This month, as part of our International Women’s Day campaign, we returned to the silent yet ever-present ancestors who carried worlds and birthed us. The ones who held families, communities, and memory together, often without recognition, but never without impact.

We returned to the heart of IMBUU, Florence Mbu Ogan, my grandmother, whose life continues to shape how we understand care, community, and storytelling. In many ways, Pülö begins with her.

Our ethos is rooted in this lineage.

In the ways these women taught us to care, to endure, and to create. In the understanding that what we inherit is not just memory, but responsibility.

We carry this forward by remembering their charge.

“mu ibianga la mine ndana laka nyo” — go on and be what we couldn’t be.

Through her, we learnt that care is lived. It is carried. It is chosen again and again.

Okuru Kaka

We also look to the traditions that shaped us — Iya, also known as Okuru Kaka.

Among the Kirike and Ijaw people of the Niger Delta, this is a marriage ceremony that affirms a woman's full consent to her union. It often takes place years after a couple has already begun their life together.

It is the moment she publicly declares: I love and trust this man enough to entrust him with everything, especially my children and lineage.

The decision to kaka (to tie) the okuru (a raffia wrapper) belongs only to the woman. No one else can make it for her, not even her mother.

The okuru is traditionally handed to the woman, who in Ijaw belief is the one who holds the marriage. Okuru Kaka itself is the act of tying this wrapper, a joining of two lives, rooted in a material and practice that dates back to our ancestors.

It is no coincidence that such a tradition exists within a civilisation that has long understood creation through the maternal.

Before colonial rule and the arrival of Christianity, our cosmologies recognised a supreme creative force, known by different names such as Tamuno, Ayiba, Tamara, and Woyingi, as maternal in essence.

Creation followed this logic: the power to bring life into the world, and equally the power to refuse it before it enters this realm, is a power mirrored in both woman and God.

Seen this way, Iya becomes more than a marriage rite.

It reflects an older philosophy of gender and power, one that reminds us that many of our traditions once held far more expansive understandings of womanhood than the patriarchal systems that arrived with colonialism.

And in many ways, this is what we return to.

The quiet, enduring power of women, still shaping the worlds we live in.