2026 COPE mayoral candidate |Founder, Adinkra Strategies | Building a city that cares for everyone
Unceded MST territories
Joined June 2021
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What does Vancouver need? Leaders who care about everyone who lives here & won’t prioritize private equity over people. I’m honoured to be the ‘26 @COPEVancouver mayoral candidate & promise to fight for affordable living, transparent government, & fund public services. Lets go!
stephanie allen retweeted
BC election data shows 52% of voters stayed home.
Global data shows all things being equal proportional elections have higher turnout than systems built solely on single-winner-ridings, because proportional representation means everyone feels they have a voice.
ALT Graphic comparing BC election results as percentages of eligible voters. If nonvoters were a party, they would win with 52%. BC Conservative got 23%, BC NDP got 18%, and BC Green got 5%.
stephanie allen retweeted
In 1980, upwards mobility - moving up an income decile happened for about 4 in 10 people in Canada. By the 2010s, that dropped to 3 in 10.
Capitalism, thanks to neoliberalism has been trending here for a very long time. Only morons and profiteers will defend.
stephanie allen retweeted
They called the police on a three-year-old because he is good at soccer.
Read that again.
They called the cops on a toddler.A three-year-old. Because he can kick a ball better than the other kids on the field.
Not because he assaulted anyone. Not because he had a weapon. Not because he was a danger to anyone.
Grown adults watched a toddler play a sport and decided the appropriate response was to dial emergency services and send uniformed officers to deal with a child who has not yet started kindergarten.
stephanie allen retweeted
You can't blame this loss on Green 'vote splitting'
1. The BC NDP called the early election, so that's 100% on them
2. The Greens support Proportional Representation, so they actually want to fix this system
3. The ONLY vote splits in recent memory were right-wing Liberals splitting the vote in 2011 Federally, and in 2018-2024 Ontario.
4. The BC CON win was so big, even a collapsed Green vote wouldn't have mattered.
The left doesn't split votes: Liberals do, and moderates are the ones who elect right-wing governments.
stephanie allen retweeted
Photo from Reddit.
White nationalists just outside the BC Legislature this morning after a BC Cons supermajority.
This group is Loyalist Pioneers, a white nationalist organization virtually identical to Second Sons. They've been active around Victoria for about a year & a half.
stephanie allen retweeted
BCTF and Nurses Union were absolutely betrayed by the BC NDP, taking short contracts that they expected to finish in the middle of an NDP term only for Eby to selfishly call an election.
I hope unions learn their lesson about who the NDP is in it for
stephanie allen retweeted
Dallas Brodie suffers landslide defeat in Vancouver-Quilchena #bcpoli #vanpoli
dailyhive.com/vancouver/dall…
Funny. This was typically only a problem for ppl on the left considered radical. Being sexist racist homophobic & ableist was the norm & mostly acceptable in the halls of power without consequence.
This obsession with the details of what a candidate may or may not have said is one reason why parties are finding it so difficult to attract candidates. The perfect candidate will have nothing on the record concerning their views on various religious groups., abortion, LBGTQ+, indigenous relations, etc.
Especially pathetic since in today’s government, so-called backbenchers have basically no influence whatsoever. Prime Minister‘s and Premiers rule like modern monarchs.
stephanie allen retweeted
reminder that David Eby wasn’t elected by people into party leadership - he was essentially appointed into premiership when the BCNDP party brass blocked Anjali Appadurai because she got people excited - a major scandal - he became the leader by default without a vote, then this
stephanie allen retweeted
They taught African children, in colonial schools, that their continent had no history before Europe arrived.
Let that sit for a moment.
They took children whose grandparents had lived in functioning kingdoms, whose oral traditions carried the history of empires spanning centuries, whose communities had legal systems and agricultural science and trade relationships and philosophical frameworks for understanding the world.
And they sat those children in European-designed classrooms and taught them that their past was darkness.
That their ancestors had been waiting. Waiting without direction or achievement or meaningful civilization. Waiting to be found.
That the story of their people began when Europeans arrived to begin it.
This is not ancient history.
The generation of Africans who received this education are alive. Their children are alive.
The psychological work required to recover from being taught that your people had no history.
To excavate your own past not from lived memory but from archives that were often kept by the people who had the strongest interest in what was and wasn’t in them.
That work is ongoing.
And the people who created the need for that work are still explaining that colonialism, on balance, was not so bad.
stephanie allen retweeted
The Benin bronzes are in the British Museum.
