Hello!
Immaculata, here. The Sweet Medicine podcast is finally rolling out. With it, I am making an argument for the indispensable role that the humanities and social sciences play in our quest for social healing in Nigeria. Listen to the introduction episode above.
And while you’re at it, visit the Sweet Medicine website to see behind the scenes, research notes, more information about collaborators, and a special special sub-project I’ve been working on in tandem with Sweet Medicine.
What do we need healing for? Decades and decades of colonial and military brutality and subjugation have numbed our collective Nigerian psyche, and left us resigned and afraid to ask anything of our country, of our government, of the public us. By and large, I see us as a nation of people who are afraid of our desires because we are rational beings who have seen the bar for what Nigeria can do go so low. And so we repress our desires and punish others for having what we cannot have. We are afraid of the child who wants more than its parents, because really and truly, how would the family afford it? How can the family risk experiments? After all, we have seen and witnessed—from the SAPs in the 1980s to EndSARS in 2020—we would be foolish to imagine otherwise, and this is precisely the problem.
By social healing, I mean an orientation towards life affirming relations with ourselves and all beings around us. I mean life affirming relations with the world that we are all co-creating, whether we like it or not. By social healing, I mean an exercise in integrity and integration, an exercise in the kind of connection we can achieve only by accepting ourselves as new as we will be every single day.
This podcast will run for eight weeks, and week 1 has just passed. On weekends, I’ll broadcast two of fourteen conversations I had with humanities researchers and practitioners where we discuss the ideas that animate their work and how they use their work to make tangible impact in their communities.
And for the next seven Tuesdays, I’ll be sharing an episode discussing the following seven questions:
Why the humanities and the social sciences when people are starving?
What do we do with history and what do we do with our past?
How might we describe the nervous condition of today's Nigeria?
What kind of family is this our country, Nigeria, and how do we relate with it?
Why dem born Nigeria in the first place sef?
Why take ownership?
What are our bodies good for?
Chapter 0: Why Social Healing?
Read the transcript here: https://sweetmedicine.me/Why-Social-Healing
What some people have said so far:
“I wish this episode was recorded last year when I was interrogating activist wellness with the question “How does the unmotivated volunteer draw cheer from community through meaningful conversations?” It’s important, this podcast. A necessary listen. It makes you want to seat with your pessimism & poke at it.” - Ude Ugo Anna, founder of The Book Drive Bayelsa
“You know how people say that if you don’t do something now, somebody else will do it? I just feel like if you didn’t exist, nobody was going to do Sweet Medicine. This is divinely inspired work.” -Victor, founder and editor-in-chief of Lounloun, a pan-African literary journal of historical stories.
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