Trad Magazine

TRAD is a grassroots educational organization. We create African centered educational experiences, publish tradmag.ca, and create learning tools for students, teachers, and community. TRAD Magazine is the publication for African ideas and collective memories. We are on a mission to restore and renew our peoples' traditions. TRAD began as a campus club at McMaster University in 2013. Thanks to a three-year, grant from the Ontario Trillium Foundation, students in Toronto, Ottawa and Hamilton will be engaged in exploring African cultures, ideas, philosophies and traditions. We create TRAD to document and honor the strengths and contributions of our peoples across time, and build on their legacy. Revisiting traditional and contemporary worldviews will allow us to reflect on the institutions we build, the way we organize our lives and societies and explore the limits of what we believe is possible in our lives and societies. We choose to write, think, and dream about the world on our terms. West African mystics spoke of the turning of an age - a period where children will seek to remember the ways of their ancestors after a period of invasion and famine. They spoke of a burning curiosity that will drive the children of the displaced back home. It is impossible to know if that era is now. We do know that in our personal lives, in the lives of our team, and our organisation, we are animated by an ancestral force, and a historical logic that brings us to you, now. TRAD feels timely, necessary, and deeply urgent. Building TRAD has been an exceptionally rewarding experience for us. It feels like the thing we have been searching for all our lives. A place we can come to with our whole selves. I hope you find some of what you are looking for reading through these pages. Please support us. Read, engage, share, like subscribe. We are supported by the Ontario Trillium Foundation,the Youth Opportunities Fund, and mentored by Empowerment Squared. To them,we are deeply grateful.