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. Since the launch, time has been spent reflecting on how to improve how Kustawi can be a first-class solutions-based resource for its primary community – African descent boys, men and those who love them. Consideration, too, has been given to the ways that others in the broader society, academia and policy circles interested to ensure the thriving of African descent boys and men might find in Kustawi an important resource for knowledge that will inform creative and transformative thinking and effective practices for thriving and resistance to anti-Black misandry.

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 completed his BA (Hons – Sociology/Political Science) (1995) and MA in the Faculty of Education (1998) at York University, and, his doctorate at OISE/UT in Toronto (2005).

What follows are the five experiences that inspired the founding of Kustawi Institute for African Descent Boys and Men and those who love them.  

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 the impacts of sexual stereotypes, 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 also the development of a space where scholarship, activism, access to services and community engagement can be provided. The research participants told me they we want to see and be a part of a community of like-minded people who reject deficit and pathologizing narratives and perspectives. More importantly, they want to be part of re-imagining 'Black' boys and men through cases and stories of triumph and resilience that can inspire and be transformative for African descent boys and men.

The demonic archetypes of ‘Black’ boys and men as “toxic masculinity”, criminals, predators and imitators of White males – found no favour with the individuals I interviewed. To the contrary, to support the thriving of African descent boys and men, the call was for alternative imaginings that affirmed complexity, empathy, nuance and solutions driven by Black boys and men.

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 an organization not only offering services to their families, communities and Black boys and men across the country, but one that would create opportunities for Black boys and men to be in dialogue across Canada. This is a tall order!

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 implicitly commit themselves to what sociologist Martin Nicolaus calls “social espionage”. I, therefore, have developed a healthy suspicion of academics and academia and the publishing enterprise.

This may sound anti-intellectual, but I have a healthy regard for knowledge production, ideas and thinking. The question I was asking was: how can I do academia in a way that is more impactful than publishing in journals that ready almost exclusively by other academics. For me, as important as publishing the results of my research with the participants may be, and when I do, it will be with care to I respect their voices, the priority I am placing on my academic work is to establish an institution that would promote knowledge, provide access to services and contribute to a solutions-based agenda to the challenges Black boys and men are facing in Canada.

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: an academic and policy-engagement initiative and report which 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’, Kustawi 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 that influenced 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, Walter Rodney, Frances Cress Welsing, Amos Wilson and Richard Wright (see the Kustawi Booklist).

Leaning about what Cedric Robinson in his famous work Black Marxism: The Making of a Black Radical Tradition called the ‘Black Radical Tradition’, I learned the important role that intellectuals play in any community and society. (Spoiler: I am was not then, nor convinced by Marxism of any sort, Robinson’s or otherwise; this, of course, does not make a “conservative” by default. In my opinion all forms of forms of centralized political authority are opposed to freedom and they facilitate the subordination of boys, men and fathers). Bitten by the knowledge bug, 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 these are among the earliest Canadian scholarly work to focus on African descent boys and men in a tradition Dr. Tommy J. Curry has dubbed ‘Black Male Studies’.

Tommy Curry's the Man-Not

The fourth experience that inspired the founding of Kustawi is reading the work of, and, getting to know Dr. Tommy J. Curry, Professor of Philosophy and Personal Chair of Africana Philosophy and Black Male Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

In 2019, while working on an anthology I had been curating since 2014, now published as Appealing Because He Is Appalling: Black Masculinities, Colonialism, and Erotic Racism, my spouse, who is the author of a chapter in the book, excitedly called me into her office: "Tamari you have to see this"! It was a description of Tommy Curry's book, The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood. We immediately ordered copies for each of us, then watched videos of Dr. Curry lucidly spelling out his thesis. I could not believe my ears and eyes: despite working in the area since my MA and PhD theses, I encountered, at last, a model and theory unlike any I had been exposed to till then. My scholarship on 'Black' boys and men owes a tremendous debt to Tommy Curry's sharp historical, philosophical and sociological insights, not to mention that he coined the name for the field name – Black Male Studies – under which so much previous and contemporary scholarship on the topic fits.

'Battle fatigue' of anti-Black misandry

The final experience that drew me to establish Kustawi is what I have called "empathy deficit disorder" and the compounding effects of persistent anti-Black misandrist ‘microaggressions’ that William A. Smith calls ‘racial battle fatigue’. In my experience there is indifference to the suffering of boys and men of African descent. Worse: my reading of the past 500 years suggests there is a wish for our death. Nevertheless, empathy deficit disorder is not something which is academic. If you feel bone tired, or, feel the life draining from you in your interaction with people at work or you have the symptoms of chronic fatigue, you might be suffering from 'racial battle fatigue'.

Over many years of mentoring and counseling undergraduates, graduates, junior scholars and other men in other spheres of life I have witnessed the fallout of empathy deficit disorder and racial battle fatigue as they struggle to cope. Until recently, I never really paid attention to the weathering effects of struggles in the classroom and in the meeting room on my own health. It is not that I thought I was immune, it is that I could not stop to allow myself to come to terms with what was happening to my mind, body and soul. In fact, I used to believe that what I was experiencing was a condition of my employment: but not any more, especially now that I real-eyes that I am the creator of my reality. As shown by Ellis Cose in a series of books such Rage of a Privileged Class and A Man's World: How real is male privilege – and how high is its price? and Calvin Lawrence in Black Cop: My 36 years in police work, and my career ending experiences with official racism, no Black boy or man is immune. Toward naming, diagnosing and exploring anti-Black misandry and its harmful effects, Kustawi aims to be a space where men of African descent in Canada can find community and the resources that enable them to transcend, thrive and to be the calm in the eye of the storm.

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

If more than 40 years of reading widely has taught me anything, it is this: while communities can rise no higher than their women, they cannot build while its boys and men have someone’s boot on their neck! (Just look at Jamaica’s Governor General’s Coat of Arms – how ironic!)

Kustawi focuses on the emotional, 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 and access to services to aid community members, scholars, policy makers and others committed to the thriving of African descent boys and men and those who love them.

The Kustawi Team

Kustawi was launched with the strong and continued support of a small team of volunteers:

Rashaun Bennett, web design and technical support

Ryan Burke, Bibliographic manager

Adisa Deliovsky, marketing

Firoze Alam, technical support

Nubaid Alam, technical support