Scholar of Zambezian Earth

Banji is a Scholar of Zambezian Earth whose practice explores questions of relationality, ancestral continuities and reclamation. Working across storytelling, healing practices, and community-based engagements, she interrogates imposed ways of knowing shaped by colonial and imperial ‘inheritances’ while offering alternative ways of being. At the center of her work is a self-formulated methodology called Radical Zambezian Reimagination. This is a practice of rethinking spatial, cultural, and ecological imaginaries through the epistemologies of communities shaped by the Zambezi River and its tributaries.

The Zambezi serves not only as a geographic reference but as a conceptual starting point, a way to think with water systems as interconnected, relational networks. Fed by numerous tributaries and ultimately flowing into the Indian Ocean, the Zambezi becomes part of a larger hydrological continuum that links rivers to oceans, rains to aquifers, wetlands to clouds. Through this lens, knowledge is understood as fluid, migratory, and shaped by movement, seasonality, and interdependence.

Banji uses “Zambezia” not as a fixed location or national identity, but as a term of futurity. It is an invitation to imagine other modes of belonging rooted in what she describes as “river thinking.” This framework challenges the rigidity of borders and centers ecological and spiritual kinships that cross time, space, and territory. Through this methodology, her work cultivates possibilities for healing, relationality, and community, grounded in the rhythms and wisdoms of water, where past and future meet in cycles of continuity and renewal.