Humans of Sweet Water...Meet Mama Afua
Humans of Sweet Water… Meet Mama Afua. Mama Afua is an Afrikan Warrior, healer, and builder. She first visited The Commonwealth before the COVID-19 Pandemic and has been a regular market-goer ever since. More recently, she has been volunteering her time every week to pull weeds, transplant, and seed. Mama Afua is an integral part of the SWF Family who brings a vibrant energy to The Commonwealth every time she is onsite. Read on below to learn more about Mama Afua.
Tell us about your background
I am Gwendolyn and William Tolliver’s daughter. I am the granddaughter of Sarah and Smithie and Ezra and Catherin The great granddaughter of Momma Fannie Mae Pritchett. I am a descendant of many African warriors, healers, and builders. I've been known by other names Dr. Tolliver, D, Dino, and lots of other names. Here, at Sweet Water Foundation, I am known as Mama Afua. I was born on a Friday. Afua means Friday born girl child in the Twi Language of Ghana. I've done rites of passage in Ghana which is where I received the name Afua.
I am a clinical psychologist by training, a facilitator of learning and healing by nurture. I am retired from my day job as a university faculty member. I am continuing to be more and more grounded in traditional African healing, spirituality, and culture during this time of refirement in my life.
I grew up in the suburbs of Cincinnati. We had peach trees, cherry trees, grape vines, tomatoes, and strawberries. It wasn't a big garden but I knew that growing was important. It also tasted really good! So you get to the big metropolitan city like Chicago, and you usually have to go outside the city to get to a farm. So the idea of a farm on the South side was amazing.
I did an internship here in Chicago in 1982. I was here for that year, finished my doctorate degree at Duke University in North Carolina and came back in 1985 and I've been here ever since.
How did you find Sweet Water Foundation?
I found out about Sweet Water through a friend of my husband’s who told me there is a place on the South side of Chicago that was having seedling markets. We wanted to start some gardening so we came over on a Friday, and it was like, “wow”. I remember being so excited! We started coming pretty regularly on Fridays for the market. After this past winter with the pandemic, I received the newsletter, and I saw that the market was starting back, and I’ve been coming every week since then.
What is your role here at Sweet Water?
I wanted to start my own garden and I was trying to figure out what soil would be good to buy and, of course, all the harvest here is beautiful and I thought my mint would grow well if I used some of Sweet Water’s soil. I asked Emmanuel if I could buy some soil from you so that I could help my garden grow. I asked a couple of times and, in his Emmanuel way, he said, “If you keep asking, we gonna have to put you to work.” I asked him when would be a good day. When it started off, I was only going to do 10:00 to 12:00 on Wednesdays. The first week I was here until 12:30, and then the next time I left at 1:00 and now I have sketched out 10:00 - 2:00 in my calendar.
How does Sweet Water Foundation transform you and the community?
Being a part of Sweet Water Foundation really has transformed my life. I look forward to coming here and being involved with the earth and with the plants, but more importantly with this community. This community is amazing. I think a lot about the healing that can happen when we are in community, connecting with nature and with earth and growing our own food.
In traditional African culture, there's the idea that everything is interconnected, and that we all derive from Divine Source, so we all have divinity in us. That divine energy is shared between human beings, nature, the material, the immaterial, plants, and animals. So for me, I see Sweet Water providing space for nurturance and growing, for transformation of all in community. I see it as continuing our species in a wonderful way. Every time I come here, every time I touch some of the soil, every time I do some weeding, I know there is a purpose. Everything we do here enhances our lives, our being, our thriving, and prospering - not just surviving. Sweet Water Foundation’s very existence helps to change the much too often narrative of this community and her people from one of negativity to one of vibrancy, positive possibilities and empowerment.
As a teacher, I also think about how I can use my experiences here to teach learners. I'm going to be teaching a course on black, African centered psychology. One of the exercises I thought about utilizing is what I call “thinking like an Ancient African”. When there wasn't all this modern technology, how did people come to understand what goes on and what you need to do? When planting seeds or weeding or watering or observing the plants growing and the worms and butterflies and bees, what does that tell us about how to be in the world, how the Universe operates and functions? This, it seems to me, is the first learning technology, experience and observation. When I’m at Sweet Water Foundation doing whatever I'm doing that day, whether it’s seeding, weeding, transplanting, or whatever it might be, I’m thinking about what this is teaching me, not only about the activity, but about life in general.
Sweet Water Foundation is a reminder of what community can do and what is possible when people say it's impossible. It is a model for people to see that they can do this too! They can grow their own food and build their own things. They can do this and more, collectively, outside of competition, harmoniously and have fun!
What are other things you are interested in doing here at Sweet Water Foundation?
