Conscious Conversations with Mmabatho Montse

About Conscious Conversations with Mmabatho Montse

Season 4 of Conscious Conversations unfolds as a living, transdisciplinary curriculum, weaving Africana Womanist eco-metaphysics, mythological studies, Black feminist geographies, Indigenous Knowledge Systems, and Futures Literacy. Each dialogue is a portal into learning as becoming—an initiation into memory, healing, and self-knowledge. We begin with Prof. Monica Mody, whose work in decolonial and Indigenous epistemologies reframes education as initiation, where myth, dreams, and cycles of birth–death–rebirth act as sacred technologies of transformation. With Atava Garcia Swiecicki, we deepen this arc through Earth-rooted teachings, honouring plants, ancestral medicine, and ecological consciousness as archives of cultural and cellular repair. In conversation with Malikeya Khantrece, we confront law, coloniality, and historical amnesia, reimagining reparations as spiritual and ancestral reckoning. Dr. Christy Garrison-Harrison traces how violence is inscribed onto the Black body and how ancestral work becomes resistance and reconstitution. With Mthuthu Ndebele, we turn to music as ancestral offering, and with Chad Zibelman, to frameworks of co-learning and relational accountability. The season closes with Riel Miller on Futures Literacy, resonant with ponelopele—the Sotho-Tswana ethic of ethical foresight. Rather than prediction, it is a forward gaze rooted in ancestral wisdom, guiding us to live into uncertainty with clarity and presence.

Publisher

Solid Gold Podcasts #BeHeard

Category

religion & spirituality · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

15 Aug 2022

Latest episode

28 Nov 2025

Latest episodes

1 of 33 episodes have a transcript.

1. 

   28 Nov 2025

   Future's Literacy

   In this episode of Conscious Conversations, Riel Miller, futurist, economist, and pioneer of Futures Literacy, joins Mmabatho Montse to explore the ethical, philosophical, and deeply personal dimensions of anticipation. Together, they unpack how coloniality, productivity culture, and structural violence have distorted humanity’s relationship with time, imagination, and learning.The conversation journeys through Miller’s reflections on his global experiences, interrogating the arrogance of certainty and the seductive illusion of mastery over the future. They examine how Futures Literacy is not a technocratic tool but a competency—a practice of humility, openness, and radical unknowing. The dialogue emphasises the importance of imagination as a communal, embodied capacity, not confined to abstract thinking but deeply rooted in relationality, ancestral continuity, and spiritual discernment. Central to this discussion is the interrogation of institutional metrics of success, the commodification of knowledge, and how dominant systems coerce the imagination into predictable, extractive patterns. Mmabatho and Riel reflect on the urgent need to reframe education, development, and leadership as anticipatory, emergent, and deeply ethical practices. This episode is an invitation to decolonise how we imagine, to reclaim the power of play, and to nurture an imagination that is attuned to difference, mystery, and collective becoming. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Riel-Miller

2. 

   14 Nov 2025TRANSCRIPT

   The Educated Self as Action-Oriented Praxis

   In this episode of Conscious Conversations, Dr. John Scott joins Mmabatho Montse to explore what it means to live education as a praxis of self-knowledge, action, and ethical transformation. Together, they move beyond schooling as a system of conformity and efficiency, instead reframing education as a deeply intuitive, embodied, and ancestral journey toward becoming. Drawing on insights from his decades-long work in diversity, equity, and cultural humility, Dr. Scott brings a nuanced lens to the conversation—rooted in Indigenous wisdom, narrative inquiry, and liberatory pedagogies such as Theatre of the Oppressed. This dialogue unpacks how healing, unlearning, and memory are not peripheral, but central to education that cultivates presence, relational accountability, and critical consciousness. At its heart, this episode challenges listeners to rethink education as more than intellectual accumulation. Instead, it emerges as a spiritual and political alignment—a life-long process of attuning to responsibility, integrity, and radical love. Through stories, reflections, and grounded theory, this conversation invites us to reclaim education as a sacred practice of becoming, rooted in both personal truth and collective liberation.

3. 

   31 Oct 2025

   Self Knowledge as Life's Teacher

   In this episode of Conscious Conversations, Mmabatho Montse is joined by educator, Mafole Sematlane for a rich dialogue on the role of education in restoring African identity, healing colonial trauma, and reweaving cultural wholeness. Drawing from his journey in Lesotho and over a decade of work in social transformation, Mafole introduces Afro-symbiosity, a paradigm rooted in Basotho values such as botho, khotso, and nala—as a framework for conflict resolution, leadership, and communal regeneration. Together, they explore how colonisation instilled a psychic captivity of fear and fragmentation, and how African communities can recover their sense of self through education as a practice of self-knowledge. They speak to the interdependence of land, body, and mind; the need for de-fragmented, transdisciplinary education; and the everyday manifestations of inherited trauma in postcolonial African life. Mafole reflects on figures such as Morena Moshoeshoe I and the healer Morena Mohlomi, whose stories illuminate a pathway for personal and collective transformation grounded in humility, listening, and ancestral wisdom. The conversation is both critical and hopeful, inviting listeners to move from discourse to practice, from despair to reclamation, and from disconnection to Ubuntu.

Inside a recent episode

The Educated Self as Action-Oriented Praxis

Published 14 Nov 2025 · Transcript excerpt

[…] And he is like, no, no, but listen to me. And he would just really, so there was this, there was no performative stuff. It was all about relationship and community. And so I just, I had this, I feel really lucky that I wasn't, I did not experience bureaucracy with these elders. I felt like they loved me, they loved the communities they were with. And so I have internalized that since both of these, Dr. Boggs and Dr. Harding both have transitioned and it's time for us to step up, you know, in some ways. And so I'm really working to embody that. So the work I do, I think, is to really be in community and practice. […]

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