Healing, boundaries and borders: Mental health, money lending and Black queer travel stories

In this Notes from the Margins edition of Rigour & Flow, we follow three journeys that sit at the heart of Black life: how we heal, how we give, and how we move through a world that does not always want us in it.

Tamanda opens with a little-known and astonishing history of mental health care in Nigeria. Long before global psychiatry learned to speak about community, Dr Thomas Adeoye Lambo pioneered a model that placed patients with local families, blended medical care with traditional healing, and produced recovery outcomes that surpassed Western institutions.

We trace how cultural belief, ancestral knowledge and community networks transformed treatment, and why colonisation buried so many of these practices from view.

From there, Aiwan takes us into the psychology of lending money. Growing up in a home where generosity came before the electricity meter, she unpacks the emotional inheritance behind giving, the different meanings of “broke”, and the personal boundary she had to learn the hard way: ‘Do not lend what you cannot afford to lose!’.

We explore how culture, responsibility and survival shape our money instincts, and why boundaries are a form of self-care.

We close with a listener request that goes straight to the marrow of identity: travelling while Black and queer. From the relief of landing in majority Black countries, to “walking the gauntlet” in Lanzarote, we speak honestly about safety, the violence of the white gaze, and the fragile peace that holiday planning requires when your body is othered before you even reach passport control.

We also speak to the joy of finding Black owned and queer run travel spaces that see us, hold us and shelter us.

🎧 In this episode:

• Community as clinic: The Aro Village System and the ancestral healing that Western psychiatry could not recognise
• Culture and healthcare: Why traditional healers shaped better outcomes and how colonial healthcare erased that knowledge
• Inherited generosity: Growing up in homes where giving was the norm, and how this shapes adult money habits
• Unquestioned belonging: Landing in majority Black countries and feeling the burden of Blackness lift
• The colonial gaze abroad: Othering in Asia, Europe’s white gaze, and finding the familiar in Africa
• Travel as calculation: Scanning for safety as Black queer travellers, and the pain of choosing destinations on a heavy criteria of safety
• Queer routes and refuge: Finding unexpected joy in Black owned and queer run travel communities, and recognising the places that hold us

🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts

🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/1TTKqQl9k_o

🔁 Share with someone navigating their own journey

📬 Reflections or stories to share? rigourandflow@gmail.com

Please rate, review and subscribe for weekly episodes.

Connect with us on:

• TikTok
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• AiAi Studios
• Roots & Rigour

This is an AiAi Studios Production

©AiAi Studios 2025

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.