Ceddo (The Outsider)

I am not one, but many — the voices under the baobab, the hands in the soil, the fire in the drumbeat. We carry the weight of millet fields and memory, of sacred groves and stolen daughters. Strangers come with books and chains, but we hold to the old ways — not blindly, but with purpose. We are not untouched by change, but we do not kneel to it. We meet it, face to face, and decide what lives.