I've had the urge to dust off my first fursona.. way back in 1998.

I came up with Kijo Kitwana. I liked this name because I believed it means "Innocent Troublemaker." I haven't looked that up in a long time. At that time in my life I was in a lot of trouble, seeing lots of counselors, constantly threatened with expulsion from school.

I took solace in my obsession with Timon and my own Kijo among other distractions. Kijo was someone who nobody took seriously in day to day life, only seeing a superficial surface that was obnoxious and out of tune. I knew Kijo as a very deeply spiritual individual with a sense of destiny inherited from his character. To me, he was my expression of someone who struggles with a fundamental problem with reverence - both individually and in Africa.

For some weird, and perhaps parallel reason, I gained a funny interest in the African American culture in my mid teens - totally separate from our collective swoon over the Lion King. What really interested me were cultural hints of a back-to-Africa ethos (traditional clothing, the anti-apartheid movement) and that sort of earthly belonging. I also listened to a ton of Jazz. While many friends say I listen to "elevator music".. I consider it something altogether so much more precious that it deserves it's own journal diatribe.

I look about as white as they come, but being so obsessed with ecology and sustainability from an earlier age, and thinking often of my own native American heritage, something registers with me still in Africa's diversions and dislocations. It is the last landsape we haven't fundamentally ruined yet in terms of how we operate as a species upon a landscape. But here in 2014, we are closer than ever to sealing that fate. Human rights, civic sustainability, and respect for ecology is not an African problem, it is a human challenge.

My own obsessions, two undergraduate projects and my undergraduate professional thesis all centered on African American urban struggle. Most recently, I've been given a unique privelege to work with a team that may have perhaps among the best chances to design the modernization of a large portion of Africa.

I feel more like Kijo than at any time in my life.