In the Listen To Your Footsteps podcast, I have in-depth conversations with Africans operating across various fields such as the arts, design, advertising, media, entertainment, communications, technology and business about their life’s journey and the lessons they have learned along the way. It is a space for reflection, introspection, acknowledgement and celebration.
The most foundational theme across all episodes is the idea that how someone got to where they are matters more than where they arrived. Conversations are grounded in backstory, childhood, and the conditions that shaped each guest, not to romanticise origin stories, but to surface the craft of becoming.
We never rush to the destination. Guests are frequently prompted to return to inflection points – the moments a career collapsed, a direction shifted, a decision was made against the grain. This patient, longitudinal approach to storytelling generates one of the show’s most consistent insights: the pivot is rarely accidental; it is usually the accumulation of many smaller acts of listening to oneself.
Recurrent themes include: identity, belonging, and the question of home; reinvention and the courage of the pivot; fatherhood, parenting, and redefining manhood; craft, mastery, and the work behind visible success; quiet leadership; mental health, wellness, and the permission to heal; African creativity; ubuntu, community, and collective responsibility; storytelling and the archive as act of justice; and much more.
Listen To Your Footsteps podcast is available on multiple podcasting platforms including: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Afripods, YouTube, Amazon Music, Castbox, Podcast Addict, and Pocket Casts.
Kojo Baffoe is a South Africa based storyteller, writer, author & content strategist, driven by curiosity & a fascination with how people got to where they are and how they do what they do. In the Listen To Your Footsteps podcast, he has in-depth conversations with Africans operating across various fields like the arts, design, advertising, media, entertainment, technology and business about their life’s journey and the lessons they have learned along the way. It is a space for reflection, introspection, acknowledgement and celebration.
Writer, documentary filmmaker, photographer, conceptual copywriter, and author of Patient 12A, Lesedi Molefi carries more titles than most, but at the heart of all of them is a single, unshakeable ethic: the restoration of dignity.
In this rich conversation with host Kojo Baffoe, Lesedi reflects on a childhood lived across cities, a mother who used books, music, and protest marches as tools of political education, and the turbulent creative journey that led him from a photography studio to a mental health clinic – and ultimately to one of the most quietly radical memoirs in recent South African literature.
Together, Kojo and Lesedi interrogate the pressure to monetise passion, the forgotten art of the hobby, what it means to be a ”work in progress” memoirist, the difference between survivingand thriving, and why the world outside the clinic may be far less sane than the world within it.
They also discuss the writing of Patient 12A – why Lesedi almost didn't publish it, the frustrating public reception that reduced a nuanced work to ”Black man has feelings,” and why truth, even when it's complicated, is still an act of love.
And Lesedi teases his next book.
This one goes deep. Don't miss it.
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