Decluttering: A Cultural Battleground of Minimalism

Let's cut through the crap about decluttering. That minimalist influencer telling you to "spark joy" by tossing your grandmother's "excessive" kitchenware? They're selling you a colonial mindset wrapped in Japanese packaging.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: Your "clutter crisis" isn't about stuff. It's about how capitalism convinced you that your ancestral ways of keeping a home is somehow wrong. My grandmother's compound would make Marie Kondo have a panic attack – and that's precisely why we need to talk about it.

F*ck "tidying up." Let's talk about tidying down.

Down to our roots. Down to the messy, beautiful reality of African family spaces where every "unnecessary" item holds a thread of our collective story. Down to why your mother can't throw away those plastic containers, and why that's not actually a problem to solve.

Quick reality check:

• Your decluttering anxiety? That's ancestral trauma dressed in IKEA catalogs.

• Your parents "hoarding"? Probably intergenerational wisdom you're not ready to understand.

• That minimalist Pinterest board? Just colonialism wearing a beige linen outfit.

Here's where it gets interesting (and your Western productivity guru won't tell you this):

In African philosophy, ubuntu teaches that "I am because we are." Apply that to your cluttered family home and watch the whole Marie Kondo industry collapse on itself. Because guess what? Some things are meant to spark collective memory, not individual joy!

Let me get critical for a moment:

The Western obsession with decluttering isn't about organization – it's about erasure. Erasure of the complex ways my ancestors and yours kept a home. Erasure of the beautiful chaos that comes with holding space for extended family. Erasure of the stories our stuff tells about survival, abundance, and community.

Your grandmother doesn't need a decluttering intervention. Your family's relationship with stuff doesn't need "fixing". What needs fixing is how we've internalized the idea that Western minimalism equals mental health.

Want real talk about family spaces?

1. That overcrowded kitchen holds more wisdom than any organizing app.

2. Those "excess" family photos aren't clutter – they're your ancestry demanding acknowledgment.

3. The "unnecessary" items your parents keep? That's your heritage refusing to be minimalized.

Here's the plot twist: The solution to your family's "clutter problem" isn't in a bestselling decluttering book. It's in remembering how our ancestors treated spaces as living archives of community memory.

The next time someone suggests your family needs to declutter, ask them this: "Whose standard of order are we measuring against?"

Because maybe, just maybe, what looks like chaos to the minimalist eye is actually a sophisticated system of preserving cultural memory that we're too colonized to recognize.

Your space tells your family's story. Make sure it's telling your story, not some influencer's version of what your story should look like.

And if your story comes with a side of "clutter"? That's not dysfunction. That's cultural resistance in its most beautiful form.