There is a slowness to Bayo Akomolafe’s words that makes them feel as if they are arriving from another time, or perhaps another dimension of time altogether. Born in Nigeria and trained in clinical psychology, Akomolafe has become one of the most quietly radical thinkers of our time, not by proposing new answers but by asking stranger and better questions. He doesn’t offer us a map out of the crisis; he wonders if the road itself is the problem. In a world addicted to acceleration, clarity, and control, Akomolafe speaks of the value of uncertainty, the intelligence of mess, and the sacredness of the pause.

“The times are urgent,” he often says. “Let us slow down.”

A Voice from the Crack

Akomolafe’s work is not easily summarized, and that is by design. He is skeptical of frameworks that promise coherence too quickly. His writing, lectures, and collaborative projects resist categorization because they emerge from what he calls the “crack”—the ruptures, thresholds, and liminal spaces where new forms of knowing become possible. He is a scholar who writes like a poet, a philosopher who distrusts fixed meaning, and a healer who insists that the wound has its own wisdom.

He is deeply influenced by post-structuralist philosophy, Yoruba cosmology, indigenous epistemologies, decolonial theory, and post-humanist thought. But he rarely wears these influences on his sleeve. Instead, they infuse his work like underground roots. His doctoral training in psychology provided one language for exploring the human condition, but he found it inadequate for the kinds of mysteries he was drawn to—questions of being, becoming, loss, and emergence.

In his writing, Akomolafe draws liberally from theorists like Jacques Derrida, Karen Barad, and Donna Haraway, but also from oral tradition, ritual, and the ancestral cosmologies of his Yoruba heritage. These streams combine into a kind of counter-modernism that sees modernity not as a universal truth but as one cosmology among many—a powerful one, yes, but also a violent and limited one.

“The world doesn’t exist,” he writes. “Worlding does.”

Rethinking Change

If there is one central thread in Akomolafe’s philosophy, it is a sustained challenge to conventional ideas of change. In political and environmental spaces, change is often framed as a matter of policy, progress, or protest. But for Akomolafe, this misses something deeper. Real change, he suggests, doesn’t always look like action. It can look like falling apart, like composting, like failure.

He speaks of “fugitive futures”—futures that hide in the cracks, away from the spotlight of progress narratives. He often turns to the metaphor of the slave who runs into the dark woods rather than towards the plantation house. What if, he asks, the escape is not into clarity but into obscurity? What if salvation lies not in fixing the world but in being undone by it, in listening to what we’ve learned to ignore?

This is not to say Akomolafe advocates for passivity. Rather, he offers a shift in posture: from mastery to humility, from control to entanglement. In a world of systems collapse, ecological devastation, and social fragmentation, he proposes that we look to the margins, to the “overlooked and underfoot,” for signs of renewal. In a deeply human sense, this is also an invitation to be undone—to let go of certainty, of power, of the savior complex, and make space for something truly different to emerge.

This vision aligns with the broader shift in social theory toward emergence and complexity. Instead of top-down transformation, Akomolafe invites us into the unpredictable play of relationships and ecologies. Drawing on Indigenous and African philosophies, he reminds us that transformation often arises from what appears broken, marginal, or discarded. This recalls Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the “borderlands,” where identity and understanding are forged in multiplicity, contradiction, and contact zones.

Slowness as Rebellion

In one of his most quoted refrains, Akomolafe says, “The times are urgent; let us slow down.” It is a counterintuitive statement in a world driven by urgency. But for Akomolafe, slowness is not about inactivity. It is about reorientation. Slowing down means entering into relationship, allowing ourselves to be touched, and becoming attentive to the strange textures of the moment.

Slowness is a kind of rebellion against the optimization mindset, against the colonial clock that has dictated what counts as valuable, productive, and real. To slow down is to become porous, to listen to nonhuman rhythms, to recognize that not all things can be solved, and that maybe the insistence on solving is part of the problem. Slowness also becomes a way to dwell within the body and within time differently. Where modernity carves time into units to be monetized, Akomolafe asks us to inhabit time as mystery, as presence.

This ethic is deeply resonant with what cultural theorist Homi Bhabha calls the “interstitial space” – a space between identities and systems, where new meanings gestate. For Akomolafe, this in-betweenness is not something to be overcome, but the very space where wisdom resides.

Philosophy from the Edge

What makes Akomolafe’s voice so singular is that he refuses to speak from the center. His is a philosophy from the edge—of disciplines, of cultures, of ontologies. He draws from the Yoruba concept of “aťọ,” often translated as ritual, but which also implies a shifting, dynamic practice of becoming-with. Knowledge, in this view, is not a fixed commodity but a relational, emergent dance.

This edge-philosophy has affinities with the work of thinkers like Emmanuel Levinas and Edouard Glissant, who explore alterity and opacity. It also resonates with Karen Barad’s agential realism and Donna Haraway’s concept of “staying with the trouble.” But Akomolafe’s approach is more than intellectual bricolage. It is rooted in embodiment, myth, and the sacred. His thinking feels like invocation. It does not merely seek to explain; it seeks to enchant and undo.

He often asks: what if the problems we face are not meant to be solved, but to be related to? What if the world is not a puzzle, but a presence? This shift from problem-solving to presence is radical, especially in spaces of activism and policy, where results are demanded, and urgency is sacred. It is a philosophical move with ethical implications: to be with, rather than to dominate or fix.

The Invitation

Ultimately, Akomolafe’s work is not a doctrine. It is an invitation. He does not offer answers so much as portals. He invites us to step off the highway of crisis management and enter the forest path of mystery. He calls us to descend into the belly of the world, to listen for the more-than-human voices, to be disoriented, and perhaps even reborn.

His recent work with the Emergence Network and his podcast appearances, such as “For the Wild,” deepen this invitation. These are not platforms for broadcasting certainty, but spaces for collective listening, for “critically untethering from the familiar.” In a time of collapse, Akomolafe offers not a solution, but a companionship in the ruins. He reorients us from the illusion of mastery toward an ethics of entanglement, reminding us that not all change is legible, not all progress linear, and not all healing looks like recovery.

In the end, perhaps what makes Bayo Akomolafe so compelling is his refusal to be a guru, a guide, or a prophet. He walks beside, not ahead. He does not declare, he invites. He does not build temples; he gestures to the cracks. He is not offering us a way out of the dark. He is suggesting we might stay awhile and learn to see.

“Maybe the cracks are not signs of failure,” he writes. “Maybe they are how the light gets in. Maybe the cracks are where the world begins again.”

References and Suggested Reading

Akomolafe, Bayo. These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home. North Atlantic Books, 2017.

Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press, 2007.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

Glissant, Edouard. Poetics of Relation. University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. Duquesne University Press, 1969.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 1987.

The Emergence Network: https://www.emergencenetwork.org

For The Wild podcast featuring Bayo Akomolafe: https://forthewild.world