Vocal Roots

What is Between Worlds? 🤔👀

If this sounds like an event you want to be a part of, follow us and CAYAD Auckland for the journey.

For now, make sure to save the date: Saturday 3 October 🙂‍↕️ more to come soon 🫶

Saturday 3 October

While the formal reporting and reflections are complete, it felt really special to pause and reflect out loud, not just on this year’s Africa Month programme, but on the journey of the past five years.

A huge thank you to ☀️T I N A B O N S U-M A R O☀️ for the opportunity to sit down and share on Be About It 🙏🏿✨

If you have any questions, thoughts or comments, please share! I’m keen to continue the conversation ☺️

A few moments from opening night ✨

If you haven’t made it through yet, Thursday is your last chance to experience this gorgeous, joyful exhibition celebrating Black creativity, storytelling, and community.

We’ll be open from 6pm–7:30pm for the final evening. Come through, bring a friend, and spend some time with the works before the exhibition closes. 🖤 ✨🎨

📸 photos by

Happy Africa Day 🌍✨🥳

It feels especially timely that this month Auckland Libraries released their African Voices – Stories of the Lands collection.

It was an incredible experience to delve into the work of research, archiving, and oral histories throughout this process. Oral histories play an important role across many African cultures and customs, and to see our communities reflected and preserved in this way felt deeply special.

Vocal Roots had the role of culturally advising on the project, helping ensure the stories were approached with care, authenticity, and respect for the communities involved.

Thank you to Lema, Mahad, Love, Boubacar, and Tina for trusting us throughout this journey, and thank you to Synthia Bahati / for capturing them so beautifully.

Huge thanks and for all their hard work interviewing and transcribing and to the Auckland Libraries Research Team for their initiative, for sharing this idea with us, and for including us in the journey from the beginning.

Celebrating your heritage, culture, and days like this can look however you want it to, and storytelling is undeniably a part of that.

Have a listen to the collection by searching African Voices – Stories of the Lands on Kura Collections or via the link in our bio.

Change of locations for our community panel on Sunday!

We’ll be hosting the panel discussion in the Akozone, level 1 of Auckland Central City Library from 2pm-4pm.

Conversations will include panelists from arts, community, creative and academic backgrounds led by our emerging curators. Come listen in, join in and reflect on the questions and answers over afternoon tea. Registration link is in our bio ✨

Meet panelist Andrea Edwards 🌍✨

Andrea Edwards is Head of Standards at Eco Choice Aotearoa and a passionate advocate for environmental justice, community empowerment, and sustainable futures. She earned her PhD in Environmental Science from the University of Auckland in 2022, with research exploring the environmental and social impacts of the Huntly Power Station. Through extensive archival work, Andrea uncovered historical documents, stories, and records that illuminate the intersection of energy development and environmental injustice in Aotearoa.

That same year, Andrea joined the Working to End Racial Oppression (WERO) programme, leading research into the drivers and effects of environmental injustice experienced by ethnic communities in Tāmaki Makaurau. She has since completed the project and is in the process of publishing her findings.

Beyond her environmental work, Andrea is a skilled facilitator who contracts with the Peace Foundation, teaching conflict resolution and peer mediation to secondary school students across Auckland. This work has led her to facilitate an annual two-day workshop for Tautai Pacific Arts Trust over the past five years, focused on cultural safety and conflict resolution within the arts space.

At the heart of all Andrea’s work is a belief that justice, safety, and belonging are not abstract ideals — they are the conditions under which communities truly thrive. It is from this foundation that she brings her voice to the Black Joy workshop: a space that refuses to let struggle be the only story. Because when we dismantle the systems that harm, protect the environments we live in, and create the safety to be fully ourselves, joy is not just possible — it becomes an act of resistance.

Meet the creatives behind The Black Community Project 🤝🏿✨📸

Beth Teklezgi
Born in Ethiopia, Beth is a storyteller and writer whose work explores the experiences, identities, and realities of Black communities through both written and visual storytelling. Her practice is grounded in themes of community, migration, belonging, visibility, and social justice, drawing from lived experience and the stories that exist within everyday moments.

Naledi Mthembu
Naledi Mthembu is a South African filmmaker and visual collaborator whose work explores storytelling as a tool for empathy, connection, and cultural reflection.

Through a humanistic lens, she is interested in documenting diverse lives, perspectives, and experiences, using film and visual media to foster shared understanding across cultures and communities.

Renati Waka
A Māori photographer of Te Arawa, Tainui, and Te Aupōuri descent, raised in Whakatāne, Whanganui, and Rotorua, and based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa New Zealand. I work across fine art and documentary photography.

Renati’s practice examines photography’s role in the colonial construction of Indigenous identity in Aotearoa. Historically used to classify and objectify, the medium continues to shape how Indigenous bodies and histories are represented. He uses photography to intervene in this legacy by producing images grounded in Māori perspectives, asserting authorship and self-determination.

Including Māori perspectives in this work was important as a way of acknowledging Tangata Whenua and recognising the significance of Te Tiriti o Waitangi within conversations around identity, community, and visibility in Aotearoa.