Iritah Shenmira Naba (Neb) brings the wisdom of the Dogon homeland to the Black/African Feminisms Conference 2026

By Biksaa Nessebik

I watched it happen through a screen, but it felt more real than that. On the morning of May 22nd, the Black/African Feminisms Conference opened with Diane Hill, Mohawk Elder, Bear Clan, a Medicine person speaking the truth of the land now called Toronto: its name in her language, Ticeronto, "where the trees stand." Then Dr. Osholene Upiomoh poured libation, calling on the Ancestral Divine Mother, the River Divinity, the primordial waters that govern what cannot be seen. By the time Neb Iritah was introduced, the way had already been opened…  in every room existing in reality beyond the screen.

He didn't begin with theory. He opened with a saying from his own culture: no matter how dark the room is, a child will always find its way to the mother's breast. Then he said the thing the whole conference could circle back to for two days: that our mothers, our grandmothers, our sisters, anyone with the ability to carry and give life, are divine, and they are supreme. He didn't offer it as a compliment. He stated it as a fact, and he was asking a room of some 200 scholars to sit with it.

It mattered too, considering who was in that room. The esteemed Founder Dr. Njoki Wane, after Neb Iritah's remarks, named him "our spiritual leader" as one of the lineages carrying the story of the African continent from the Pharaohs to the present. Coming from the woman leader who built this institute, among other things, to bring Black and African feminist scholarship back to its own roots, that wasn't a small thing to say out loud.