For a long time, I’ve really wanted to build a home. I have friends in North Carolina who built their home and I remember when I first visited them, I was so inspired. I thought it would be so cool to build a home. Then I wanted to build a dome home in a community with community. When you think about affordable housing, there's so many different possibilities of how to address this issue creatively, while meeting people’s needs for shelter and remaining environmentally responsible.. I am still interested in building: homes; furniture; solutions; opportunities for learning, growing, and experiencing joy; and more. I think that that's so much a part of what Sweet Water Foundation is about: building. Sweet Water shows us how we can have self sufficiency and self-care. But I think about “self” being not just individual, but the extended self - the community self.
One of the really exciting aspects of Sweet Water that I've seen and something I have also loved about teaching is helping people engage in critical analysis and critical thinking, such that they know they can do it, they can take care of themselves. They have those skills and if they don't have that knowledge they can get the knowledge. They don't have to feel there's something wrong with them. The teaching and learning that goes on here at Sweet Water and the facilitating of the learning supports people’s empowerment.
I really like to support people in connecting with their passion. I like to say that my mission statement is, I help people remember and re-member. Remember as in “recall”. These are things you already know. When people are having issues and difficulties and feeling like “I can't do this”, we can help remind them that they’ve done it before - it may just look a little different. If you had difficulty doing something before, how'd you get through that?. That's the recall. And then there's re-member - and that is coming back into Oneness and wholeness. I think that’s a big part of what healing is about.
There's an African proverb, it's also an adinkra symbol - “Sankofa”. Sankofa is part of a proverb that basically means “It is not taboo to go back and fetch it.” That's recalling what worked, what got you through, what has energized you, what has fed you, what has nurtured you - Sankofa. I feel like that's my purpose, to help people connect with the power of Sankofa. The message is you can take care of yourself, listen to your body and Spirit, come back into wholeness, re-member. And so, in whatever ways I can contribute to that message here at Sweet Water, that's what I would like to do.
What did Juneteenth at The Commonwealth mean to you?
My friend and I were thinking about what we wanted to do for Juneteenth. This year, everybody was doing some for Juneteenth because it’s a national holiday now. That's a whole other story and that story was told here. I love that at Sweet Water Foundation, we talked about what does it really mean for Juneteenth to be a national holiday and what do we really need to be talking about when we talk about Juneteenth? People are still dying, people are still getting killed it seems like at an alarmingly increasing rate even though people talk about being “woke”. We can't just rest on the laurels of the President of the United States of America signing into law Juneteenth as a national holiday.
A friend and I came to Juneteenth at The Commonwealth, a little bit later than we wanted, but we knew we wanted to be here. When we got here and we heard Bomba con Buya, I felt like I was at home. I saw people outside the Thought Barn and I was like, I gotta go over here now, listen to the music and dance. And then Amatullah, a SWF Apprentice, said come on up here. I usually don't go up on stage because I'm a little bit shy. But the spirit moved me to dance and it was healing. The music was great, the energy was wonderful, the little children were dancing. Having the community here and sharing the food, I felt like this is family. This is how you come together in community and family. You do the work, whatever you're going to do, and then you honor the connection with food, and then you talk, and dance and enjoy. There was also the Beat Orchestra Workshop with AFRORACK that was another opportunity for a community to be together.
Juneteenth at The Commonwealth was an opportunity for people to talk about the meaning of Juneteenth and what led to that and what it really means and how we honor the Ancestors. Juneteenth for me is really about honoring the Ancestors, and what led to this happening, what led to even the notion of Juneteenth and how we can honor those who came before us through our continuing commitment to liberation and freedom.
So if Juneteenth is about freedom, then how do we make that something that we're living in, living with, living for, and working on every single day, Even the idea of growing your own food - even if it's just a little bit - that's something you did. And then you work with other people who you trust who can support your journey. I know you all. I'm connected to you all at Sweet Water which means I'm connected to the land with you. That means that the food that I get from here has so much love and so much good energy, and it's not bombarded with chemicals and synthetic stuff, it's not just profit driven. It really is about the interconnectedness and the divine energy, and then source energy, and then human beings, and then plants, and then the material and non material, Spirit. It almost makes you want to cry. If we all knew that we were connected, we could not harm each other in the way that we do. And in those times when we do inadvertently hurt each other, we would work together to right that wrong action.
Helping people see the possibilities. Helping people re-member. If I could distill a lot of my feelings about being here and what I've seen here it's like helping people to remember, helping people be engaged in Sankofa. Looking back, not taboo to go back and fetch what’s worked. This has worked for all and this is where it starts.
If you could describe SWF in a word or phrase, what would it be?
Loving, nurturing, nourishment, growing, warrior, healing, building community
I feel a lot of love here. You have to have love to be doing what you’re doing. It’s not always easy work. And it may not always be satisfying work in that moment. But you have the vision, it’s bigger than any one person. It’s about love of nature, love of self, love of the community and humanity, love of justice, and love for all that is divine.
