Wakanyi Hoffman is an artist of life who paints the shades of each day as a storyteller, author, mother, global citizen, journalist, and keeper of indigenous wisdom. While serving in a refugee camp in Northern Kenya in her early twenties, she came to a profound insight: "Compassion is a two-way act of service. The more you give of yourself, the more you receive of someone else." Wakanyi's life is a vibrant ode in that spirit.
Wakanyi is nurturing the African Folktales Project, an ongoing open-sourced resource of indigenous wisdom and knowledge for school children. Currently based in the Netherlands, she teaches the art of oral storytelling to promote a values-based education for young children and diversify the knowledge base of global citizenship education.
A "global nomad" with strong African roots, Wakanyi and her husband have been raising their four multicultural and mixed race children across seven countries, three continents, on a mission to teach them to embrace the whole world as their home. They have called Kenya, United States, Nepal, Philippines, Ethiopia, Thailand and now the Netherlands home. Along the way, Wakanyi's educator's heart has found her initiating a children's library in Kathmandu and holding "ubuntu circles" to hold space for deepening awareness for youth.
Wakanyi recalls childhood school breaks among coffee trees in the backdrop of snow-capped Mount Kenya, listening to grandmothers share palpable folk tales while grinding corn on a hand-carved wooden mortar. Returning to school outside of Nairobi, she recollects, "During unbearably long school days, or when friendships failed, these stories transported me into a boundless world filled with unlimited possibilities."
Today, she harnesses the ancient wisdom of those cultural roots for today's globalized and internet inundated youth through African Folktales Project. “Throughout our travels, it became apparent just how little literature exists about most of the world,” she says. “In many of the schools that our children have attended so far, most of the books that they learned to love were all English or American tales, detailing lifestyles that were quite foreign to my children and to many other children that went to these international schools. As a storyteller, I am aware of how important it is to see oneself or hear familiar voices in stories, books and film.” Guided by the African Ubuntu philosophy, Wakanyi reflects on new cultural values and practices that she encounters as “an opportunity to learn about the many ways that we express being and becoming more human.”
Formerly a journalist with Kenya’s largest newspaper, The Daily Nation, Wakanyi's writings have been published in Dutch News, The Northern Times, and on the International Organization of Migration's (IOM) web blog of global migration stories. She holds a Masters in Global Education from University College London (UCL), where her thesis focused on how to embed indigenous knowledge and wisdom into formal school curriculum in Africa. She continues to actively research cross-cultural identity narratives, and their impact on global citizenship. She also sits on the board of the Kenya Education Fund, an NGO that provides gifted children from low-income backgrounds in Kenya with access to a fully-funded high school education and life skills. With her characteristic spark of creativity, in December 2020, she authored a captivating children's book set amid the vast landscapes and enchanting folktales of her birth country: The Twelve Days of Christmas Safari.
“Every human encounter that I make anywhere in the world is an encounter with my own humanity,” Wakanyi describes. Indeed, an encounter with her inevitably infuses one with a sense of possibility, a spirit of solidarity, and a heart that suddenly remembers its inextricable connection to the human spirit, of our infinite Ubuntu -- the African ethos of oneness and togetherness.
Join
Audrey Lin and
Brian Conroy in conversation with a keeper of stories, weaver of culture, and convener of
Ubuntu.
