Category Archives: VLOG

03.02.25
by

The Likoni Ferry

I was somewhat lost, extremely confused, and kind of frustrated. I was 10,000 miles from California in a city called Mombasa on the South Coast of Kenya. I thought that I had proper instructions from my host to get to my Airbnb, but she posted directions from the train station (Mombasa Terminus), however, I was at MOI international airport. So, I had to figure out how to get to my apartment rental near Diani Beach and I didn’t like the $4,000 Kenyan Schillings price that Bolt (an international ride sharing app which is cheaper than Uber) was charging to get there. So, I decided to take a taxi about halfway there instead. This would put me back on track with the route that my host had given me. It would also require that I take the Likoni Ferry. This ferry ride would be an unexpectedly healing experience for me. It was profoundly spiritual and deeply fulfilling.

I’m aware that this must sound absurd to the average Kenyan. It must be the equivalent of someone saying they were moved to tears by the beauty of the people on the BART Train, or they had a cultural awakening on the back of an AC Transit Bus. We tend to not recognize the potency of what we see every day. Sometimes it takes looking at the world through the eyes of the tourist to see what we take for granted. My ride on the Likoni Ferry represented one of those super rare occasions when you recognize that you’re in a moment within the actual moment. I walked onto a boat with no less than 1,000 other Black people who brought bikes, had babies on their backs, and carried bags. I was no doubt the only “American” and probably the only tourist on the entire ferry. My Bolt driver advised me not to get on. I’m glad that I’m hardheaded and refused to take his advice.

I had an enormous suitcase that was 2 kilograms overweight at the airport, but the nice lady at Kenyan Airlines allowed me to slide without a penalty. I also had a huge burgundy backpack that I once used to go camping in Yosemite National Park for three days. It has several compartments, zippers, and hidden storage space. It’s great for backpacking, but it’s extremely conspicuous when it comes to city walking.  

“It’s not safe for you to take the ferry with those bags,” he said.

“Really?” I replied somewhat sarcastically.

My driver was a very long limbed but somehow average sized man named Peter. It took a few phone calls and me having chase him down in the Airport parking lot for him to see me when he arrived. This turned out to be a bonding experience for us. By the time I sat down in the backseat of his Hyundai I felt like we were homies. 

“Yeah.” He said sharply. “Anybody can go through your bag on the ferry. Be careful.”

 

Every African that I have ever met in Africa thinks Africa is the most dangerous place in the world. When I tell them that major American cities are way worse in terms of theft and violence they refuse to believe me. I once tried to explain this to a Liberian woman in Accra, Ghana. She shook her head then told me with a strong conviction; “No, America is heaven.” Of course I didn’t tell Peter any of this. I just said:

“Ok, I’ll be careful.” 

I actually appreciated his advice. It was just that my lack of speaking Swahili—the official language of Kenya— prevented me from explaining my perspective. I live my life knowing that I can be robbed, maimed, or killed any second. I’m always vigilant when I’m in public spaces and there was nothing that he could say to make me any more or any less aware of my surroundings. There was also nothing he could tell me to keep me from getting on that ferry. In fact, the more he spoke the more excited I got about boarding.

 

I was sick of being separated from normal Kenyan experiences because I was a visitor from a foreign country. The tourism industry is structured like a traveler’s ghetto in that the local government keeps you boxed in so they can control the outcome of your experience. The roads that you can walk down, the restaurants where you can eat, the people you encounter, and the way you commute is all predetermined. In the ghetto the ultimate objective is to keep you trapped at the bottom of society. In tourism the sole purpose is to manipulate your mind by giving you a watered-down version of culture while encouraging you to spend way more money than you should on items that you do not need. This stimulates the local economy and makes the billionaire hotel owners even more wealthy.

 

Think all-inclusive resorts. They keep you fenced in for most of the day. They give you a swimming pool, beach access, or both. They give you a menu with a few native foods and local juices alongside hamburgers, chicken strips, French fries and Coca Cola. They employ locals to serve you and perform for you. And they only allow you to move about the city in chartered vehicles that the hotels own. All of this while people live in squalor right outside the gates of your paid fantasy. Nah, I ain’t with it. I have never been with it. I was going to hop on that ferry with the people of Mombasa and I was ready to deal with whatever consequences came with it.

