Binamu

Have you ever wondered what connects a crowded club in Lagos to a basement party in London; a block party in Brooklyn, and a samba circle in Salvador, Bahia? It is the syncopated heartbeat of the African diaspora. While the transatlantic slave trade systematically stripped millions of displaced Africans of their languages, families, and tangible histories, it could not deafen their internal rhythm.

There is a distinct frequency in Black music that requires no translation. It is the equivalent of stepping onto a porch in the heat of July, hearing the murmur of elders before you even see their faces, or catching the aroma of a family recipe that hasn’t changed in four generations. It is an immediate, innate recognition. We often call it a vibe, or a groove, or soul, but is it actually spiritual memory at work?

For generations, Black music has operated as more than the soundtrack for celebration or a vessel for grief; it has functioned as an active, living archive of African American history. Spirituals coded with messages between enslaved Africans mapped literal escape routes out of plantation bondage to the intricate sonic tapestries of modern hip-hop and neo-soul, the music has carried an encrypted language.

For decades, the global conversation around African restitution centered on one primary demand: return what was stolen. The request itself was never complicated. African nations, scholars, historians, and cultural advocates have spent generations calling for the return of sacred artifacts, ceremonial objects, royal treasures, ancestral remains, and cultural works taken during colonial occupation, military invasions, missionary expansion, and exploitative collecting practices.

A strange thing is happening in the middle of one of the most technologically advanced eras in modern history: people are slowing down on purpose. You can see it in the resurgence of vinyl records and DVDs. You can hear it in the warm crackle of cassette tapes and analog synthesizers. You can taste it in the revival of heritage recipes, homemade bread, preserved foods, and meals prepared the way grandparents once taught from memory instead of measurement.

In 2018, my nana and I decided we were finally going to sit down and figure out who our people were. What started as a simple family tree quickly turned into census records, old photographs, phone calls to elders, and the kind of discoveries that can change how you see yourself. Genealogy is beautiful work, but it can also feel deeply overwhelming at first. Someone dies and suddenly nobody remembers Big Mama’s maiden name. An elder mentions “the cousins in South Carolina” nobody talks to anymore.

When Arianne Edmonds speaks about lineage, her voice carries both urgency and reverence. A fifth-generation Angeleno, writer, and memory worker, she has made it her life’s work to piece together the fragments of stories often scattered, suppressed, or left to gather dust on family shelves. That work comes to life in her debut book, We Now Belong to Ourselves (Oxford University Press, 2025), a blend of memoir, archival storytelling, and cultural analysis.