Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda

Many of us learned very young that sexual violence is “unsayable”. That naming it has consequences. In turn, sexual violence remains endemic, sustained by the silent treatment it is given, and by a society that tolerates such an insatiable appetite for violence without accountability.   In this episode, we step into terrains of this damaging silence and ask who it protects, who it punishes, a...

Whistleblowing is often framed as an act of courage. But in practice, it is more often met with punishment, isolation and quiet retaliation. In this episode of Rigour & Flow , we examine what actually happens when people tell the truth inside institutions that claim to value transparency, ethics and accountability. Drawing on lived experience, research and patterns across multiple sectors - in...

African knowledges have always been everywhere, in language, land, healing and survival. Yet most of us passed through the highest levels of education without ever encountering them.   In this episode, we step into the lecture halls of “higher” education and ask what it means to be trained to forget, and who that forgetting ultimately serves.   We begin inside higher education itself. Ta...

Education is not neutral. And for Black children, it is rarely complete.   School is often the first place where erasure is formalised, belonging becomes conditional, and history is taught as if our people were a footnote rather than the foundation. In this episode, we turn our attention to education - not as a neutral site of learning, but as a powerful system of selection, silence, and cont...

New year energy is usually about what we are chasing next. In this episode of Rigour & Flow, we slow that impulse down and start 2026 by asking, “What are we leaving behind in 2025?”   After an intense year of work, production, learning curves and hard lessons, we wanted something lighter for this conversation. The result is a mix of reflection and a lot of laughter, alongside some seriou...

In this Feedwarmer episode of Rigour & Flow , we spotlight a project from Aiwan’s back catalogue that brought her an enormous amount of joy to produce: Snatched! - the companion podcast celebrating all things RuPaul’s Drag Race . We open with a short preamble reflecting on why Snatched! mattered to AiAi Studios as a creative project - not just because of the joy and chaos of Drag Race, but as...

In this Feedwarmer episode of Rigour & Flow , we spotlight a podcast that had us nodding, wincing, laughing, and quietly re-evaluating our own friendships. We open with a short preamble and reflections on adult friendship; the stories we tell ourselves about loyalty, closeness, and safety, and the moments when something starts to feel off but we can’t quite name why. From there, we introduce a...

In this Feedwarmer episode of Rigour & Flow , we share a moment of encounter: meeting sporting history in the flesh. The episode opens with us setting the scene at CLIMB 2025 , where Aiwan attended a talk by Olympic gold medallist Tessa Sanderson and knew immediately she had to hear more. After that brief introduction, we move into a live conversation between Aiwan and Tessa, recorded at the A...

In this Feedwarmer episode, we spotlight one of our absolute favourite projects of 2025: Unguilty Pleasures - the Real Housewives–inspired podcast we launched this year as a collaboration between AiAi Studios and Daylight Productions. Hosted by Liv Little and Scarlett Curtis , Unguilty Pleasures is a joyful, self-aware ode to reality TV, escapism and the softer corners of culture we don’t always g...

We return to a conversation that never really settled. After the unexpected response to Season 2’s “Episode 19: Are Mixed Race People ‘Properly Black’?” , we sit with what lingered; the comments, the discomfort, the language policing, and the familiar demand that mixed race people either ‘pick a side’ or ‘play the bridge’. This isn’t a debate about identity labels. It’s a reflection on what mixedn...

In this Notes from the Margins edition of Rigour & Flow, we follow three journeys that sit at the heart of Black life: how we heal, how we give, and how we move through a world that does not always want us in it.   Tamanda opens with a little-known and astonishing history of mental health care in Nigeria. Long before global psychiatry learned to speak about community, Dr Thomas Adeoye Lam...

We step into the charged, intimate territory of religion, politics and the stories we were raised to believe, and ask how aspects of Pentecostal conditioning continue to shape how many of us understand Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East today. We begin with the lessons we absorbed long before we had language for them: Zion as a sacred homeland, Jews as “God’s chosen people,” Muslims as enemies...