We had to get out of the car about 200 meters from the ferry station. Cars and tuk tuks are allowed on the ferry but the passengers must pay. Pedestrians and cyclists are free which was another major incentive for me to take the ride. Peter insisted on walking me to the security check-in. After I paid Peter, I was heading to the embarking point when three Kenyan security guards stopped me.

“Jambo! Jambo! You come here.”

I walked over to the men pulling my oversized suitcase behind me.

“What is in the bag?”

“My clothes. Most of them are dirty.”

“Open the bag.”

I opened my suitcase, and the main guard who was asking all the questions sifted through my belongings while noticeably avoiding touching my dirty drawers.

“Where are you from?”

“I’m from California.”

“Oh, USA. Do you bring a gun?”

“No, I left all my guns at home.”

We both laughed, then he zipped up my suitcase and let me go. I walked into a large rectangular area with benches that were being quickly filled up. People had bags full of fish, beans, and clothes to sale on the other side of Kilindini Harbor. A woman walked by while gracefully balancing a large green sack on her head. A teenaged boy pulled up on his bike. A mother and father sat down with their two boys. The males in that family had clearly come straight from the barbershop because their lineups were immaculate. The people kept arriving. Each and every one of them had business to attend to on the other side. All of them moved with the familiar mundanity of a morning commute as it was about 9:30am.

 

I’m certain that they saw diversity in one another. I’m sure they could determine tribal affiliations by body type, gait, or skin tone. They could probably tell who was from the countryside and who was from the city based on accent and attire. Perhaps they could decipher who was formerly educated versus who had been working on a family farm their entire lives. I could not figure out any of these things, nor did I try to. All I saw was Black people and all I heard was the intermittent sounds of a soothing African tongue that I did not know how to speak. I was calmed by not being able to understand sentiments that might ruin my day. I was unaware of who was gossiping, who was cursing, who was being offensive, or who had a different political ideology than I do. I was blanketed by my obliviousness. I was comforted by what I did not know.  Then we began our descent.

 

It was time to be loaded onto the ship which was at the bottom of a cement hill. I walked in synchronicity with the people of Mombasa. I was in the middle of the crowd, in a country in Africa, headed into the bottom of a boat. I thought about the middle passage—the indescribably brutal tragedy that ripped my ancestors from the continent and forced them into chattel slavery for centuries—but this was not a kidnapping. This was a reconnection. This was an initiation ritual. This was a baptism into a culture that had the power to redirect my spirit. I was being reunited with everything that had been lost. I pulled my luggage behind me onto the vessel, and I carried my backpack like a thousand burdens on my back. I did not stop walking. I did not speak at all. Even when asked a question in Swahili I just shook my head, no. I did not want to speak English. I did not want to be an American. I did not want to be an individual. I wanted to be at peace. I wanted to be whole and move within a body of people striving toward a singular destination. As I found my position on the ship, I looked up to my left and saw black people going up the stairs to the next level. I was surrounded by the Kenyan people—my people, whether they knew it or not. And as the powerful motor of that ferry propelled the entire lot of us across the water, I knew that I belonged. And I knew that I was safe because everyone was far too preoccupied with their own bags to be concerned about taking mine

11.26.24
by

AfroTech 2024

On November 13th I arrived at AfroTech in Houston, Texas. The energy was absolutely palpable. It was young, Black, and positive. In the name of transparency, I was much more enthralled by the Afro than I was the Tech. There were plenty of people vibing, networking, and being gorgeous. I did an interview with Bay Area journalist Reyna Harvey. I think it turned out pretty well. What do you think?

-Roger Porter

06.16.23
by

I am not a Minority: My Revelation in Ghana

Ghana feels like the whole sun. It looks like a whole tree. And it tastes like a whole cake.

 At some point when I was there I realized that I had only been given pieces of what’s essential to my being, and I had made the best of it, but in the pit of my soul I felt like I deserved more. I always thought that there was something else. Well at the market place outside of Kumasi in the Ashanti region–I experienced that something else. 

There were probably no less than 10,000 people shopping for everything from cow heads, to backpacks, to ice cream. There was a buzz both inside and outside of the mall that felt like downtown New York City at 2:00pm in the middle of July. 

