Nana Célestin

Greetings, Nana Célestin is a Baton Rouge-based organization committed to Black Heritage, History, and Community Development, connecting Louisiana to the greater Transatlantic World.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nana Célestin was founded in 2016 as a social purpose business with operations in Southwestern Nigeria and Benin, the region from which the very first two slave ships arrived in Louisiana in 1719, delivering 450 Africans who would build New Orleans first levees and cultivate rice, saving the Louisiana colony from famine.

Formed as an outgrowth of Dr. Sheriden Booker having been invited by the Osun State Governor’s Office of Economic Development to be a featured speaker for their first Trade, Investment and Culture Conference, Nana Célestin elevates Louisiana’s connection to a greater TransAtlantic history through community-based trade projects, historical research, and artistic exchanges that resurface multidirectional diasporic linkages.

Named in remembrance of Booker’s grandmother, Myrtle Célestin, who paid for her first trip to Africa, Nana Célestin honors the intergenerational and matrifocal brilliance of the Célestin family of St. James, Louisiana. While Nana means “little girl” in Creole French, among the Ewe and Fon people of Benin it means “a highly respected and revered female elder in the community”. At the intersection of these two meanings, Nana Célestin represents the coming together of the wisdom of the elders and the promise of the future.

In 2021, Nana Célestin was forced to shutters operations in West Africa as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the organization has continued under the same conceptual framework working closer to home on projects related to Black Creole ancestry and African cultural heritage in Louisiana.