My name is Lebohang. Welcome to my little corner home on the internet – a deeply personal, intimate and carefully composed space. The kind of comfort you could nuzzle your whole body into, that familiar feeling of home is what I cultivate here. Home is a hug; with warmth that spreads like balms and salves for soothing. Home is where the heart heals. Where imagination and dreams float freely, a space to share with you some of the things that make living pleasurable. Just as I step into my home to adorn myself and step out with the requisite finery to show up everyday, I come here to think and write about some of the things that fill my life with meaning and effervescent joy. You walk in to find my thoughts, ideas and dreams strewn about with history, politics and the words of every genius musician and writer I’ve ever loved. You walk in to find me in the scents and the sounds, the velvet and wooden treasures, the books I just can’t put down and the whisp between labour and leisure.

For me, living in long-form—moving slowly and contemplating deeply—are how I come to be myself in the way I know best. On any given day, I move around in the world with so much gratitude for all things great and small, especially the blessing of adventure! It’s thrilling to know that, at their best, all my days are different thanks to the many hats I wear (fedoras only). I move through the world as a social anthropologist, author, poet, literacy advocate, storyteller, Senior Writing Fellow and speaker. All of this, the perfect combination for a chatty patty and bookworm. There are slight exceptions to the thrill of my daily comings and goings, of course, like when I’m glued to my desk working on admin or a deadline for weeks on end. But just knowing that I rarely suffer traffic makes it a rather flawless arrangement. Being a stay-at-home-work-at-home multi-hyphenate is exciting because no two days are the same. For instance, I might be in a rehearsal for the delivery of a spoken word verse for a range of brands across the financial, broadcasting, social development, literary and public sectors. It’s just like how I performed the manifesto at the launch of ABSA’s Your Story Matters one day…

…and then, on another day, I could be out at a school or community library weaving a big, big story about Mpumi and her Magic Beads for a spellbound group of little readers sitting cross-legged on a rug or in neat rows of plastic school-chairs. Although rarer than most, there was also the time I filmed a cameo appearance for Diprente productions’ latest Netflix show, Classified, an exciting teen drama about Ella, a 15-year-old American-South African girl finding her feet at her new school in Johannesburg..

…but on most days, I’m writing new stories for children or fulfilling my duties as a Senior Writing Fellow: helping my group of Honour’s and Master’s students towards the mastery of ethnographic writing as future Social Anthropologists. Everything I do begins and ends with the word. The word wants to be written. The word wants to be spoken. The word wants to be read and heard. The inimitable, life-changing pleasure and potential of prose and possibility is a sensation I have been pursuing for as long as I can remember. To continue to pour into my craft and ascend to the music of beautiful sentences written just right is a privilege I treasure. Wrought in the fire and tireless cool of Johannesburg and it’s Tumblr-era sensibilities, words are how I rise to the challenge of existence. I write to make room for myself.

The other important thing is that this is how I resist the relentless incursion of Big Tech. I have been thinking about how to continue to keep growing and learning at the level for which I am destined despite our smart devices offering us instant gratification under a million guises. I want to remind myself of how delicious it is to read and write at length. I want to document how magical it is to watch myself make my contribution and earn my place on every part of this journey called life. I will strive to update my little corner home on the internet twice a week. I hope you’ll follow along and I hope you have a similar space that holds everything you enjoy in the palm of its hand.

Ke a leboha.

Thank you, reader.