About Kustawi Institute

What is Kustawi and who is the Founder?

Kustawi is a knowledge enterprise founded on the inherent dignity and commitment to the thriving of African descent boys, men and those who love them.

The Institute formally greeted the world in January 2026 with seven days of panels and forums. The success of the launch was due to the aid of a small group of volunteers, the expertise of panelists and enthusiastic audience participants who have inspired me. One panelist in particular encouraged me to learn from the launch by ‘failing forward’. With that advise I spent January to June in a state of In-Action – basically listening to the voices of the Ancestors and drawing positive vibes from those who want to see Kustawi grow – to relaunch a better Kustawi Institute.

The Institute’s Founder, Tamari of Kitossa, is professor of sociology at Brock University since 2006. He emigrated from Jamaica in 1973 with his parents and three siblings. After living in Toronto for 5 years, his family moved to Scarborough, Ontario, where he spent most of his life. Since 1998 he has lived in Hamilton, Ontario, with his spouse, son, daughter and in-laws. He took his BA (Hons) (1995) and MA in the Faculty of Education (1998) at York University, and, his doctorate from OISE/UT in Toronto (2005).

What follows are the three experiences that inspired the founding of Kustawi Institute for African Descent Boys and Men.  

My research participants wanted Kustawi

The first experience arises from the encouragement of participants to a research project I launched in 2022. That ongoing study explores with research participants sexual abuse, trauma and resilience in the lives of African descent boys and men. This project builds on my edited collection, Appealing Because He Is Appalling: Black Masculinities, Colonialism, and Erotic Racism.

In my ongoing research the men, women and psychotherapists I interviewed emphasized the need to address not only sexual stereotypes and sexual trauma, but a space where scholarship, activism and community engagement can occur. The participants, however, told me they we want to see and be a part of an institution that not only rejects deficit perspectives, but which presents cases and stories of triumph and resilience that can inspire African descent boys and men.

Their thriving, the participants suggested, was impaired by the interplay between animosity toward them and their struggle to be coherent and wholly sovereign beings.

We are familiar with many of the negative demographic indicators of anti-Black misandry such as depression, educational pushout/dropout, employment discrimination, health morbidity, hopelessness, homicide, low self-esteem, suicide and anti-Black misandry in schools, policing, the courts and incarceration. They also told me they would like to see such an organization offer services to their families, communities and the country of the boys and men.

Surveying the landscape, I noticed that while there was a small but increasing number of groups that served boys and men of African descent, none focused on access to services, engagement with highly qualified individuals and exposure to a wide-array of knowledge resources that could foster thriving. Sure, there was need and a gap to be filled but I needed my own motivation. As a practitioner of what American sociologists C. Wright Mills called the 'sociological imagination' and Alvin Gouldner 'reflexive sociology', I developed in my sociological training a healthy suspicion of sociology and sociologists. But more than this I viewed with suspicion what American sociologist Joyce Ladner called 'white sociology'. The kind of sociology that makes a virtue of strip-mining communities and people of their life-stories for the benefit of the middle and top-dogs to more effectively manage and control them. In the process of looking ‘down’ and never ‘up’, sociologists commits themselves to what sociologist Martin Nicolaus calls “social espionage”.

As important as publishing the results of my research may be, and when I do, it will be with care to ensure I respect the voices of my researches participants, the priority in the short-term is on providing the knowledge services that the participants and myself believe is of utmost importance.

The role of the Scarborough Charter

The second experience is my participation in the early stages of what came to be known as the Scarborough Charter: a community and policy-engagement report that provides a framework to identify and develop policy-based solutions to challenges hindering the success of African Canadian school age, college and university students.

I was invited in 2020 by the organizer of the meeting, Dr. Wisdom Tettey, formerly Vice-President, University of Toronto, and Principal of University of Toronto Scarborough Campus, now President of Carleton University. The report from that series of meetings, popularly called the Scarborough Charter, was written by Dr. Adelle Blackett, professor in the Faculty of Law at  McGill University. Focused on how schools, colleges and universities can promote the thriving of African descent students across Canada, the key takeaway of the report is the urgent need to take a proactive and self-possessed approach to the thriving of young African descent people in Canada.

With its focus on ‘thriving’, Institute owes its name to the inspiration of the Scarborough Charter. Hence “Kustawi”, from the KiSwahili, which means “thriving”.  

My intellectual biography

The third experience for the founding of Kustawi centres on my intellectual biography.

My introduction to studying the lives of African descent males began in the late 1980s. I was a young university student who regularly bought books at Lenny and Gwen Johnson's Third World Bookstore, where I co-founded an Afrocentric study group.

At Third World Books and York University I absorbed the work of novelists and scholars such as Chinua Achebe, Na'im Akbar, Marimba Ani, James Baldwin, W. E. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Marcus Garvey, Frances Cress Welsing, Amos Wilson and Richard Wright (see the Kustawi Booklist).

Subsequently I completed my MA in 1998 (Image, Identity, and Experience in the Educational Encounter: Life histories of four African Canadian men) and PhD in 2005 (It’s Written On The Body: Malleus Africanus, crime and racial dialectic in Western ontology), both of which are among the earliest Canadian scholarly work to focus on African descent boys and men.

More recently, my scholarship, and hence the formation of Kustawi, has benefited tremendously from the brilliant and uncompromising scholarship of Tommy J. Curry at the University of Edinburgh. His scholarship has not only brightened the search light on 'Black Male Studies', he is to be credited with giving a name to a field of study that, until recently, had no handle.

Based on the Black Radical Tradition, Pan Africanism and the Sociological Imagination, the work of Kustawi is grounded on rigorous empirical evidence, historical accuracy and theoretical depth. Analysis from such scholarship shows that current and intergenerational trauma is directly connected to the exclusion, fear, hatred and decimation of African descent boys and men.

If more than 40 years of reading widely has taught me anything, it is this: while a community can rise no higher than its women, it cannot build while its boys and men have someone’s boot on their neck!

Focus on African descent boys, men and those who love them

Kustawi focuses on the mental, physical and spiritual thriving of African descent, boys, men and those who love them – it welcomes all who do.

In this way, the Institute strives to be accessible in providing critical engagement opportunities and knowledge services to community members, scholars, policy makers and others committed to the thriving of African descent boys and men and those who love them.