Devi Dee Mucina

It was 2003, in Zimbabwe.

A man was looking for his father. He had not seen him in many years.

To find him, he asked for help from Baba Colin, the cook at the orphanage where he had grown up.

Together, they found him. The father's name was Peter Dee. He was a Ngoni man. The son was shaken to see how thin he had become.

That son was Devi Dee Mucina.

He had been born in Zimbabwe. He came from the Ngoni and Shona peoples of southern Africa. His family, like so many others, had been scattered by colonialism: relatives in Zimbabwe, in Malawi, in South Africa, and farther still.

He had left Africa for Canada. There he studied child and youth care. He also went back to do outreach work at the orphanage of his childhood.

In 2006, he completed a master's degree at the University of Victoria. In 2011, he submitted a thesis in Toronto. His subject: Ubuntu, and the power of shared stories to move beyond dispossession.

On 6 December 2009, his father died. Later, he wrote to him that he had left this living world for the world of the ancestors.

For Devi Dee Mucina wrote to his dead as well as to his living.

Where he came from, stories began with a phrase. In Shona, in Ndebele, in Zulu, people said: "Many, many millet granaries ago…"

In October 2019, he published a book with the University of Manitoba Press: Ubuntu Relational Love.

The book is made of letters. Letters to his mother. To his father. To his children.

He calls these stories "millet granaries." They hold Indigenous knowledge that nourishes.

Ubuntu, the book reminds us, is a Bantu word meaning "humanity."

With these letters, he wanted to answer the wounds of European colonialism. He wanted to rebuild a governance grounded in relationships. He also wanted to rethink Black masculinity, grounding it in connection.

He drew on anti-racist thought, on African feminisms, on Ubuntu. He had also learned from Indigenous scholars in Canada who think about masculinity.

In 2020, he directed the Indigenous Governance program at the University of Victoria. He studied Gule Wamkulu, a spiritual mask dance, and the Ngoni Ngoma. In them he looked for paths to revive Black Indigenous governance and community health.

The book was launched online on 30 September 2020.

"This is Ubuntu philosophy offering a relational decolonizing approach," he said in 2020.

His letters say who he is by naming his people: a mother, a father, children, ancestors.

In one of his texts, he puts it simply:

No one tells a story alone. Someone has to listen.

Somewhere between Victoria and Zimbabwe, a millet granary is still full.