About ORA

"Knowledge for Africans by Africans"

Our advocacy work looks to engage public audiences with the historical, cultural, and environmental nuances that shape restitution processes today. Our data is transformed into a variety of educational materials, including webinars, podcasts, reports, and explainer videos These resources are designed to foster informed public dialogue around restitution, making complex issues more accessible to diverse audiences.

Our Approach

Our core activity areas

Knowledge Building - Research

We conduct nuanced, grass roots research that engages with activists, communities, museums and other stakeholders directly involved in restitution processes. We also undertake exploratory research addressing broader concerns tied to restitution thematics.

Knowledge Aggregating - Open Data Platform:

We have developed a custom-built data platform that caters to the nuances and complexities of restitution data. Our platform centralizes, retrieves, and visualizes outputs from our case study research.

Knowledge Sharing - Advocacy and Education

We produce engaging content to demystify restitution for both professionals and the general public. Our advocacy materials—ranging from policy briefings interviews and zines to explainer videos and podcasts—aim to educate and engage stakeholders involved in restitution while ensuring our research findings reach a wide audience.

Press

Providing comprehensive support with a VC mindset, combined with proven.

View All

The Team

Open Restitution Africa was founded by artist Molemo Moiloa and historian Chao Tayiana Maina, who met at a conference on African museums in Namibia in 2019. United by a shared passion for African heritage and technology, the two were struck by the difficulty of finding information on African restitution processes, despite numerous ongoing and past cases. In 2020, they founded the initiative to address this lack of visibility and increase access to restitution data in Africa.

What started off as a collaborative passion project has now grown to a team of 5 dedicated women committed to understanding and exploring the ways in which data can strengthen restitution efforts and discourse on the continent.

A women-founded and led initiative based on the African continent

Chao Tayiana Maina

Co-Founder

Molemo Moiloa

Co-Founder

Karen Ijumba

Senior Researcher

Phumzile Twala

Research Associate

Syokau Mutonga

Research and Operations Associate

The ORA Story ADH + Andani

Chao Tayiana Maina

Co-Founder

Chao Tayiana Maina is a Kenyan historian and digital heritage specialist with a unique expertise at the intersection of memory, digital humanities, and public education. Leveraging a background in computing and a specialization in heritage studies, her work is dedicated to exploring and excavating African histories, while simultaneously building and enhancing the infrastructure needed for the preservation and dissemination of these vital pasts. She is the founder of African Digital Heritage, a co-founder of the Museum of British Colonialism, and a co-founder of the Open Restitution Africa project. Currently, she is a fellow at Yale University’s Institute of Cultural Heritage Preservation and was previously selected as a public historian in residence at the University of Luxembourg’s Centre for Contemporary and Digital History.

Molemo Moiloa

Co-Founder

Molemo Moiloa lives and works in Johannesburg, and has worked in various capacities at the intersection of creative practice and community organizing. She currently works on notions of ungovernability, social infrastructures of cultural organizing, and relationships to nature. She is one half of the artist collaborative MADEYOULOOK, who explore everyday popular imaginaries and their modalities for knowledge production. Molemo also co-leads the Open Restitution Africa project, an Africa-focused research platform for restitution of African heritage under the auspices of Andani.Africa. She also co-leads the ungovernable, an experiment in communitary practice and ungovernability. Molemo is a Soros Arts Fellow 2023/24, was a Chevening Clore Fellow 2016/17, and winner of a Vita Basadi Award for 2017. MADEYOULOOK are selected artists of the South African Pavilion for the Venice Biennale 2024, were DAAD Artists-in-Berlin fellows for visual arts 2022 and Lumbung artists at documenta fifteen, 2022. They were nominees for the VLC Prize for Art and Politics 2016/17 at the New School, New York.

Karen Ijumba

Senior Researcher

Karen Byera Ijumba has worked at the intersection of research, culture, creativity and digital knowledge management for over 10 years; interchangeably serving as a trained physical and digital archivist, researcher and academic research project manager. She holds an LLB and BA (Hons) in Heritage and Public Culture from the University of Cape Town (South Africa), and an MA in Arts and Culture Management from the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa). She enjoys encountering different ways of being, looking at things as puzzles and maps, and thinking through how bits come together under one nuanced conceptual umbrella.

Phumzile Twala

Research Associate

Phumzile Nombuso Twala is a cultural and creative industries practitioner, writer, researcher, convenor and public engagement curator based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is currently developing an interdisciplinary heritage, research and development praxis, informed by public engagement curating models. To this end, she is exploring arts, culture and heritage institutions, community engagement and development models through research and practice-led inquiry. She is a Senior Researcher at Andani.Africa, a cultural and creative economies research strategic advisory agency, where she contributes to a wide variety of research studies and projects. She is also Research Associate at Open Restitution Africa, a project focusing on centering Africa-centered restitution processes. ORA’s work is informed by the intersectionality of cultural heritage, research methodology and tech. She holds BCom Industrial and Organisational Psychology (UNISA), BA (Honours) Media Studies and Journalism (Wits University) and BA (Honours) History of Art (Wits University) degrees. Phumzile was on the Wits University Humanities 2021 Dean’s List and was awarded the Standard Bank Group Foundation of African Art Postgraduate Prize (2021) for Outstanding Achievement in Postgraduate African Art Studies. She has been appointed as a Board Member of the Funda Community College, where she leads on heritage research and alumni programming development at the institution.

Syokau Mutonga

Research and Operations Associate

Syokau Mutonga a research and operations associate at Open Restitution Africa, an open-data platform seeking to make visible African voices in the restitution debate. For the past decade, she has worked in the cultural heritage sector as an academic, writer, activist and curator, seeking to amplify community voices. Her work explores what it might look like to practice an articulation of Kenya’s painful and problematic past while also leaving it as multiple, unfinished and present. At Open Restitution Africa, she leads the operational side of the work while supporting the research department. Her research work includes putting together databases of key restitution issues, creating research frameworks and carrying out case studies that support the open data platform and empower all stakeholders to make knowledge-based decisions.

About the Project (Test Copy)

About the Project (Test Copy)

About the Project (Test Copy)

Website Link