About
Matkɛl was founded in 2024 by a South Sudanese-Ethiopian-American liberation architect and decolonial somatic practitioner, out of a deeply personal question:
What does healing look like when it comes from us, for us, and does not require us to abandon our wholeness at the door?
The name Matkɛl comes from the Naath word meaning “one unity” or “to bring together”.
This is not accidental. Everything Matkɛl does is built on the understanding that our healing traditions did not begin with trauma-informed care in Western psychological frameworks. They began with our grandmothers. With Mat (one unity). With the ways African communities have always held each other through difficulty, transition, and grief.
Matkɛl works at the intersection of healing justice, peacebuilding, and Pan-African feminism, rooted in a core belief: personal healing and collective liberation are not separate projects—they are the same work, approached from different angles.
We cannot build the movements we need if the people building them are running on empty. And we cannot heal sustainably if we are trying to do it alone, disconnected from the communities and traditions that have always known how to hold us.