Divorce is sheer grief. It pulls apart your routines, your identity and the story you believed you were living. In this episode of Rigour and Flow, we open up with one of our most private conversations.   Tamanda shares the long road from confusion to clarity in her first marriage. She reflects on growing up with parents who modelled peace but not conflict, and how that silence left her witho...

We take education to task. Asking who it serves, what it leaves out and what it means for boys growing up in an age of algorithms and Andrew Tate.   Aiwan opens with a question many 18-year-olds are asking today: "I s university still worth it?" She shares what she gained from structured learning in music technology and what 20 years in a creative industry taught her that a degree never could...

In this episode of Rigour & Flow, we step into the tender terrain of family business : where bedrooms and boardrooms can potentially become interleading doors. From millennia-old trading families to today’s co-founder couples, we ask what it takes to build something together without breaking each other.   Our conversation starts with a question we hear often: “How do you run a business wi...

We turn our gaze to the glittering world of Africa’s super rich - and ask what wealth really means in a world built on inequality. Beginning with the BBC documentary From Lagos to London: The Rise of Nigeria’s Super Rich , we unpack the rise of “soft-life” culture, the myth of meritocracy, and the emotional price of Black excellence . From oil money and old elites to Instagram entrepreneurs and Du...

The original African Bad Gal gets us going, Kenyan MP and activist Millie Odhiambo Mabona, whose fearless voice and legendary one-liners have cut through flaccid politics with candour. From calling out men on the parliamentary floor on decisions, periods (!), to publishing her book Rig or Be Rigged , Millie embodies the unapologetic role needed for women to step into power.  From there, we pi...

We travel back to the glossy pages that raised us - the agony-aunt columns, gossip spreads, and advice pages that shaped girlhood across Africa and beyond. At the centre of the story is Dear Dolly - an advice column that captured the hearts of readers across the continent of Africa, answering questions about love, shame, and desire. What few people knew was that, in the early days at least, “Dolly...

We step into the charged terrain of land, power, and belonging - and ask who really gets to claim ownership of land in Africa.  Beginning with a screening of The Battle for Laikipia at Hyde Park Picture House, we trace the tensions between Indigenous Samburu pastoralists and fourth-generation white settlers in Kenya - and unravel how the logic of private property, colonial inheritance, and cl...

FGM, cultural silence, and women’s rights in Britain today. In this feedwarmer - and our very first Rigour & Flow On The Go - we take our podcast out of the studio and into community spaces. Live from Climb25 in Leeds, Aiwan reflects on the intimacy of podcasting, how deep conversations can cut through even in a noisy public space, and the art of capturing sound in the moment. From the clang o...

Trans rights, migrant labour, and the hidden lives of domestic workers in Britain. In this feedwarmer, we shine a light on Our Place Is Here - a powerful three-part podcast series created in partnership with the Our Place Is Here campaign produced by Aiwan and AiAi Studios in collaboration with gal-dem. The Filipino Domestic Workers Association, and campaign partners fighting for migrant workers’...

In this final episode of Season 2, we return to our signature Unfinished Business format, bringing together the conversations that refused to be neatly stitched up. We open with reflections on the mixed reactions to our episode on mixed race identity, which sparked far more commentary than we anticipated on social media - including a sharp intervention from the brilliant BBC 1Xtra presenter and co...

We hand the mic to you. For our first-ever community voicenote episode, we asked you, our listeners, to share what’s stayed with you so far. What you’ve disagreed with. And what you want us to explore more deeply. The result is this moving, funny, and thoughtful collection of reflections that remind us why we make this show in the first place. From lived experiences of sickle cell and navigating B...

We abandon the serious stuff and dive straight into our love of all things woo-woo: near-death experiences, dodgy mediums, growing up under Satanic Panic, and the paranormal guilty pleasures that make us cry with laughter. Tamanda sets the scene early: this is not a serious death and grief episode. Instead, it’s a confessional of the strange, terrifying, and sometimes hilarious ways we first encou...

We step into the tangled, deeply personal politics of body image - and the fat and skinny shaming scripts that shape how we see ourselves, each other, and the people we love. We open with a conversation about what it means to be two women in a relationship with entirely different body types; each of us shaped by radically different cultural beauty standards in our own homes. From Lagos to London,...