Bayo Akomolafe • About

Once, I lived on the tarred lonely highways of truth –

Slugging towards the looming horizons – the promised dwelling places for those who did not waver. The whole world was about being either right or wrong. I was either lost or found. That was many years ago though. Today, when I meet people, I recognize how utterly beyond right and wrong they are – how their lives are symphonies beyond orchestration, how their mistakes and failings are actually cosmic explorations on a scale grander and of a texture softer than our most dedicated rule-books could possibly account for. You see, something happened on my way – and I lost my coordinates, my map, my directives. Now the whole journey is the destination – and each point, each barren point, just as noble as the final dot. Every splotch of ink is become to me a fresco of wisdom, a beehive of honey, a lovely place – and every aching voice a heavenly choir. The world is no longer desolate and empty and exclusive; she is now a wispy spirit, whose fingers flirt through the wind – a million roads where only one once lay. And I need not be certain about the road travelled – since I arrived the self-same moment I set out.

Bayo Akomolafe is the grateful life-partner to ‘EJ’, father to Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi, son of Olufunmilayo Ibidapo Akomolafe and Ignatius Abayomi Akomolafe, and descendant of Yoruba fields of archetypal becomings and mythopoeic landscapes. He is an author, celebrated speaker, teacher, and self-styled trans-public intellectual (a concept imagined together with and inspired by the shamanic priesthood of the Yoruba healer-trickster)- whose vocation goes beyond justice and speaking truth to power to opening up other spaces of power-with, and queering fond formulations and configurations of hope.

Bayo was born in 1983 into a Christian home, and to Yoruba parents in western Nigeria. Soon after he was born, his family emigrated to Bonn, Germany with his father on his first diplomatic assignment. This - Bayo’s first trip - would foreshadow a life of travel (both literally and figuratively) to come. Losing his diplomat father to a sudden heart complication in Kinshasa, Zaire, Bayo became a reclusive teenager, seeking to get to the “heart of the matter” as a response to his painful loss. After meeting with traditional healers as part of his quest to understand trauma, mental wellbeing and healing in new ways, his deep questions and concerns for decolonized landscapes congealed into a life devoted to exploring the nuances of a “magical” world “too promiscuous to fit neatly into our fondest notions of it.”

Now living between India and the United States, Bayo is a father of Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi. He is married to EJ, his dear life-partner of Indian descent.

In 2014, Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.) was invited to be the Special Envoy of the International Alliance for Localization, a project of Ancient Futures (USA). He left his lecturing position in Covenant University, Nigeria to help build this Alliance. Bayo has been Visiting Professor at Middlebury College, has taught at Sonoma State University (CA, USA), Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada), and Schumacher College (Totnes, England) – among other universities around the world. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California and University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality, Unashay Sanctuary, and more.

The convener of the concepts of ‘postactivism’, ‘transraciality’ and ‘ontofugitivity’, Dr. Bayo Akomolafe is a widely celebrated international speaker, teacher, public intellectual, essayist and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak.

Dr. Bayo Akomolafe considers his most sacred work to be learning how to be with his daughter and son, Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden – and their mother, his wife and “life-nectar”, Ijeoma. “To learn the importance of insignificance” is the way he frames a desire to reacquaint himself with a world that is irretrievably entangled, preposterously alive and completely partial.

As Visionary Founder and Elder of The Emergence Network and Chief Host of the widely popular online-offline course/festival series, We Will Dance with Mountains, Bayo curates an earth-wide project for the re-calibration of our ability to respond to civilizational crisis – a project framed within a material feminist/posthumanist/postactivist ethos and inspired by Yoruba indigenous cosmologies. He considers this a shared art – exploring the edges of the intelligible, dancing with posthumanist ideas, dabbling in the mysteries of quantum mechanics and the liberating sermon of an ecofeminism text, and talking with others about how to host a festival of radical silence on a street in London – and part of his inner struggle to regain a sense of rootedness to his community.

Bayo Akomolafe is a recipient of the 2021 New Thought Walden Award, meant to honor those who use empowering spiritual ideas and philosophies to change lives and make our planet a better place.