More than 900 of them.
They were taken in 1897, when a British punitive expedition burned the royal palace of the Kingdom of Benin, a kingdom with which Britain had diplomatic and trade relations, and whose metalwork was among the most technically sophisticated on the planet.
Taken. As loot. During a raid.
They are still there.
The British Museum has had decades of requests for their return.
The responses have involved long conversations about legal frameworks and cultural heritage law and the logistics of preservation and the importance of these objects being seen by international audiences.
The objects have seen international audiences.
From inside Britain.
The argument is, essentially: we took these things, we built an institution around the taking, the institution now benefits from housing them, and their presence here proves their importance, which justifies our continued possession of them.
This is not a difficult argument to identify.
It is the colonial argument in miniature, running in the present tense.
The history was removed.
The evidence of the history was also removed.
Sometimes to museums.
ALT Benin City, 18 February 1897. Three British soldiers stand inside the burned royal compound of the Kingdom of Benin, present-day Nigeria. In the foreground lie bronze plaques from the royal palace, amid the destruction left by the British punitive expedition. Thousands of royal and sacred artefacts were looted and dispersed into Western collections, including the British Museum. Before they became museum exhibits, they were spoils of colonial conquest. Photograph: Reginald Kerr Granville, 1897.
Is this the man who tried to trick his wife into taking medication for an STI he picked up from Epstein’s trafficked victims?
Colonizers always justify their conquest by calling those they kill & plunder backwards & uncivilized. Lying about cultures far more humane & sophisticated than their barbarian origins that perfected violence & little else. “Crappy pieces of land” & people deserving subjugation.
Hegel, the philosopher, the foundational figure of Western intellectual tradition, the man whose ideas shaped how generations understood history and progress and civilisation, said Africa had no history.
Literally.
In "The Philosophy of History," published posthumously in 1837, he described Africa as "the land of childhood, which lying beyond the day of self-conscious history, is enveloped in the dark mantle of Night."
No history. No development. No participation in the movement of human civilization.
This was not a fringe opinion.
These were the intellectual assumptions that would help legitimize European colonial domination and, decades later, the partition of an entire continent.
Now.
While Hegel was writing this, the Oyo Empire in West Africa governed millions of people through a sophisticated constitutional system with checks on royal power.
While Hegel was writing this, the Kingdom of Dahomey had a standing army, a complex taxation system, and active diplomatic relationships with the European powers who were simultaneously, in their salons and academies, insisting the continent they were negotiating with had no civilization worth the name.
While Hegel was writing this, the Asante Empire operated under legal codes that European jurists would have recognized as sophisticated if they had been written in a language those jurists were willing to read.
While Hegel was writing this, the manuscripts of Timbuktu, hundreds of thousands of texts on mathematics, astronomy, medicine, theology, history, were being preserved by African scholars in the city his tradition insisted had produced no thought worth preserving.
And while Hegel was writing that Africa had no history, Ethiopia already had one that stretched back more than four thousand years.
Egyptian pharaohs, themselves African rulers, had been sending fleets to trade with the Land of Punt, in the Horn of Africa, as early as 2500 BCE.
Gold, frankincense, myrrh, ebony, ivory.
By the third century CE, the Kingdom of Aksum was minting its own coinage, trading across the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, and commanding such international recognition that the religious teacher Mani counted it alongside Rome, Persia and China as one of the great kingdoms of the world.
Its written literary tradition in Ge’ez carried scripture, philosophy, law, and royal chronicles that predated most of the nations doing the accusing by centuries.
The darkness was not in Africa.
It was in the theory that needed Africa to be dark.
ALT Gold coin bearing the bust of King Kaleb of Aksum, ancient Ethiopia, sixth century CE. Royal portraits. Greek inscriptions. Sovereign currency. International trade. Aksum had been minting its own gold coins since the late third century, more than 1,500 years before Hegel's lectures. An African civilization was literally striking its history in gold centuries before European philosophers presumed to deny it.
stephanie allen retweeted
Hegel, the philosopher, the foundational figure of Western intellectual tradition, the man whose ideas shaped how generations understood history and progress and civilisation, said Africa had no history.
Literally.
In "The Philosophy of History," published posthumously in 1837, he described Africa as "the land of childhood, which lying beyond the day of self-conscious history, is enveloped in the dark mantle of Night."
No history. No development. No participation in the movement of human civilization.
This was not a fringe opinion.
