About
Matkɛl works at the intersection of healing justice, peacebuilding, and Pan-African liberation, rooted in a core belief: personal healing and collective liberation are not separate projects — they are the same work, approached from different angles.
We are a Pan-African healing justice organization rooted in Indigenous knowing, ancestral grounding, and the understanding that collective liberation begins in the body. We work with women and men, government institutions, movements, frontline workers, organizations, and communities across East, West, and Southern Africa and the African diaspora — building healing ecosystems in the places where systems have failed to provide them.
Our practice is Pan-African in its roots and universal in its welcome. The wisdom we work from is ancestral and African; the door is open to any community, anywhere, ready to do the work of healing and liberation.
What Our Name Means
Matkɛl is a Naath (Nuer) word. It means one unity.
We chose it deliberately, because the work of healing is not individual. It is collective. What one person carries, the community feels. What one community heals, the movement inherits. Unity is not a destination. It is the practice.
Why We Exist
Western systems were not built to hold the grief, the political trauma, and the intergenerational wound that African and diaspora communities carry. They were not designed for the particular weight of displacement, conflict, and survival that comes at great cost.
Matkɛl exists because our communities deserved better than what those systems offered. We build healing infrastructure rooted in what our ancestors already knew — long before anyone coined the phrase “trauma-informed.”
What We Believe
— Healing is not a break from the work of liberation. It is the work.
— The body holds what the mind has tried to forget. We start there.
— Individual transformation ripples outward. Regulated people build regulated collectives; regulated collectives build sustainable movements.
— Accessibility is non-negotiable. If your organization, government body, or institution is doing this work and needs Matkɛl, we find a way.
— You do not have to be broken to belong here. This work is for those already thriving, too — healing is not only repair, it is also how people and organizations who are doing well go further.