Rigour & Flow with Aiwan and Tamanda

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,...

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 tha...

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 na...

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...

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 refle...

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...

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 contin...

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 Balha...