A story of longing for a place I’ve never been and finding my way back home.

Written on November 26th, 2021

My name is Ibraheem and I am a 28-year-old Muslim, community organizer, artivist, and archivist. Originally from Sierra Leone in West Africa, I was born in Canada, and raised in California and other locales around the globe.

In 2017, I saved up enough money to travel to Sierra Leone for the first time. Homecoming is a collection of visual stories illustrating my first visit to Sierra Leone, which felt very much like returning home. Through these 20 photos and a short film currently in production, join me on a journey from the capital city of Freetown, from where my mother hails, to the village of Mange Bureh, where my father grew up.

Click on the Opensea link above to view the Homecoming Collection.

Sorting by Oldest vs price will help you to experience the collection as the story it is.

Where to next? And when?

Learning more about where I come from has helped me understand where I can and want to go. And in this moment, I want to go back home.

Beyond collecting these stories, the community of people who purchase Homecoming NFTs will be funding the seeking, curation, and preservation of more stories that need telling. I will be using the proceeds from Homecoming to fund a trip back to Sierra Leone this December of 2021 where I further explore and document my history and culture.

“If the University of Sankore had not been destroyed; if Professor Ahmad Baba, author of forty historical works, had not had his works and his university destroyed; if the University of Sankore as it was in 1591 had survived the ravage of foreign invasions; the academic and cultural history of Africa might have been different from what it is today.” - Thomas Sankara

When an elder in my father’s village passed away, his sons gifted my father a box of mostly hand-written, Arabic manuscripts their father had left behind.

Being proficient in Arabic, I set out to understand what these manuscripts where and where they came from. I quickly identified that the manuscripts included a Quran, a book of praise poetry, a Bible, and a book on Jurisprudence (Islamic Law). Delighted by these discoveries, with the help of my brother Mustafa Briggs, we were able to trace the manuscripts, the calligraphic scripts, and some of the authors to West Africa, North Africa, and Spain.

These findings were significant to me because the post-colonial and backward lens through which villagers are looked at paints them as illiterate and uneducated both in Sierra Leone and abroad. It is also significant because this village scholar who was educated in multiple languages, and faith traditions, passed away with those around him being none the wiser. When we don’t seek and preserve it, how much knowledge and truth dies with those who bear it?

This truth coupled with the knowledge of how much of my culture and history is transmitted through oral tradition is what inspires me to seek out these stories, and preserve them through the mediums available to me.

Blockchain in particular presents a tool through which these stories can be preserved in an immutable way. And I’m excited to explore and be a part of defining what that can look like.

Homecoming will fund:

• Travel expenses/Plane ticket
• Drone/Camera/Recording Equipment
• An extended stay in Sierra Leone

I will be sharing more as this story unfolds.

For now, if you want to connect with me, follow me on Twitter or Instagram @ibraheemleone

You can listen to me being interviewed about myself and my project by the Black Me Up podcast here:

View and collect Homecoming at the Opensea Link below: