Identity, Belonging, and the Courage to Return to Ourselves - Dr Eleanor T. Khonje, PhD

My father turns seventy in just a few months, and I find myself in the midst of planning a surprise celebration for him in Malawi. He is a very traditional man, patriarchal, if I am honest, and if I am wearing my sociologist’s hat, also deeply devoted to his family and his children. He is a man who has given, sacrificed, and carried responsibility in ways that deserve to be honoured.

One of the intentions I have set for this celebration is deeply personal: I want to speak to my family, as much as possible, in Chichewa—our local Malawian language. Not because I do not understand it. I understand everything. There is no gossiping about me. But because expressing myself in Chichewa has never come easily to me. I did not grow up speaking the language.

Over the past few weeks, I have been asking my close family and friends to speak to me mostly in Chichewa. I have been stumbling, searching for words, laughing at myself, and pushing through discomfort. And I am doing so very intentionally. This moment is part of what I am calling my intentional decolonisation of self. It is about reclaiming an identity that has always been part of me, but that I have never fully explored or embodied. 

As an African woman who has spent much of her life embedded in Western institutions - academia, global governance spaces, and international organisations - it is easy for Western ways of being to become normalised. Not because we consciously choose them, but because survival often requires adaptation. We move through the world fluent in Western norms, languages, and epistemologies, sometimes at the cost of proximity to our own cultural grounding.

Decolonisation, for me, is not theoretical. It is embodied. It is linguistic. It is emotional. It is about asking myself, again and again: Who am I becoming, and at what cost? As a sociologist whose work centers on the lives and leadership journeys of African women, I know that identity is never static. Identity shifts across time, space, and experience. I am currently in a season where I am intentionally allowing my own identity to shift, embracing my culture and my belonging within the Malawian space in ways I have never done before.

Our need for belonging evolves as we move through different seasons of life. What anchors us at twenty may no longer hold us at forty. And what once felt distant may suddenly call us back with urgency.

There is a particular kind of reckoning that comes with maturity, a quiet recognition that growth does not always mean moving forward. Sometimes, it means returning. Identity, I have learned, is not only about where we are going. It is also about what we refuse to leave behind. Author, bell hooks reminds us that “Belonging is a deeply personal and political act”. To belong to ourselves, to our communities, to our histories, and to our identity in its shifting forms requires consciousness. It requires intention. And sometimes, it requires unlearning the ways we have been conditioned to distance ourselves from who we are.

For Black women. For African women. For women navigating the world across borders and systems not designed for their flourishing, knowing our identity, tending to it, and revisiting it as we move through different spaces and seasons is not a luxury. It is a survival strategy.

Knowing who we are, our strengths, our wounds, our abilities, our broken places, our communities, our superpowers, is about grounding. When identity is rooted, character follows. And when character is grounded, we are better equipped to withstand mischaracterization, exclusion, and erasure.

Belonging, then, is not something we wait to be granted. It is something we actively discern and cultivate. Choosing first to belong to ourselves before we can feel at home anywhere else. It shows up in the languages we choose to speak, the spaces we claim, the communities we nurture, and the ways we honor our lineage. Belonging comes alive when we embrace all parts of who we are and allow ourselves to show up fully in the spaces that reflect us back to ourselves.

There are moments in life when returning to the basics becomes radical. When remembering who we are is an act of resistance. When reclaiming culture, language, and identity becomes a form of leadership.

This season, for me, is about that return. And right now, that return looks like speaking Chichewa. It looks like embracing my identity as a Malawian. More than that, it looks like embracing my identity as the daughter of my father, who, on his seventieth birthday, will hear his daughter speak from a place of truth, belonging, and a deep comfort with self. A daughter who has come home.

About choosing to belong, fully, consciously, and without apology, to myself, my roots, and the woman I am becoming. And perhaps that, more than anything else, is the work. So let me ask you this: What part of yourself are you being called to radically embrace in this season of your life? What inner work are you doing to take the mask off and fully own the parts of you that matter most, so that belonging to self becomes the center of who you are?