Rewrite Stories and Reshape Systems

Thank you to everyone who joined us for ‘Rewrite Stories, Reshape Systems’ at The Conduit Club. We were joined by an inspiring panel and moderator.  Alexis Akwagyiram (Semafor Africa), Lena Bheeroo (Bond UK), Najite Phoenix (Decolonial by Design) and Roxanne Wright (Eunoia Learning). Each working in different ways to reseed new narratives about our homelands, from Ghana, Nigeria, to Jamaica. Thank you all for your wisdom.

At the time of preparing for the event, I was reading the book In The Wake by Christina Sharpe.  The opening chapter reminded me that Afro-Asian peoples’ experiences of chattel and indentured slavery and colonisation were and are the crises we are still tackling today.  Yet, when we talk about crises in Afro-Asian countries, they are given other names, climate, food, water, health or education crises. Each name masking colonial footprints in what becomes an ongoing act of erasure. It is this insight that we brought to the floor as panellists and the audience explored what it means to tell climate and humanitarian stories ethically in a world marked by extreme violence and inequity that echo our past.

What we heard

The discussion underscored how deeply stories shape systems. Najite and I explained how narratives don’t just describe reality, they influence how people identify themselves and others, how organisations act and how entire sectors function. In humanitarian and climate spaces, the repeating background trope of saviours and victims shapes how funding and aid are delivered. Western European and more recently East Asian actors are cast as benevolent architects of progress, positioning far too many people in African, South Asian, Caribbean, and Latin American contexts as living in extreme poverty that has no start, end, or cause, passively receiving aid.

Challenging dominant narratives

Yet the reality is very different. Together, we discussed the extreme poverty the humanitarian industry deals with as being a result of decades of violent colonial occupations that denied humanity, seized land, trafficked people, and extracted natural resources.  The aim was wealth accumulation, justified by claims of racial superiority. Pre-colonial systems dissolved and were replaced by commodification of human, plant, and animal life, renewed elitism and conflict, producing today’s crises and inequity.. 

We critiqued the dominant narrative for the ways that it erases colonial legacies and the racialised nature of extreme poverty. Always suggesting that it is the aid industry that responds to these devastating conditions, despite evidence telling us that it is households and communities across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean that are the ‘first responders’  that feed,  house and educate themselves and others. Low-wage employment, collective care, remittances, entrepreneurship, large and small, and government safety nets are key drivers lifting people out of poverty.  The aid machinery works alongside these networks, though they remain the central story.

Shifting power through language

Lena reflected on the power we hold when telling stories, flagging the dangers of binaries that divide people into us-and-them groups, ‘saviour/saved’, ‘developed/undeveloped’, ‘local/international’, each term describing Afro-Asian people and their diaspora without ever mentioning heritage.  Each binary upholding one group’s positive identity at the expense of the other’s humanity.

We talked about the importance of asking questions about repeating background tropes. Who do they serve? Whose voices are centred, and whose are missing? We mused about the state of representation work, often starting and stopping with ‘diverse voices’ telling the same tired background story, rather than naming what is not being said. In that silence, Western perspectives are reinforced while feminist or decolonial voices are marginalised. 

Relevance and language

Slowly, the conversation came full circle: stories and language matter. They can be used to make topics like climate or humanitarian crises relevant to racialised audiences while building historical context and knowledge. Roxanne showed how making issues like climate change tangible for young people, particularly for Black, Brown, and other marginalised groups, can help a wider group of people see their own agency in shaping the future. 

The discussion closed with a reminder that storytelling is reparative. Narratives don’t only have the power to harm; they also heal, restore dignity, and open space to reimagine what’s possible.

Looking forward

We left the event with a sense of both urgency and possibility. There is real power in shifting the stories we tell, and in doing so, we can reshape the systems those narratives sustain.

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