There’s a history that lives in the soul. It shows up in tears and laughter, in language, in the weight carried across generations. For many people of African descent, that history is shaped by rupture – by displacement, extraction, and the daily reality of being seen through a distorted lens.
For our Sisters, Africa is not a theme or a focus area. It is the ground where relationships have been formed over lifetimes. It’s where many of us have stood barefoot: laughed in kitchens, grieved in silence, and shared meals without words. These are not memories to be sentimentalised. They are part of what holds us accountable.
To honour the people of Africa and her descendants means making space for complexity. For recognising the brilliance, strength, and cultural depth that has flourished in spite of centuries of dehumanisation. It also means naming the systems that continue to exclude, exploit, or reduce. Prayer has to hold both.
There’s no neutral way to speak about Africa. Too often, the words are loaded, romanticised, reduced, or filtered through someone else’s lens. But when you’ve walked the dusty roads, felt the sun that cracks the earth, shared food around a low table, and sat beside a mother whose grief needs no translation, the language changes. You stop speaking about Africa as a place. You begin to speak of people. By name, by memory, by what they taught you.
The OLA story is full of these moments. Not milestones or mission highlights, but the ordinary, steady presence that Africa and her people holds for us. That’s where the shape of our prayer begins. It is not in abstract longing, it’s in the daily work of accompaniment. Of staying when things are fragile. Of listening even when it’s uncomfortable. Of learning when it would be easier to withdraw. A presence that recognises the force of history but doesn’t stop there.
Prayer is not what we do instead of action. It’s what makes action possible. It what grounds our action in something deeper than urgency or outcome. When we pray for Africa, for her people, for her descendants, we’re holding relationships, commitments, and stories that continue to shape who we are. We’re sitting in the discomfort, allowing the reality of injustice unsettle our habits. To stop looking for resolution, and start honouring the weight of what’s been carried for too long.
Prayer changes when we stay. It quietens. It stops reaching for the right words and turns our attention to the truth that have been plainly spoken, the conversations that ask us to change—not only the systems, but ourselves. It shifts how we hold ourselves in the presence of another’s pain, another’s dignity, another’s vulnerability.
This is the deep wok of prayer. It is not in the whispered words, but in the quiet opening of our hearts. The willingness to let the spirit change us.
The African people, collectively, carry the inherited strength and pain of their forefathers. Many live with the ache of displacement. Some move through systems that still read their bodies as threat. Some carry names that have never been spoken correctly. Others carry languages that were silenced.
And still, they do what needs to be done. Building lives. Holding families together. Creating beauty, protest, tradition.
Our prayers must stretch further than memory or geography. It must ask who we overlook. Whose grief we dismiss. Whose excellence we diminish. And whether we’re ready to do the work of unlearning what we’ve been taught to ignore.