Written piece
The Thread Between Worlds
Paul Ashu Egbe
Cameroon
About this piece
A thread woven through Cameroon and Britain, through storytelling, resilience, and advocacy. Rooted in oral tradition and shaped by lived experience with sickle cell disease, this piece reflects memory, transformation, and our shared humanity across the Commonwealth.
The Thread Between Worlds by P. Ashu Egbe
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Tell me your line, they said.
The one you were born to.
The one you walk through.
Mine was never straight.
It bends
through Cameroon and Britain,
through illness and healing,
through memory, storytelling, and becoming.
I was born in Cameroon, in the village of Bachuo-Ntai,
where stories are not written first
they are spoken,
carried in voices,
stitched into ordinary life like raffia woven by hand.
My earliest thread was ancestral.
It came from elders who taught resilience without naming it,
from village gatherings where history lived in proverbs, songs, and silence,
from a community that understood that survival itself is a form of wisdom.
Later, my journey carried me across oceans to Britain,
where I trained as an engineer.
Yet even there, another thread continued pulling at me
the need to tell stories.
I became a filmmaker.
An author.
A witness to lives too often overlooked.
Through my books, including Shining the Light and The Daughters of T’Ayuk,
and through my films, I try to preserve what modern life sometimes leaves behind:
human connection, cultural memory, and the dignity of ordinary people.
Living with sickle cell disease also became part of my thread.
Not only as struggle, but as transformation.
It taught me empathy.
It taught me endurance.
It taught me that broken threads can still be rewoven into something meaningful.
That understanding led me into advocacy through the Ashu Egbe Foundation,
where I work to bring awareness, hope, and visibility to others living with sickle cell disease across African communities.
To me, the Commonwealth is not simply geography.
It is a quilt of journeys.
A meeting place of inherited histories and imagined futures.
A reminder that despite our different languages, borders, and experiences,
there remains a common thread: our shared humanity.
So this is the line I offer to the Quilt.
A thread woven from village memory and global movement.
From tradition and transformation.
From pain, purpose, and possibility.
And still,
I walk it