"Mosi Village"

"Mosi Village" will be at the Syracuse Peace Council Plow Shares Arts and Crafts Festival December 3rd and 4th at Nottingham High School.  I will have story quilts, art dolls, Earth Women Pins and more for sale.  Oh and....BOOK WOMAN CLUB BOOKMARKS!!!!   You ask, yes I can hear you, what is Mosi Village?  It is the name that my friend Mardea Warner and I do our visual art under.

One night, in the early 1990's, I had this dream.  These people spoke to me.  Told me their story. Said they were Mosi...a people that I was connected to.  Ancestors.  They said that I just needed to know this.  Didn't need to do anything with it.  Just know.  At the time I had just settled on an African name for myself.  Re-naming myself.  I had tried out a name or two.  Nahila Nis Mosi for a while.  And then, Kephra Mosi was what I decided on.  Weird, huh!  I then named my business "Mosi Village" to go with the name of the people that had come to me in the dream.  I thought they weren't real.  Until a friend from the Ivory Coast saw my card and asked why I name my business "Mosi Village".  I told him about the dream and he told me that their was a real tribe named Mossi, sometimes spelled Mosi in northern Ghana and Burkina Faso!  Weirder, huh?  I did some research on this tribe and found out that they had ruled a portion of Ghana in Ghana's history.
Then I went to Africa in 1990...to Ghana.  Several of the women that I traveled with looked like the woman in the northern part of Ghana that we had traveled to.  In the Bolgatanga area.  The women there called them their sisters.  And so, as we traveled through Ghana, I kept looking for my face.  And asking elders, "Who do I look like?"  Three times, in different areas of the country I was told, "You should look for your people in Burkina Faso.  You look like you are from the Mossi People."  Yeah....Weird!

See you at Plow Shares...and Happy Thanksgiving!