Revisiting the legend of flying Africans

As an experimental documentarian, I reimagine the function of archives for black women. There are stories the ancestors have buried, and I feel them scratching their way to the surface. Whether these archives have been erased or misplaced, I reconstruct what has been lost by excavating and interrogating oral histories. In the above video, “Dreaming Gave Us Wings,” I explore the legend of flying Africans—a story, existing on the edge of dream and memory, about enslaved Africans who could lift up and fly home.

The story of flying Africans has been passed down from generation to generation since slavery—a secret, suppressed gift of our ancestors. While this myth has evolved over the years, it continues to be the source of imagination that depicts freedom, new futures, and returning to Africa. Rooted in the history of Igbo Landing—a site on St. Simon’s Island, in Georgia, where enslaved people brought from Nigeria