Sustaining African Indigenous Knowledge Through Communal and Spiritual Literacies

• In Event: African Indigenous Knowledge and Research

Abstract

This study examines how Black Muslim immigrant families in a Midwestern U.S. community engage in communal and spiritual literacies to negotiate personhood and cultivate spaces of belonging. Focused on recurring halaqas—weekly literacy gatherings at mosques, I investigated how Muslim Somali families draw on African Indigenous Knowledge systems (Wane, 2005; Dei et al., 2022), including oral traditions, storytelling, and intergenerational learning, as tools for place-making and meaning-making. Using an ethnographic approach that integrates Black aesthetics (Abdi, 2024) and desire-centered inquiry (Tuck, 2009), I challenge Eurocentric literacy frameworks and foreground the agency and cultural wealth of Black Muslim families. Preliminary findings reveal that these literacy practices counter colonial myths about Black cultures as being primitive and homogenous (Taylor, 2010) and highlight community spaces as sites of belonging, freedom, and resistance (McKittrick & Woods, 2007).

Author

• Kaha Abdi, The Ohio State University