We step into the messy truth about adulthood, rites of passage, and why so many of us hit 40 feeling… not quite grown. Aiwan opens with Kendra Lindsay’s viral post - a rallying call to join the “Council of Elders” instead of clinging to youth - which ultimately ruffled the feathers of a legion of women in their 40s. From there, we dive into the uncomfortable question: Where did we get the idea that 40 isn’t old? And who exactly benefits from allowing us to believe that, at 40, we are still reall...
Aug 26, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Season 2Ep. 20
One of the most emotionally charged and quietly policed questions in the politics of race - a question so fraught, it’s almost unsayable: Are mixed race people “properly Black”? This time, the question’s unquestionably personal…! This isn’t just a discussion between two Black women. It’s a conversation between two queer women in love - building a life, a business, and a podcast together - while navigating complex and sometimes uncomfortable truths about race, desire, identity, and proximity. Tam...
Aug 19, 2025•1 hr 33 min•Season 2Ep. 19
We’re unpacking what our algorithms say about us, whether business can cure poverty across the continent of Africa, and why women are so obsessed with true crime as a genre. Tamanda opens with a late-night spiral about the politics of platform recommendations: what do your YouTube and Instagram feeds reveal about your identity? And are you really who you think you are? Or does the algorithm tell a different story? Aiiwan follows with a deep dive into African economic development, reflecting on t...
Aug 12, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Season 2Ep. 18
We take you inside one of the most joyful, radical, and hard-won celebrations of Black queer life: UK Black Pride. As the movement gets ready to mark another year, we reflect on Aiwan’s work on the UK Black Pride Time Capsule Podcast, what it really means to come into yourself, and the very real challenges of building sustainable spaces that can hold us through every stage of becoming. Aiwan reflects on her first encounter with UK Black Pride back in 2015, the American YouTubers who shaped her s...
Aug 05, 2025•1 hr 18 min•Season 2Ep. 17
We dive headfirst into the contradictions and complexities of what it means to raise boys as a lesbian couple… especially when men have caused us so much harm? Aiwan opens with a striking reflection on The Tin Men , a social media account that toes the line between thoughtful masculinity and, at times, men’s rights rhetoric. From there, she shares more about her own desire for a son, the question of if and how our son would need male role models in their life, and the impacts of growing up in a ...
Jul 29, 2025•1 hr 26 min•Season 2Ep. 16
In this three-part episode of Rigour & Flow , we explore how race, gender, and language shape our lives, and how health inequities, queer histories, and identity politics often get erased. Aiwan opens with a deep dive into sickle cell and other racialised health disparities, reflecting on her own sickle cell trait diagnosis as a child and how the UK’s most common genetic condition continues to be under-researched and underfunded. Tamanda traces the forgotten queer history of Save the Childre...
Jul 22, 2025•47 min•Season 2Ep. 15
We dig into the complicated world of entrepreneurship - from childhood side hustles and early money lessons to investment readiness culture, the “ cult of startups” , and what it takes to grow a business without losing yourself. Aiwan shares how her grandma in Nigeria shaped her business mindset growing up on a council estate in London - and how visiting her Auntie Margaret’s market stall in Balham inspired her to pursue a “work for herself” path that would eventually lead to founding her creati...
Jul 15, 2025•1 hr 13 min•Season 2Ep. 14
In this bonus segment, Tamanda and Aiwan dig deeper into the existing and emerging research around LGBTQ+ domestic violence. They reflect on the stories we don’t hear, the data that doesn’t exist or is too easily overlooked, and the ways coercive control shows up in queer relationships, from misgendering and outing to body shaming and withholding gender-affirming care. Tamanda shares insights from Galop’s research and from scholars working to fill the gaps in how LGBTQ+ domestic abuse is underst...
Jul 10, 2025•10 min
In this deeply personal and long-overdue episode, we unpack the silences, scripts, and systems that shape how we understand abuse, and how they fail queer people in particular. Aiwan opens up for the first time about her experience of domestic violence in a same-sex relationship, and what made it so hard to recognise or name. Tamanda reflects on a coercive relationship marked by gaslighting, manipulation, and lies, including a fabricated cancer diagnosis, and how it warped her sense of reality. ...
Jul 08, 2025•1 hr 15 min•Season 2Ep. 13
⚠️ Content warning: domestic violence, emotional abuse Some stories mark you. Even when they’re not yours. Even when you’re just eight years old, standing in the corner, trying not to breathe. Even when the person on the phone says they’re dying, and you believe them - because how could someone LIE like that? In this first episode of Season 2, we’re talking about the kinds of relationships we don’t talk about. The ones you don’t know how to name. The ones that break you open in slow, strange way...
Jul 06, 2025•1 min
Tamanda introduces us to a podcast that deeply moved her: Sunday School for Misfits , created by theologian and public educator Dr Selina Stone. Tamanda shares how she first met Selina through a chance encounter at a ‘Life Beyond the PhD’ residential - a connecting moment that led to a research collaboration which exposed her to Selina’s unique approach to theology, which is as rigorous as it is compassionate. Across academia, community, and the digital pulpit, Selina brings a voice that holds s...
Jul 01, 2025•36 min
We’re keeping your ears and minds warm between seasons by spotlighting the shows and creators who are moving us, challenging us, and reminding us why we do what we do. This week, Aiwan shares a pick close to her heart: an episode from The Pursuit Playbook hosted by Aprileen Alexander - a finance powerhouse, creative producer, and former gal-dem team member. Produced by AiAi Studios, the show is a masterclass in navigating corporate spaces as a Black woman. It’s giving honesty, guts, and unapolog...
