Publish Date: Sun 28th Jun 2026
Guest Writer: Manbo Konnen Ki Fe
Remembrance is an article series designed for those on an indigenous African spiritual journey, helping us collectively remember why our connection to nature is important. Each article in this series will delve into the elements of water, earth, air, and fire.
To create alignment in our lives and spiritual walk, we must first remember, understand, and ground ourselves in nature’s elements. Through this relationship, we learn to bring our thoughts, words, feelings, and actions into harmony.
Each of the five elements offers a path toward self-mastery. Water guides our personal and professional relationships. Earth supports financial independence. Fire strengthens spiritual and material success. Air deepens understanding, knowledge, and discernment. Spirit awakens inner knowing, intuition, and our spiritual gifts across the physical and astral realms.
Metaphysically, aligning with the elements helps us embody the fullest expression of our life’s purpose and mission in this incarnation.
This article explores the air element through an African cosmological lens and offers a brief overview of the spiritual meanings associated with air.
Deconstructing the Air Element
From an African cosmological lens, the air element is not quite as defined visually and cognitively like the other elements. It is a bit more complicated because many African creation stories have different concentric circular depictions of air. The Dagara of Burkina Faso view the five elements as earth, water, fire, mineral, and nature. The Akan of Ghana speak of honhom, breath-spirit, the Yorùbá of Nigeria speak of èmí. The Zulu and Xhosa of South Africa say umoya. Umoya means wind but can also mean breath and spirit. What is interesting is that to the Dagara people and many other African communities, the air element is not distinctly articulated; not because it is absent, but because it is viewed in relationality to the other elements as a medium through which the living and the dead remain in contact.
When I use the word “air element” in this series, it should be understood as language to describe a cosmic concept that is contextual, multilayered, and much older than space and time.
Different Expressions of the Air Element
Air is invisible until it moves. Everything we can actually see of the air element is air that has been transformed; pressed into shape by heat, pressure, grief, or intention. Each form carries its own symbolism.
Breath is air at rest. The most intimate transformation. The first act of a life and the last. In Akan thought the ɔkra, the soul, arrives with the first breath and departs with the last. In Kikongo, Zulu, and Shona, umoya is the word for wind and spirit. The breath symbolizes presence, arrival, the covenant between a person and the source that lent them air. In this context, no one owns their breath. It is on loan, and the loan is called in.
The Whisper is air with a word in it. Naming, blessing, prayer, curse, praise-song, the secret told to someone that will surface forty years later. Many individuals experience communication with their ancestors of important, sometimes life-changing information that arrives in the form of a whisper. Whispers symbolize spiritual transmission and, in many cases, accompany stillness.
The Breeze is air in the form of visitation. Across a great many African traditions, a sudden cool movement of air in a still room is read as an ancestor passing through. Nothing is disturbed; something is acknowledged. The breeze symbolizes benediction, the reminder that you are not alone.
The Harmattan is the stripping wind. The dry northeasterly that carries Saharan dust across West Africa from roughly December to February. It cracks lips, hazes the sun, coats everything and also breaks the humidity, which is why it has been called the doctor. It arrives in the season traditionally given to storytelling and initiation. The harmattan symbolizes both clarity and discomfort. The wind that takes moisture, softness, and cover away from you so that you can finally see the horizon.
The Whirlwind is spirit in transit. The dust devil spinning across a field is, in many traditions, something passing that has right of way. You do not step into it. The whirlwind symbolizes encounter with force that is not addressed to you. Whirlwinds require discretion and the wisdom of not interrupting.
The Storm can represent a variety of African divinities. In Haitian Vodou, the storm represents a trinity of powerful lwas (spirits). Met Agaou, the lwa of earthquakes, thunder, lightning, and storms as well as Papa Sobo Bade, brother lwas that represent thunderstorms. In Yorùbá, Oya is the òrìṣà of the wind, tornados, and lightning. Like storms, all of these divinities represent change that does not negotiate. The storm symbolizes necessary destruction, threshold, revolutionary transformation, and the refusal of staleness in life.
Smoke is prayer made visible. Examples of smoke include incense and steam. Smoke as visible prayer is a form of libation that symbolizes the message in transit, the proof that the invisible carries things.
Stillness is the held breath. The most difficult transformation for an air person to respect. Stillness symbolizes the gap, the pause before speech that separates a wise sentence from a fast one.
Conclusion
Balancing the air element requires two practices that on the surface, may appear opposite to each other, which is the point. Air is the ultimate expression of freedom because it is the only element that can be in two places at once and connect them.
Ask questions. This is air’s own medicine, taken deliberately rather than compulsively. Ask into your own certainties, not just into the world’s. A question aimed inward is worth ten aimed outward.
Meditate. Sit still on purpose. Not to empty the mind but to watch it run, so you can finally see which parts of it are you and which parts were installed.
Breathe with attention. If breath, wind, and spirit are one word, then the breath is important practice. Breathwork helps create a path towards self-mastery with air.
Air self-mastery calls for taking deep breaths, prayers and meditations with incense smoke, and most importantly deeper understanding through stillness.
Lastly, air element is not something you keep; it is something you pass on.
Ayibobo, Ase, Ashe
About the Author
Manbo Konnen Ki Fe is the host of the award-winning Agua Cedito podcast, a show focused on demystifying, deconstructing, and decolonizing Haitian Vodou. A lifelong Vodouizan, born and raised in a family lineage of practitioners, she is first-generation Haitian American, initiated manbo/priestess, and Haitian Vodou theologian.
Manbo Konnen Ki Fe earned her master’s degree in theological studies from Harvard Divinity School, with an emphasis on Afro-Diasporic religions. As a priestess, Konnen Ki Fe is focused on helping everyday people experience heart-centered healing, spiritual clarity, and purposeful transformation. She is the owner of The Sacred Rose Center, a female healing and empowerment ministry rooted in Afrocentric practices.