Listen To Your Footsteps

Kojo Baffoe | Zebra Culture

Kojo Baffoe is a South Africa based storyteller, writer, author & content strategist, driven by curiosity & a fascination with how people got to where they are and how they do what they do. In the Listen To Your Footsteps podcast, he has in-depth conversations with Africans operating across various fields like the arts, design, advertising, media, entertainment, technology and business about their life’s journey and the lessons they have learned along the way. It is a space for reflection, introspection, acknowledgement and celebration.

  1. Aug 6

    Danielle Bowler, Many Lives, One Creative Thread

    What does it mean to live a tapas life, to sample widely, to commit deeply, to keep becoming? Danielle Bowler has spent her life refusing neat labels, and in this conversation, she makes a powerful case for why she never needed one. Writer, culture editor, researcher, musician, and now opera composer, Danielle joins Kojo Baffoe for a deeply personal conversation that moves from Ifafa Beach on KwaZulu-Natal’s south coast - her spiritual home - to the lecture halls of Rhodes University, the editorial spaces of Elle South Africa and EWN, the stages of the National Arts Festival, and ultimately into thedemanding, expansive world of opera. She speaks candidly about retrenchment, reinvention, and the strange pressure of trying to answer life’s biggest questions in Johannesburg, a city that can both sharpen and scatter you. There’s also a powerful moment in the making of her opera, when writing the final lines brought her to tears because the characters had grown beyond the page and into something fully alive. Together, they explore the myth of the jack-of-all-trades, the actual weight of that old saying, the beauty and brutality of building a life in Joburg as an outsider, the role of Twitter-era community, Black feminist thought, and why Danielle believes opera may be the only form vast enough to hold all of who she is. This one is for anyone who has ever been told they do too much — and is finally learning that maybe they’re simply whole. 🎧 Listen now. Leave a review. Share it with someone still trying to find their thread. #ListenToYourFootsteps #DanielleBowler #KojoBaffoe#AfricanPodcast #BlackCreatives #SouthAfricanPodcast #Opera #BlackFeministThought #CreativeCareer #Joburg #MultihyphenateLife #PurposeDriven #AfricanWomen #CultureEditor #MusicAndCulture #Storytelling#KwaZuluNatal #PortfolioLife #GeneralistLife

  2. Jul 23

    Lesedi Molefi, Writing Truth Into Being

    Writer, documentary filmmaker, photographer, conceptual copywriter, and author of Patient 12A, Lesedi Molefi carries more titles than most, but at the heart of all of them is a single, unshakeable ethic: the restoration of dignity. In this rich conversation with host Kojo Baffoe, Lesedi reflects on a childhood lived across cities, a mother who used books, music, and protest marches as tools of political education, and the turbulent creative journey that led him from a photography studio to a mental health clinic - and ultimately to one of the most quietly radical memoirs in recent South African literature. Together, Kojo and Lesedi interrogate the pressure to monetise passion, the forgotten art of the hobby, what it means to be a "work in progress" memoirist, the difference between survivingand thriving, and why the world outside the clinic may be far less sane than the world within it. They also discuss the writing of Patient 12A - why Lesedi almost didn't publish it, the frustrating public reception that reduced a nuanced work to "Black man has feelings," and why truth, even when it's complicated, is still an act of love. And Lesedi teases his next book. This one goes deep. Don't miss it. 🎧 Listen now. Subscribe. Leave a review. #ListenToYourFootsteps #LesediMolefi #Patient12A #BlackMenWrite #SouthAfricanPodcast #AfricanCreatives #MentalHealthAfrica #BlackCreatives #Memoir #Storytelling #AfricanWriters #KojoBaffoe #Podcast #BlackAuthors #CreativesOfAfrica

About

Kojo Baffoe is a South Africa based storyteller, writer, author & content strategist, driven by curiosity & a fascination with how people got to where they are and how they do what they do. In the Listen To Your Footsteps podcast, he has in-depth conversations with Africans operating across various fields like the arts, design, advertising, media, entertainment, technology and business about their life’s journey and the lessons they have learned along the way. It is a space for reflection, introspection, acknowledgement and celebration.

You Might Also Like