Listen To Your Footsteps

What does it take to turn curiosity into culture, and culture into a lasting legacy?
In Episode 139 of Listen to Your Footsteps, Kojo Baffoe sits down with Osmic Menoe - South African hip-hop pioneer, cultural organiser and creative entrepreneur - for a candid conversation about growing up in deep Soweto and building a life through hip-hop.
Osmic reflects on childhood astronomy, long school journeys that began before dawn, and the power of finding a purpose when the world around you offers too many destructive distractions. He traces his path through graffiti, b-boying, beatboxing, rap, design, mixtapes, early creative enterprise and the grassroots cyphers that helped give Johannesburg’s young hip-hop community a voice.
This is a conversation about South African hip-hop history, street culture, youth identity, creative discipline, entrepreneurship and what it truly means to build cultural architecture from the ground up.
If you are an artist, entrepreneur, culture-maker or anyone trying to create a meaningful path beyond the spaces you were given, this episode is for you.
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#OsmicMenoe #SouthAfricanHipHop #Soweto #Johannesburg #HipHopCulture #StreetCulture #CreativeEntrepreneurship #AfricanCulture #ListenToYourFootsteps

Memorable moments from the conversation with Taryn Gill. From leaving a conventional career to creating a business rooted in African beauty, instinct and community, Taryn shares what it really feels like to step into the unknown. It is terrifying, thrilling—and sometimes both at once.
Her reminder is simple: courage is not the absence of fear. It is doing the work despite it. And when doubt arrives, carry the evidence of everything remarkable you have already done.
Listen to the full episode of Listen to Your Footsteps for the complete conversation with Taryn Gill.

Dr. Lesley Mofokeng - academic, journalist, and author - sits down with Kojo Baffoe to trace a life built on curiosity. From dreaming of being a bus driver in a dusty village outside Mafikeng, to breaking into the Sunday Times newsroom in the mid-90s, to writing bestselling books on Khanyi Mbau and Somizi, Lesley's path eventually turned inward — toward his own grandfather, a Dutch Reformed Church minister whose name had vanished from history.
This conversation moves through migrant childhoods, the discipline of court reporting, the politics of appearance in newsrooms, and a master's research journey that took Lesley to the tomb of King Moshoeshoe at Thaba Bosiu. It widens into a bigger reckoning: how colonial narratives buried African intellectual history, why "oral culture" was a label designed to diminish, and why Lesley now spends his days restoring erased names - his grandfather's, Sol Plaatje's, and an entire lost chapter of Black South African history around the Boer War.
If you care about journalism, memory, language, and legacy, this one stays with you.
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#AfricanHistory #Journalism #Podcast #ListenToYourFootsteps #SouthAfricanHistory #OralHistory #BlackHistory #Storytelling #PhD #Academia #Mafikeng #Sesotho #Setswana #KingMoshoeshoe #SolPlaatje

A Memorable Moments highlight from my conversation with artist and storyteller Tsoku Maela, on using lived experience, photography and self-portraiture to make sense of mental health, identity and empathy.
#LTYFMoments #ListenToYourFootsteps #TsokuMaela #MentalHealth #AfricanArt #SouthAfricanPhotography #SelfPortraiture #Storytelling

What does it mean to live a tapas life, to sample widely, to commit deeply, to keep becoming? Danielle Bowler has spent her life refusing neat labels, and in this conversation, she makes a powerful case for why she never needed one.
Writer, culture editor, researcher, musician, and now opera composer, Danielle joins Kojo Baffoe for a deeply personal conversation that moves from Ifafa Beach on KwaZulu-Natal’s south coast - her spiritual home - to the lecture halls of Rhodes University, the editorial spaces of Elle South Africa and EWN, the stages of the National Arts Festival, and ultimately into thedemanding, expansive world of opera.
She speaks candidly about retrenchment, reinvention, and the strange pressure of trying to answer life’s biggest questions in Johannesburg, a city that can both sharpen and scatter you. There’s also a powerful moment in the making of her opera, when writing the final lines brought her to tears because the characters had grown beyond the page and into something fully alive.
Together, they explore the myth of the jack-of-all-trades, the actual weight of that old saying, the beauty and brutality of building a life in Joburg as an outsider, the role of Twitter-era community, Black feminist thought, and why Danielle believes opera may be the only form vast enough to hold all of who she is.
This one is for anyone who has ever been told they do too much — and is finally learning that maybe they’re simply whole.
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#ListenToYourFootsteps #DanielleBowler #KojoBaffoe#AfricanPodcast #BlackCreatives #SouthAfricanPodcast #Opera #BlackFeministThought #CreativeCareer #Joburg #MultihyphenateLife #PurposeDriven #AfricanWomen #CultureEditor #MusicAndCulture #Storytelling#KwaZuluNatal #PortfolioLife #GeneralistLife