The manifesto

Masapo, defined

For centuries, black peoples were told about, instead of telling their own story. Through suffering, slavery, colonization, as if nothing had existed before. And when we were granted heroes, they rarely came from our own myths. Our gods, our spirits, our kingdoms stayed as backdrops, never as worlds.

I refuse that. And I also refuse to borrow other people's words to say it.

Japan has manga. Korea has manhwa. France has the BD. Each has its own word to name its drawn stories. We do not. We are offered « afro manga », as if our stories had to be the black version of someone else's.

So I set down the missing word.

Masapo

In Lingala, masapo means the tales, the stories, the legends. The same language as Ebandeli. The language of those who, at night, held the world upright with stories.

A Masapo is a drawn narrative that makes visible the souls, the spirits and the heroes born of the Afro-diasporic pantheons. It treats these spiritual worlds as real and sovereign, never as decorative folklore. And it does so with a grammar of its own: the dya made visible, that share of soul and double that Mande thought knows how to name, shown on the page beside the visible; the rhythm of the tale and the griot's voice in the layout; and the vertical format, the one you read in your hand, where our youth grows up.

The Masapo has a family, and I name it without denying it. Afrofuturism is its uncle, born in the diaspora, turned toward the future and the machine. Okorafor's Africanjujuism is its aunt, who first said that our spiritualities are real within fiction. The Masapo owes them much. It adds what they lacked: a drawn body, a form of our own.

The Masapo is not my property. It is a door I open. The word belongs to anyone who draws our souls with pride and truth, from the continent to the diaspora. I do not command it, I contribute to it.

This is why ROHO exists, and why what ROHO gives to see will be the first Masapo. So that our children open a page, recognize themselves, dream, and be proud.

It is not only a story. It is a word returned to those it belongs to.

Make Africa Legendary.

Loudvic Salcède, creator of ROHO.