teachers certified to teach about climate change. These are mainly graduate-level teachers. I also started giving lectures at Brooklyn College to incoming high school seniors, teaching them about the power of storytelling to understand different ways of knowing and seeing the world and to understand sustainability and sustainable practices from an indigenous perspective. This project is personal, as it is also a way of honouring my indigenous background. It also bridges the knowledge gap between African indigenous ways of educating children about sustainability and the Western education model. I have achieved the original intention, and I am now ready to take the project to the next level, ensuring that all children entering school in Africa have access to this knowledge, too.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am a storyteller, trained journalist and an academic researcher/philosopher of ubuntu ethics for AI systems. The journey to becoming an AI ethicist began when I had my first child 18 years ago and discovered that there were hardly any children’s books written by African authors for children of African descent. I wanted to bring into the modern world the stories from my childhood that were told to me by the elders while growing up in Kenya. So i began a small project called the African Folktales Project as a digital curation/repository of folktales from Africa, mainly as a form of wisdom keeping for my kids. The project then grew into an open-source platform where teachers/educators, parents and children could find these stories and use them at home, schools, and for research on African Indigenous Knowledge Systems. I then began to teach teachers on ways of using these folktales in classrooms to promote a deeper understanding of sustainability from an indigenous perspective. I also put together a podcast, called Folktale Fridays where I shared these stories as a way of introducing the sustainable development goals to children through African storytelling. My son who was then 12 years old was helping with the technology as well as curating the background music for the podcast.
Moving on, I went into academia after being invited into a fellowship program at an institution in Germany where my group was researching non-material conditions of human flourishing. naturally, my contribution was through storytelling and showcasing the power of sharing indigenous ways of knowing that is presented in stories that have been passed down from generation to generation. I organized the first indigenous-led conference where I invited indigenous elders from different parts of the world to co-create ideas about the future of flourishing for humanity and the planet, alongside academics, practitioners and non-indigenous scholars and researchers. It was a massive learning opportunity for all of us, and the success of that led to a second edition of the same workshop this year, just a few weeks ago in Germany. We anticipate that this workshop will become a yearly gathering and we hope to raise funds to be able to take the conference to indigenous communities as our host and co-create new knowledge while on indigenous land. From that fellowship in germany came the invitation to join the Inclusive AI Lab at Utrecht University as a lead researcher on sustainable AI systems in Africa. Here my work is both theoretical and practical. I have established a framework of indigenous ethics for AI, based on the African Ubuntu philosophy and these ethics can be used to build a more humane AI system and develop ways of interacting with AI that enhance human flourishing and reduce the disconnection, loneliness and further extra ction of natural resources on the planet.
In my private life, I am a nomad mom, having lived in 9 countries so far and having birthed and raised my four children in all those countries. They were each born in different countries too. As a family, we speak multiple languages and currently live in 3 countries on 3 continents. My children are ages 18, 16, 13, 10. My husband runs a humanitarian company based in the Netherlands, so we have a base in the netherlands but we each travel quite a bit and consider our home to be a nest from which we come and go. We live by the ubuntu motto- a person is a person through other persons- and we believe that it takes a village to raise children. We have built a global village that helps us raise our kids in different parts of the world, and we all feel comfortable living anywhere in the world.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I am driven by the desire to leave the world a better place for the next seven generations of children to come.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

That home is more than a place. It is truly where the heart is. My oldest son was 3 years old and we had just moved to Bangkok when he asked me when the truck full of his toys would be delivering our household goods. On the day that it was due to arrive, he was so excited and said to me, “I can’t wait for our house to come!” I realised that all along he thought that the shipping container would arrive carrying the actual house from Ethiopia, where we were moving from. I then explained to him that all our stuff would be inside the container and not the house. He wanted to know specifically if our green couch would be in the container and when I said yes, he made the most profound statement,
“Home is where the green couch is!”
From then on, my whole perspective of where home is shifted. For us, home is wherever the green couch (or any other couch) is.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://humanitylinkfoundation.org
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wakanyi-hoffman-77a9671a4

Image Credits

Wakanyi Hoffman