By Kealeboga Kamodi
Art has quietly risen as one of the most powerful translators of human experience. You don’t need to speak the same language to feel something when you see a mural dripping with color, a photograph that captures a fleeting moment of truth, or a piece of design that carries the weight of a whole community’s history. Whether you’re walking through the crowded streets of Gaborone or scrolling through your phone in a bus to Abuja, it’s clear that creativity has become our global passport.
Before the mind even tries to interpret anything, arts have already done that for you. A simple portrait of an elderly woman with wrinkles shaped by years of laughter and hardship can make someone thousands of kilometres away pause long enough to whisper, “I know that strength.” Design does the same. A handcrafted basket, a patterned Leteisi or Chitenge fabric, or the architecture of a home can reveal stories of ancestors, migrations, rituals, and dreams without using a single word. These symbols are cultural fingerprints, small, beautifully intentional pieces that say, “I am African, Motswana, Nigerian, and Congolese,” even when the viewer lives in a world that looks nothing like ours.
Storytelling, the greatest art ,has travelled further than any passport ever will. A young writer in Botswana shares her experience of growing up with expectations that felt too heavy for her small shoulders, and suddenly a girl in India, Brazil, or Canada finds herself nodding. A poet somewhere else writes about love, loss, joy, or disappointment, and strangers across continents recognize their own lives in the recital. Same effect is felt in our stories, film makers stories break fear. They challenge assumptions. They remind us that beneath skin, culture, geography, and history, we are all just people trying to figure life out.
What makes art, storytelling, and design so special is that they sneak under the walls we build around ourselves. When someone tells you directly to “understand my struggle,” you might resist, walls rise up, defenses tighten. But a song, a painting, a poem, a film, a piece of fabric? Those enter quietly. They pull you closer without demanding anything. They teach you to feel before you judge.
And in this new era of global connection, the most powerful creative work is emerging from collaboration, not comparison. Artists, designers, and storytellers are blending their cultures, trading ideas, working across borders, and creating pieces that feel like shared memories rather than borrowed ones. The world doesn’t need more noise; it needs deeper seeing. It needs more conversations made of colours, rhythms, textures, and stories that allow people to recognize themselves in someone else’s humanity.
So the question becomes: What world does your art open? Whose story does it echo? How does it invite someone outside your world to step inside, softly, respectfully, and with curiosity?