Stay In This World
The stories, the culture, the conversations. Every week.
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Curation, cultural documentation, and the weight of saying no.
Every week, stories arrive in our inbox. Some come as formal pitches, carefully structured, with subject lines and word counts. Others come as DMs, casual and urgent at the same time, someone who heard about Unruly from a friend and wants to know if we'd be interested in what they're working on. A few arrive as conversations at events, someone pulling me aside to say they have a story, that they've been waiting for the right platform, that they think we might be the ones to tell it.
Most of them I cannot say yes to. Not because the stories aren't real, nor is it because the people telling them don't matter. Rather, it’s because Unruly has a specific kind of attention, and that attention is not infinite. We are a small team documenting a vast culture, and the only way to do that with any integrity is to be honest about what we can hold and what we cannot.
What I've noticed, over time, is that a no from us is sometimes read as a verdict. That the story wasn't worth telling. That the person bringing it didn't deserve a platform. I want to be very honest and direct about this: that is not what a no means here. Rather, what it means is something more complicated, and I think it’s important we say that out loud and honestly.
Documentation is not neutral. Every archive, every publication, every platform that has ever existed makes choices about what enters the record and what doesn't. Those choices are never purely aesthetic or logistical. They are philosophical. They determine what a culture remembers about itself, which voices get amplified, which moments get preserved, and which ones fade because no one with the means to capture them chose to look.
This is in no way a new observation. Historians have argued about it for centuries. But it becomes a live question the moment you are the one holding the camera, or the pen, or the editorial decision. When you are the one deciding which story gets the attention and care that proper documentation requires, you are not just making a scheduling call. You are participating in the construction of a cultural record. That is a serious thing, and treating it as anything less is how important stories get lost, not through malice but through carelessness.
I believe that the platforms that don't acknowledge this tend to make one of two mistakes. The first is treating documentation as purely democratic, the idea that every story deserves equal attention, which sounds generous but in practice produces a body of work with no argument, no coherence, and no reason to exist beyond volume. The second is treating it as purely taste-driven, which concentrates power in the preferences of whoever happens to be editing, without accountability to anything larger. Neither of those is documentation in any meaningful sense, at least not to me. One is an archive without a point of view. The other is a point of view without an archive. What sits between them is curation, and curation, when done honestly, requires knowing what you are for.
Unruly was built around a single conviction: that African culture, as it is actually lived, shaped, and remembered, deserves documentation that takes it seriously.
Not as trendy content, nor as inspiration for someone else's narrative. Rather, as the thing itself, worthy of the same attention and care that any serious cultural institution brings to the work it preserves. That conviction is what the selection criteria grew from. When a story arrives and we have to decide whether it belongs here, the questions we ask are not about who the subject is, or how many followers they have, or whether the timing is commercially convenient. The questions are closer to:
The final question matters much more than it might appear. A story told carelessly is worse than a story untold. It flattens the subject, reduces something complex to something consumable, and enters the record as a version of the truth rather than the thing itself. We would rather say no to ten stories and tell one properly than say yes to everything and do justice to none of it.
Part of knowing what we are for also means being clear about what documentation is not, at least for us. We do not charge subjects to be featured. This is a position we arrived at deliberately, including through experience of operating differently in the earlier years of the platform. The reason is simple: if a story is selected because of a financial arrangement rather than because it deserves to be told, the editorial judgment is no longer fully ours. We are open to partnerships, and we have had them, but only where there is real alignment with what we are trying to build, not where the relationship is purely transactional. The stories we tell have to be ones we chose on their own terms. That is the only way the selection means anything.
None of this makes the no easier to receive. I understand that. When you have a story you believe in, one you've been carrying for a long time, waiting for the right moment and the right platform, a rejection lands with weight regardless of the reasoning behind it. I don't want to minimize that.
What I want to say instead is this: a no from Unruly is not a judgment on whether your story matters. It is a judgment on whether we are the right place to tell it, at this moment, with the capacity and focus the story deserves. Those are different things. A story can be entirely worth telling and still not be ours to tell.
The culture is larger than any single platform, and the work of documentation is larger than any single editorial team.
What we are trying to build here is a body of work that, taken together, says something coherent about African culture as it is actually being lived. Every story we publish is a choice about what that record looks like. Every story we don't publish is also a choice, made not from indifference but from the same seriousness we bring to the ones we say yes to.
The stories we choose are the ones we believe we can carry properly. That is the standard. It is not about prestige or reach or what is easiest to tell. It is about what we can hold with care, and what, when it enters the record, will still mean something when the moment that produced it has passed. That is what we are building toward. One story at a time, chosen deliberately, told as well as we know how.
