Arc I: Naming the Distortion (Yurugu is as Yurugu Does Pt. 1)

I took two weeks before this one because I knew what I was walking into. Yurugu: An Afrikan-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior by Marimba Ani, is not casual reading, and I was not going to come to it carrying book-launch energy.What I did do when I first encountered Yurugu about a year ago, before I had the bandwidth to sit with the full text, was go straight to the glossary. Three terms in particular: Asili, Utamawazo, Utamaroho. I talk about all three in this episode, and I start there because without that language, the patterns are visible and still un-nameable. Arc I is called Naming the Distortion for a reason.The part that stopped me in this chapter was recognizing something I had been building years before I had this framework. Years ago, working as a cultural strategy program manager inside a corporate organization, I was trying to construct a model that could measure the gap between what an organization says it values and what it actually produces. I didn't have the word Asili. I didn't have the word Ubuntu. I had a spreadsheet and a set of questions that, I now understand, were trying to answer the same thing Ani is doing in this book.Chapter 1 also gets into Plato and Platonic thinking, specifically the move Ani argues he made that has structured European thought for centuries. It is a precise argument, and it touches directly on why intuition has been the most consistently penalized way of knowing in every institutional space I have ever moved through.This is episode seven, and the first of what will be several episodes on Yurugu. We are just getting started. Get full access to Seeds of WizDoom at muzabi.substack.com/subscribe