Author: Celine Isimbi
Archive the Diaspora, a project based in Kitchener-Waterloo, began in January 2025 as a scribbled note in the back of a book. It was a nagging thought that would not disappear, and it articulated the growing need to hold onto the stories that tie us to our homelands and each other, before they slip away.
We are an environmental archive and incubator for centring the voices, stories, and resistance of the global African diaspora. We believe Africans have always been environmental change-makers from Kenyan Wangari Maathai’s reforestation efforts in the 1970s and 1980s to Congolese politician and independence leader Patrice Lumumba’s fight against resource extraction and imperialism in the late-1950s, to New York-born Assata Shakur’s steadfast commitment to the liberation of African people worldwide. Yet, our histories are often erased. Archive the Diaspora aims to reclaim these narratives by documenting diasporic environmental histories, running youth-centred programs, and building a collaborative ecosystem. Grounded in anti-imperial, anti-colonial, and environmentally liberatory politics, we have co-created a politically principled framework that roots us across communal ecosystems and beyond colonial border divisions. Our goals are to reclaim, record, resist, and rebuild.
As an ongoing project of reclamation, we began as a response to the double-burden faced by Black African diasporic youth. In the diaspora, we are faced with the immediate effects of systemic injustices and violence, which impact our communities but are often sidelined and excluded from mainstream environmental movements. We are often pushed to the side or our environmental concerns are siloed from global demands for racial and economic justice.
We also face unique challenges as part of a diaspora. Many of us are still deeply connected to our homelands’ struggles, and concerns whether on the African continent or across the Caribbean and the global African diaspora, which means we carry our love and responsibility across multiple borders. One of the consistent questions we are faced with is do we choose between the fight for justice in our homelands or the fight for belonging in the diaspora?
The Archive the Diaspora refuses to choose.
I have witnessed this refusal to choose firsthand in Ontario where a community garden looking over the plots tended by African aunties was created. I saw it there, in the perfect, symbiotic spiral of corn, beans, and squash growing together. The same method I’d read about in Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, the same Three Sisters that have sustained Indigenous life on this land for generations. This was more than just a way to grow food; it was a shared philosophy of community, reciprocity, and sustainable living etched into the soil across continents and cultures.
About the program
The first iteration of this mission at Archive the Diaspora came to life through the Miriam Makeba Environmental Youth Program (MMEYP), which is named after Miriam “Mama Afrika” Makeba, who was a revolutionary South African icon who used her voice to speak out against Apartheid in the 1960s through 1980s. The program integrates African storytelling, grassroots environmental education, and youth leadership. Miriam’s music was a staple of my upbringing in South Africa, and her story, now being twice displaced in the diaspora, still resonates deeply with many, including with me. The program was designed for Black, African diasporic youth (age 18 to 24) in the Kitchener-Waterloo area who are often excluded from environmental spaces despite being on the frontlines of both the crises and the solutions.
One participant described the program as “life-changing.”
“I never really realized how beautiful nature really is … I learned a lot of things I never knew before.”
Another found deep personal connection.
“The session on storytelling and memory really stuck with me… The stories my parents would tell me about growing up in Eritrea came back to me.”
These hands-on experiences, like foraging and the orchard visit, were repeatedly highlighted by participants as deeply meaningful. The week at the farm! It was very fun and getting to know more about bees was great,” shared one youth, while another simply called the experience “magical.” The program successfully created a rooted and comforting space, which fostered a sense of community where, as one participant put it, “we all express[ed] ourselves freely.”
Moving forward
Archive the Diaspora is not just about the past. It is a living practice for the present, while we collectively take on our generational mission to build a liberated future. When we gather, document, and archive, we are not just preserving static memory. We are asserting our presence and collective power, declaring the perpetuity of Africans across time and space.
We insist that our environment(s) surround us and are within us. It is the water that connects us across time and sustains life, the soil that holds our memory, the air that gives us breath, and the fire that fuels our will to fight for more just futures. To fight for the environment is to fight for life itself, to continue the legacy of the Three Sisters and our ancestors who understood balance. Our archive adds to this fight by stating, unequivocally, that the environment has a memory.
One idea that pieced together the loose fragments scattered across borders, language, generations, carried across waterways, and held in the soil that holds the memories and blood of kin is the question of what story do we want the land to hold about us.
About the author:
Celine Isimbi is a daughter of the African Great Lakes region (East Africa) and was raised in the coastal waters of Southern Africa. She is now based in the diaspora, building bridges across continents and movements, centring African peoples’ environmental and material realities while nurturing new possibilities for connection and creative world-building.