Afrosensual Awakenings: A Return to My Sense(s)

Entry 1: Sound

Keywords: Sensuality, Sound Exploration, Healing, Afrosensuality, Intuition, Nervous System

When we were young, we learned about the five senses and how they exist as part of a dense nervous and communication system, with stimuli journeying through our bodies and influencing our actions. Yet in adulthood, we seem to take this incredible fact for granted. We move through life on autopilot, presenting as calm and unbothered on the surface, while deep inside, electric and chemical impulses ripple through our motor and sensory neurons in constant response to our external environments, informing our daily experiences, reactions, mood, desires, and even our health from the inside out. Unaware of the inputs we expose our bodies to, we gradually lose touch with ourselves.

Now, years after middle school, my awareness of my senses seems be of richer substance. What once felt like a simple biology lesson has become something far more personal and intimate, breeding a desire to restore my relationship with my senses through the lens of my unique African experience. I like to think of this process as sojourning through my body and gently tinkering with its senses one by one, not to control them, but to continue learning their language and discovering their instinctive power.

In some layered way, I like to think of our senses as corridors, sacred pathways between the universe around us and the universe within.

Afrosensuality, for me, begins with understanding this delicate connection. And to understand, we must first listen. So naturally, I’d start with sound.

Looking back, sound has always been my most intimate corridor, and no, this has nothing to do with my big ears. To quote an African proverb, “There is more wisdom in listening than in speaking,” which must be why we have two ears and one mouth. Simply put, sound shaped the world around me long before I had language for it, forming the soundtrack to my becoming.

Growing up surrounded by feminine figures, I remember the soft clinking of beads between one aunty’s wrists and another’s neck, how their gentle rhythm announced their presence before they entered a room. The way traditional drums awaken something in my spine, or how my body answers instinctively in call-and-response at the function. Before my mind had time to make sense of it, it was already creating a folder of wav files collected by my sound receptors.

Beyond my personal experience, this holds in the communities I come from, too. Think of oral traditions, teachings, and how interjections like “yoh!” and “mm”, can tell you everything you need to know about a situation. As an African woman, sound shapes the collective consciousness, reminding me that we were never meant to be quiet, but to exist sonically and in communion.

Sound taught me belonging before language did.

With deeper awareness of the way I respond to certain sounds, I began to recognise their healing power. The gentle sound of cool rain against the warm earth. Sweet birds chirping in the early mornings. The crackling of dry, broken leaves being swept through the compound by Mthanyelo/ Umweyo, signalling the break of a new day. Sounds tucked neatly in memory, beckoning to be resurfaced when the days are dark and the spirit fatigued.

When the mind unjustly sinks into loneliness, the sound of kids playing in the streets, familiar worship songs, and recently, the notes of the sound bowl which my good friend from Nepal gifted me (carrying what is said to be the root frequency of the universe, activated by a wand with both a masculine and feminine end) become my revival.

This gift stirred what lay dormant in me: a desire to explore the layers of sensuality that have always existed in brown bodies. Sensual layers silently weeping beneath the abrasive words we carelessly hurl at each other, war cries and gunfire, constant buzzing machines, construction in one compound, demolition in the next, heckling, and triggering news about greed-driven atrocities waged between humans, signalling unhealed pain.

Now, more than ever, I seek to harness sound to soothe and regulate my nervous system.

And turning sensuality into ritual makes it sacred. Our ears are receptors, yes, but they are also gateways. Through them, vibrations travel through the body to the gut (that quiet sixth sense we rarely name). Between frequency and feeling, intuition slowly forms.

This line of inquiry has borne a new practice, one that allows me to use my musical gifts to create and share beautiful, moving sound. So next time you see me on stage, don’t be surprised if I pull out a sound bowl or rainstick, gently turning the function into a sound bath.

Sound exploration for healing is not a new religion. I’m definitely not trying to convert anyone. It is remembrance. It is the intentional return to frequencies that soften the body and awaken its wisdom.

And this is only one gateway.

If Afrosensuality is a return to the body’s intelligence, that quiet knowing beneath the noise, then sound is simply where I begin.

Which sense should we explore next?