Jun 24, 2025•33 min
We’re back with another Notes from the Margins - our freestyle format where we bring the ideas, tensions, and fragments we’re still sitting with. This one’s all about the stuff that didn’t feel done. The thoughts that followed us around. And the threads we couldn’t let go of. First, we return to Episode 1, and our conversation about faith and queerness as Africans. We talk about what it meant to open the podcast with that episode, what we held back at the time, and how the tension between visibi...
Jun 17, 2025•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 12
We decided to do something a little different... We went LIVE for the very first time. To reflect on the journey so far, answer listener questions, and share a glimpse of life behind the scenes of Rigour & Flow. What followed was a surprising, hilarious, and deeply moving encounter with the people who’ve been with us from the jump. We were joined by listeners from across our community - some who’ve known us for years, others who found us through the podcast - and we talked about everything f...
Jun 10, 2025•1 hr 17 min•Season 1Ep. 11
What if time wasn’t neutral? What if urgency was a trap? What if the clock, like so many systems, was never made with us in mind? We step outside grind culture to ask how time works, and who it works for. From production schedules to academic timelines, we explore how time shapes us, pressures us, and polices us as we navigate systems that demand constant productivity - and often without care or a proper sense of our contexts. Aiwan reflects on her journey as a filmmaker in extractive production...
Jun 03, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 10
We’re taking it back to the roots - exploring the stories, struggles, and politics wrapped up in Black hair. Aiwan opens up about being raised in a Pentecostal church that saw pride and beauty as sin - where dreadlocks were demonised, and even beads were banned. Tamanda reflects on her early obsession with Toni Braxton, the pain of getting her hair chemically straightened, and the complex cocktail of shame, admiration and resistance that came with being the girl with “the good hair.” Together, w...
May 27, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 9
We explore the complicated inheritance of being Black and British - and how migration, class, race, and belonging continue to shape our stories today. Aiwan reflects on growing up in Britain as the daughter of a Nigerian immigrant mum, caught between a confident Nigerian identity at home and a fraught, often hostile Black Britishness outside it. Meanwhile, Tamanda shares what it meant to migrate from Botswana as a child, and how her understanding of Blackness and Britishness was turned upside do...
May 20, 2025•58 min•Season 1Ep. 8
We open up about two family stories that changed how we understand mental health, culture, and the systems that claim to heal us. Tamanda shares the story of her mother's diagnosis - and the painful reality of watching an indigenous African spiritual tradition be misread as delusion by a colonial medical model. Aiwan reflects on her own mother’s experience during the Covid-19 pandemic, when powerful nightly devotions were mistaken for pathology by an overstretched hospital system. Together, we e...
May 13, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 7
For this episode of Rigour & Flow , we’re back with another Notes From the Margins - our free-flowing format where we each bring something we can't stop thinking about. Tamanda dives deep into the messy, glamorous world of Netflix’s Young, Famous & African . From Pan-African fame and chaotic conflict styles, we delve deep into the question of how reality TV sometimes hits deeper than we expect. Aiwan brings us into the wild politics of Yellowstone - a neo-Western where land, capitalism, ...
May 06, 2025•55 min•Season 1Ep. 6
Can you rewrite your money story – or are you stuck with the one you inherited? We crack open the money stories we inherited, and the ones we’re trying to rewrite. Aiwan shares how growing up in a fundamentalist church taught her that true faith meant living modestly, shunning wealth, and being "in the world, but not of it" - until later encounters with the prosperity gospel preached that material success was a sign of divine favour. Meanwhile, Tamanda reflects on growing up firmly wedged betwee...
Apr 29, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 5
The story we almost didn’t tell - a personal, unfiltered conversation about fertility, fibroids, and what it’s like to try and build a family as a Black queer couple. Aiwan speaks candidly about internalised shame, cultural silence, and growing up in a faith community where sex, queerness, and pregnancy were taboo. Tamanda reflects on what it meant to come out of a ten-year heterosexual relationship without a child - and how a shocking fertility diagnosis turned everything upside down. Together,...
Apr 22, 2025•57 min•Season 1Ep. 4
In this third episode of Rigour & Flow , we introduce our new three-part format - spotlighting the stories, ideas, and questions we can’t stop thinking about. Aiwan unpacks a jarring moment in the hit show Call the Midwife to explore how Black people are represented (and misrepresented) on screen, and what it says about who’s behind the camera. Tamanda dives into the story of HillmanTok - a viral, TikTok-powered learning community inspired by the legacy of Historically Black Colleges and Uni...
Apr 15, 2025•53 min•Season 1Ep. 3
Why do so many Black creatives and researchers walk away from the industries they once fought to be part of? In this second episode of Rigour & Flow , we examine the silencing, sanitising, and sidelining of Black thought within white-dominated systems - from academia to media. Drawing from Tamanda’s experiences in research and Aiwan’s in TV production, we unpack the emotional and professional toll of being “the only one in the room.” We explore what happens when your work is deemed “too much...
Apr 07, 2025•57 min•Season 1Ep. 2
Can you be queer, African, and Christian - all at once? In the first ever episode of Rigour & Flow , Aiwan reflects on the five-year anniversary of her documentary Kenyan, Christian, Queer - a powerful film about LGBTQ+ life, faith, and resistance in Africa. She and Tamanda dive deep into the complexities of reconciling Africanness, Christianity, and queerness - both in their own lives and through the communities that shaped them. From Black Pentecostal fire and brimstone to silent Quaker pe...
Mar 31, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 1
We’re Aiwan and Tamanda, two Black women with 20 years each in entertainment, research, and social justice. We’re also a married couple figuring out what it means to build a life and two businesses together. We'll talk about the realities of business, making creative work that matters, and navigating research with integrity. If you’re navigating business, love, and the messiness of life while trying to do meaningful work, you’re in the right place. Welcome to Rigour and Flow! Please rate, review...
Mar 30, 2025•2 min
