Secret African Art: Underground Railroad & Circle Symbols #shorts

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]So, throughout all of the pieces, like if you look at some of the larger pieces, what I did was I attached railroad track, toy railroad tracks, to think about the Underground Railroad.

[00:00:12]So, all of these pieces have these tracks of the Underground Railroad literally under all of the other pieces. So, you know, we thought about the story of uh John Henry and that link to the the railroads and also uh simultaneously thinking of a tunnel, but also thinking about another uh another Africanism that comes out of the Congo, which is the circle.

[00:00:46]Let the circle be unbroken. The circular ring shout.

[00:00:51]Ezequiel saw the wheel in the middle of the the wheel. Like you know, what what happens a lot in the diaspora is that the enslaved people would see things and it was a way to syncretize it and and uh that's something that uh African people were able to uh incorporate these things because in the Congo the markings for the cosmology looks like a cross.

[00:01:19]And the circle for Ezequiel Ezequiel's wheel, these things uh it you know, and this is the same thing that happened in the Caribbean. Like where there's this element that they recognize and it's linked to an ancestral narrative and and that's something that within the permitted uh understandings of what the slave masters didn't allow the enslaved people to to do, it was some it was like a sneaky way to to slide it in.