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Syokau Mutonga is 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.
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"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. Her work focuses on combining marginalised and fugitive knowledge with creative and digital tools, to address knowledge gaps and issues of power and perspective in knowledge production. She was awarded the NRF Innovation Masters Scholarship in 2016, and jointly received the (NI)HSS Creative Collections - Best Public Performance Award in 2023, for her co-curation of the hybrid 26th Poetry Africa Festival. She also led the development of the Poetry Africa Digital Map. As Senior Researcher at Open Restitution Africa her core responsibilities included working in collaboration with the project's co-founders / Digital and Research leads to conceptualise, develop and evaluate methodologies that embrace the complexities of building an Africa-centred restitution knowledge base and datasets, supporting the design and content population of the open data platform, and overseeing the work of the core and seasonal research team members."
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Suzana Sousa is an art curator and researcher focused on developing narratives and producing knowledge from the Global South through collaboration and experimentation. Over the past decade, her work has explored themes related to contemporary African art, cultural politics, and the construction of nationalisms and national discourses through culture and the visual arts. More recently, she has engaged with feminist curatorial practices and conducted research on the works of African women artists. She is currently completing a PhD at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, focusing on nation-building processes in Angola within the context of museums and the visual arts since 1975. She serves as a research fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape.
Affiliation(s): University of the Western Cape
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Published Work: Fighting over the Archive: Politics and Practice of the Art World in Angola
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Dr. Valence Valerian Silayo is a lecturer in history, archaeology and heritage conservation at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. His research interests include various aspects of African archaeology, pre-colonial defence systems, socio-political structures, social complexity, the analysis of pre-colonial material culture, restitution and reparation, and the management of communal heritage. For many years, his research has illuminated the rich history, complexity and heritage of African societies, placing the knowledge of communities of origin at the centre of his research. His research in the archaeology and the management of cultural heritage in the Kilimanjaro region represents an important contribution to understanding the past and the present of its inhabitants. He was a Gerda Henkel Fellow at the Linden-Museum Stuttgart for two years (2023–2025).
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Published Work: Cults, Crosses, and Crescents: Religion and Healing from Colonial Violence in Tanzania
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Dr. Kiprop Lagat is the Director of Culture in the Ministry of Sports, Culture and Heritage. He holds a PhD in Anthropology and a master’s degree in Museology from the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom. His PhD thesis was on the memorialization of the 1998 Nairobi terror attack on the United States of America Embassy in Nairobi. Dr. Lagat has over 20 years of experience in the heritage sector and has participated in numerous projects focused on the research, documentation, preservation and curation of cultural practices and their associated heritage collections. He has previously worked as the Assistant Director in charge of the Nairobi National Museum and as a Principal Research Scientist in the Department of Cultural Heritage at the National Museums of Kenya. As Director of Culture, his responsibility is mainly to coordinate policies and programmes aimed at the preservation, promotion, and revitalization of Kenya’s rich and diverse cultural heritage resources for nationhood and sustainable development.
Affiliation(s): Director of Culture in the Ministry of Gender, Culture, The Arts and Heritage, National Museums of Kenya
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Published Work: Representations of Nationhood in the Displays of the National Museums of Kenya (NMK): The Nairobi National Museum
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Robyn Humphreys is an Associate Lecturer in the Department of History, at the University of the Western Cape. She is completing her PhD in archaeology. Her research focuses the impact of archaeological practice on the relationship between communities and human remains from archaeological sites. She advocates for an accountable archaeology that acknowledges communities and community institutions as important stakeholders in managing human remains.
Affiliation(s): University of the Western Cape
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Goodman Gwasira is a historian of colonial archaeology and an expert on colonial cultural heritages, museum studies, prehistoric art and community engagement in Namibia and South Africa. He is an alumnus of the Culture and Environment in Africa (CEA) study programme at the University of Cologne and the Universities of Namibia and Cape Town. He worked as a curator of archaeology at the National Museum of Namibia. Currently he is a senior lecturer and coordinator of Archaeology and Heritage Studies in the Department of History at the University of Namibia. He also is part of the international cooperation / project Confronting Colonial Pasts, Envisioning Creative Futures – Collaborative Conservation and Knowledge Production of the Historical Collections from Namibia. His PhD investigated the History and critical analysis of Namibia’s archaeologies (2020). Goodman Gwasira also published, among many other texts, Rethinking the archaeology of the Dâures Mountain in a post-colonial context (2018).
Affiliation(s): University of Namibia
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Published Work: Towards a Decolonization of the Ethnographic Displays at the National Museum of Namibia
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Dr Wendy Black is currently the Chief Curator of Art & Social History and the Curator of Archaeology at Iziko Museums of South Africa. She specialises in the population history and bioarchaeology of the indigenous hunter-gatherer people of southern Africa, the Khoesan. Her research interests are broadly related to population dynamics and genetics, but more recently she has become involved with indigenous rights and transformation issues as they relate to human remains collections and group representations within South African institutions. She also participates in exhibition development and supervises postgraduate students.
Affiliation(s): Iziko Museums of South Africa
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Published Work: Hominin heritage: How institutional repositories are managing collections, collaboration and repatriation; The Southern African Human Remains Management Project: Making (p)reparations in year one ; Who were they? Repatriation and the rehumanisation of human remains in museums in southern Africa (In Museums and Communities: Diversity, Dialogue and Collaboration in an Age of Migrations)
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Professor Francis Musonda teaches at the University of Zambia. Previously, he was employed by the Zambia National Museums Board at the Livingstone Museum, where he was the head of the Humanities and Social Sciences Department comprising Archaeology, History, Ethnography and Art. This department plays a central role in documenting and interpreting the country's development. His research interests are in African prehistory, concentrating on the transition from hunting/gathering to food production and on ethnoarchaeology.
Affiliation(s): University of Zambia
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Published Work: Decolonising the Broken Hill Skull: Cultural Loss and a Pathway to Zambian Archaeological Sovereignty