These were the intellectual assumptions that would help legitimize European colonial domination and, decades later, the partition of an entire continent.
Now.
While Hegel was writing this, the Oyo Empire in West Africa governed millions of people through a sophisticated constitutional system with checks on royal power.
While Hegel was writing this, the Kingdom of Dahomey had a standing army, a complex taxation system, and active diplomatic relationships with the European powers who were simultaneously, in their salons and academies, insisting the continent they were negotiating with had no civilization worth the name.
While Hegel was writing this, the Asante Empire operated under legal codes that European jurists would have recognized as sophisticated if they had been written in a language those jurists were willing to read.
While Hegel was writing this, the manuscripts of Timbuktu, hundreds of thousands of texts on mathematics, astronomy, medicine, theology, history, were being preserved by African scholars in the city his tradition insisted had produced no thought worth preserving.
And while Hegel was writing that Africa had no history, Ethiopia already had one that stretched back more than four thousand years.
Egyptian pharaohs, themselves African rulers, had been sending fleets to trade with the Land of Punt, in the Horn of Africa, as early as 2500 BCE.
Gold, frankincense, myrrh, ebony, ivory.
By the third century CE, the Kingdom of Aksum was minting its own coinage, trading across the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, and commanding such international recognition that the religious teacher Mani counted it alongside Rome, Persia and China as one of the great kingdoms of the world.
Its written literary tradition in Ge’ez carried scripture, philosophy, law, and royal chronicles that predated most of the nations doing the accusing by centuries.
The darkness was not in Africa.
It was in the theory that needed Africa to be dark.
ALT Gold coin bearing the bust of King Kaleb of Aksum, ancient Ethiopia, sixth century CE. Royal portraits. Greek inscriptions. Sovereign currency. International trade. Aksum had been minting its own gold coins since the late third century, more than 1,500 years before Hegel's lectures. An African civilization was literally striking its history in gold centuries before European philosophers presumed to deny it.
stephanie allen retweeted
47% of likely voters in British Columbia (-2) say they would be “very upset” if the Conservative Party of BC forms the government after tomorrow’s election. #bcpoli
researchco.ca/2026/10/23/bcp…
stephanie allen retweeted
Egypt is the most revealing case of all.
Ancient Egypt, with its pyramids, its philosophy, its mathematical precision, its medicine, its legal systems, its art that still stops people in museum halls, is acknowledged as one of the great civilizations of human history.
And for most of Western academic history, it was also systematically, carefully, persistently de-Africanized.
Ancient Egyptians were depicted as lighter than the evidence suggests.
The obvious geographical and cultural connections to the rest of Africa were minimized.
The Nile Valley civilizations that predated the dynastic period were underdiscussed.
Cheikh Anta Diop spent his career arguing that ancient Egypt was an African civilization.
Not Mediterranean. Not racially ambiguous. Not a separate category inserted between "real" Africa and "real" civilization.
African.
The reaction from Western academia was not engagement.
It was dismissal. It was decades of institutional resistance. It was the particular fury of a field that had built its understanding of the ancient world on the careful, necessary, structurally load-bearing separation of Egypt from the continent it sits on.
Because if Egypt is African, then the sentence "Africa had no civilization before Europe arrived" doesn’t just need revision.
It becomes incoherent.
Not just false, but the precise inversion of the truth.
And not just about one dynasty or one period but about the foundational story of Western civilization itself, which drew substantially from Egyptian knowledge in mathematics, medicine, architecture, philosophy.
Which means Western civilization did not bring knowledge to Africa.
It learned from it.
The mummies are still there.
The DNA studies have complicated every clean narrative.
Diop’s work has been increasingly vindicated by genetic and archaeological evidence.
The resistance continues anyway.
But the instinct, the deep structural instinct to separate the civilization you want to celebrate from the continent you needed to be empty, that instinct shaped the field for generations.
You cannot claim the pyramids and also claim the continent that built them had no history.
You cannot do both with a straight face.
They tried anyway.
ALT Pharaoh Nebhepetre Mentuhotep II (reigned c. 2055–2004 BCE). An African king of the Nile Valley who reunified Egypt and founded the Middle Kingdom more than 4,000 years ago. This is not a modern reconstruction. It is an original ancient Egyptian statue, discovered at Deir el-Bahari in 1900. Long before European colonialism, Africa had already produced one of the greatest civilizations in human history. Egypt was African. Its pharaohs were African. Its history is African history. Egyptian Museum, Cairo (JE 36195).