Bayo has given up his longing for the “end-time” and is learning to live in the “meantime”...in the middle, where we must live with confusion and make do with partial answers. His greatest vocation is however learning to be a satellite orbiting his greatest gift, his goddess Ijeoma, and knowing the blessings of her gravity - as well as co-researching into magic and the utter unspeakability of the world in its ongoingness along with his children. He speaks and teaches about his experiences around the world, and then returns to his adopted home in Chennai, India – “where the occasional whiff of cow dung dancing in the air is another invitation to explore the vitality of a world that is never still and always surprising.”

1. Teaching

In 2014, Adebayo was invited to be the Coordinator/Special Envoy of the International Alliance for Localization, a project of Local Futures (USA). He temporarily left his lecturing position in Covenant University, Nigeria to help build this Alliance for a more beautiful world. Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.) has been Visiting Professor at Middlebury College, where he taught on ‘transraciality’ (his neo-materialist take on racialization) and postactivism. He has also taught at Sonoma State University (CA, USA), Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada), and Schumacher College (Totnes, England) – among other universities around the world. He is a widely appreciated speaker, teacher, public intellectual, author and facilitator, globally recognized for his poetic, unconventional, counterintuitive, and indigenous take on global crisis, civic action and social change. He currently teaches with the CLIE (Community, Liberation, Indigenous, and Eco-Psychologies) program at Pacifica Graduate Institute (CA, USA) and as Associate Adjunct Professor at University of Vermont.

2. The Emergence Network

He is the founder of The Emergence Network (A Post-Activist Project]. Bayo hopes to inspire a diffractive network of sharing – a slowing down, an ethics of entanglement, an activism of inquiry, a ‘politics of surprise’…one that does not treat the crises of our times as exterior to ‘us’ or the ‘solutions’ that conventional activism offers as discrete or separate from the problems that we seek to nullify.

3. Books

Bayo is author and editor of We Will Tell Our Own Story! with Professors Molefi Kete Asante and Augustine Nwoye, and These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to my Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books, 2017). He is the author of multiple essays on matters ranging from the nature of science, the coronavirus pandemic, racism, tricksters, climate chaos, and unschooling. Bayo is writing his third book as part of a trilogy of creative nonfiction/fiction publications.

4. Current Projects

Host – We Will Dance with Mountains: Into the Cracks!
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Executive Director – The Emergence Network (A Post-Activist Project)
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Board Member – Science and Non-Duality (USA)
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Board Member – Mutual Aid Network (USA)
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Consultant – UNESCO / Imagining Africa’s Future
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Board Member – Real Economy Lab (UK)
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Lecturer – CLIE, Pacifica Graduate Institute, California (USA)

Click here to download Dr. Bayo Akomolafe's full CV.

“Bayo Akomolafe invites us to reconsider the fault lines and fissures as the locations of birthing, as the beginning of a new imagination, as alliances with the more than human to open portals to the wild beyond our fences (as the title of his book says). His is one of the most singularly formative philosophical voices (I believe) of our time…disrupting every category and singing in an eco feminist post-activist post-humanist jazz that is groundbreaking.”

— Brie Stoner
Host, Unknowing

“Having read Bayo’s work, I am excited by proximity to the specific articulation emerging in his writing. Bayo writes of inter dimensional worlds of understanding, with the ease of expression of a seasoned cosmonaut. His is a rare and emerging talent in these transformational times we live. A handful of writers scale these multiple realities with the joy and triumph of words, language and expression as Bayo does. His writing speaks of a differentiated perceptive ability – one I believe will become more common and familiar as we all evolve at the breakneck acceleration I observe in us as a world community.”

— Deepti Datt, Writer

“He is an “old soul” – a wise elder in a young body. Given the critical need for maturity in our world today, this makes him a major asset in birthing of a new level of consciousness that I and like-minded others are working toward. As such, Bayo comes across to me as another partner in my work, bringing about a new consciousness on this planet. He joins many people I have come to know around the world who are part of this conscious leadership movement which has been gaining momentum over recent years in tackling the challenges we face as a species. What sets this young African apart, however, is that he comes at these challenges from different generational and cultural perspectives than the majority of us.”

— John Renesch
Author, The Great Growing Up, Founder, FutureShapers