There were men getting haircuts, women getting weaves, teenagers getting new cases for their cell phones, hundreds of babies being carried on the backs of mothers who were vending and mothers who were shopping as well. And all of them. 100% of them, were Black. It was very overwhelming for me, a Black man from a city that is 25% Black, from a country that is 13% Black, and a state that is only 6% Black. 

As I sunk further into my thoughts and began to be less verbal with my tour guide, a mighty revelation began to bubble over the cauldron of my being: I AM NOT A MINORITY. I am not a tree without roots, I am not lost in the wilderness of North America. I am not living in a small ghetto allowing the dominant class to define what it means to be me. I am a drop of water in a beautiful black sea. I am being baptized and cleansed from a lifetime of geographic limitations. I am not relegated to a neighborhood, or a part of town. The entire world is mine. I may travel as I please, I may think as I please, I may do as I please. I am not a part, I am whole. I represent one whole mind, one whole body, and one whole soul, working together to liberate my sullied perception of my place in the universe.         

07.31.21
by

The Unvaccinated

I’ve been hearing a lot about “The Unvaccinated” in regard to this new Delta strain of the COVID 19 virus so I decided to make a video. Check it out, like, share, subscribe and comment.

-Roger Porter

04.10.21
by

The Death of a Utopia

A few weeks ago I rode my bike down to Lake Merritt to experience a black business utopia. A few days later I discovered while watching the news that the whole thing would be drastically scaled back. The news spoke of neighbors complaining and the proper business permits not being held by vendors, and it all felt very typical of my city. In the early to mid 1990’s we had an annual event called “Festival at the Lake” in which hundreds of black vendors would come together to celebrate righteous blackness at Lake Merritt which is undoubtedly the crown jewel of our city. Then one year young people rioted. If I’m not mistaken they broke out the window to a Foot Locker and a few other storefronts. I don’t know why. I do know that Oakland was consistently one of the most homicidal cities in the country at this time. This to my knowledge, though I was just a young boy at the time, didn’t seem to concern the power structure in the way that one would think that it should. However, when corporate businesses were attacked on Lakeshore Avenue the footage was shown on every local news station for several days and within a few years there was no more festival at the lake. 

In the early 2000’s we had something called Carijama at Mosswood Park. It lasted for only a few years until it met a similar fate. Young people once again were getting rowdy. Neighbors once again complained. The news once again played its part to see to it that the festival was shut down. I remember thinking as a very young adult who looked forward to the memorial day festival as an indicator that the summer was officially here, that my city seemed to be very proud of failing black people. Instead of ironing out the edges and  considering ways to make celebrations safe, Oakland would much rather shut down all things black. This brings me back to the black business utopia that I experienced a few weeks ago. 

I met a black man who was selling organic honey that he along with his son and nephew had procured as beekeepers. He, like myself, is an allergy sufferer and he began making honey because it is a natural remedy for allergies. I saw a black woman selling tacos. I bought a refrigerator magnet from a sister who does custom made engraving. I bought sage from another sister. I bought an Oakanda shirt (the fictional homeland of Black Panther and Oakland combined) from a brother with a kind disposition and an entrepreneurial spirit. And everything felt so dope. It was just so righteous and so black that I knew that it wouldn’t last– at least not in Oakland. In a place like Atlanta for example they would institutionalize this vending. Maybe they would make vendors pay a fee and regulate the products more, but their first inclination would not be to scale it down to nothing. But alas, this is not Georgia this is California. A place where integration has come to mean every nationality can profit off of black people except black people. A place where residents replace actual black people with black lives matter signs. A place where the children of black southern migrants flee as soon as they graduate high school because, ironically enough, the American South is less racist. Can you imagine that? California with all of her liberal ideology is actually more hostile to black business owners than Georgia, Tennessee, or Texas. And Oakland is proving this to be true once again. Last weekend when I went to Lake Merritt there were less than a third of the businesses that were there the previous weekend. The Fire Department was there regulating parking and interrogating vendors and it was far less vibrant. It was clear that the utopia was dying. Or to be more concise–it was being killed. It was very disheartening to know that my city would rather create laws to keep black people in their respective corners of the city than to let us make legal money in the city that so many of us shed blood for. I rode my bike back to the Eastside in a somber mood with no merchandise, knowing that my beloved city had let my people down once again.