Academia
African Voices Archive
Dr. Kennedy Gitu
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Professor Kimani Njogu is a linguist, literary critic and cultural scholar. He is the Director of Twaweza Communications and Executive Director of Africa Health and Development International (AHADI). Until 2003, he was an Associate Professor of Kiswahili and African Languages at Kenyatta University. Between 1998 – 2007, he was Council Member of the International African Institute, University of London. In 2004, Kimani was appointed a Member of the three-person Task Force for the East African Kiswahili Council in the East African Community, drafting the Kiswahili protocol for the Council of Ministers. He is a recipient of the 2000 pan-African Noma Award for Publishing in Africa for a Kiswahili book. For over a decade, he has served as Chairman of CHAKITA-Kenya (The National Kiswahili Committee) and Chair of the Board at the Legal Resources Foundation and CODE-IP Trust. He is also a member of the Kiswahili Cross Border Commission at the Academy of African Languages and a member of the Working Group on Safety and Security of Journalists in Kenya. His Kiswahili book on the teaching of literature won the 2000 Noma Award for Publishing in Africa. Prof. Kimani Njogu was recently awarded the Order of the Golden Warrior by H.E. Uhuru Kenyatta, President of Kenya, for his work in media, culture and the arts. He holds a PhD from Yale University (1993)
Affiliation(s): Twaweza Communications
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Published Work: Getting Heard: [Re]claiming Performance Space in Kenya; Reclaiming our Heritage
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Dr Njabulo Chipangura is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology with an interest in the empirical ways in which museum practices can be decolonised through epistemic and aesthetic disobedience, benchmarked by undoing earlier ways of knowledge production, particularly by examining African collections and their representations. Njabulo has published several research papers that examine ongoing debates about the coloniality of museums and associated knowledge production and representation practices, with the aim of imagining a decolonised museum in Africa. He is also a managing editor for the Museum and Society, published by the University of Leicester Open Journals. Njabu is currently working on a co-edited volume entitled The Museologies of Africa: Rethinking African Museums, Community Inclusion, Living Cultures and Decolonisation which will be published by Routledge in 2026.
Affiliation(s): National University of Ireland
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Published Work: Provenance Research in Museums: Principles, Practices and Possibilities, Volume 1; Truth-telling as a form of decolonial care: stories from a collaborative object biography research with the Ndau community of Eastern Zimbabwe; Community Collaborations and Social Biographies of Museum Collections from Colonial Contexts: Meanings of Zulu Beadwork; Where are Nehanda's remains?: A Zimbabwean Search in the Context of Shifting Museum Politics (In Fifteen Colonial Thefts: A Guide to Looted African Heritage in Museums); “Bring the Objects out of the Basement!”: The Wellcome African Collection at Manchester Museum
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Lennon Mhishi is an anthropologist whose interdisciplinary work spans interests in Africa and its diasporas; museums; material culture and art practices; the afterlives of slavery and colonialism; and approaches to contemporary forms of exploitation, forced labour and human rights in different African countries. He has experience in migration and diaspora, heritage, music, and other arts-based, creative approaches to knowledge-making and engagement. Before joining UBC, Lennon worked at the University of Oxford, based at the Pitt Rivers Museum. He was part of the project, “Reconnecting Objects”, funded by the VW Stiftung. He collaborated with partners in Oxford (UK), Cape Town (South Africa), Dakar (Senegal), Dschang (Cameroon) and Berlin (Germany). The project, among other things, explored colonial collections—as well as art practices—and the possibilities of mobilising African and diasporic communities in rethinking these collections.
Affiliation(s): University of British Columbia
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Published Work: Where are Nehanda's remains?: A Zimbabwean Search in the Context of Shifting Museum Politics (In Fifteen Colonial Thefts: A Guide to Looted African Heritage in Museums); Chimurenga epistemologies: diasporic entanglements, colonial afterlives and the struggle of thinking other worlds
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Emmanuel Yacobo is a social scientist with strong academic background in education, public policy analysis, cultural heritage management and research on ethnic conflict analysis and peace building. He currently serves as the Director and Principal Curator of National Museum of Tanzania. He has been the main contact person for the repatriation of belongings and human ancestors to Tanzania.
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Kennedy Gitu is a population historian with an anthropological and archaeological background, with an interest is in pastoral demography, mobility and settlement, and climate change adaptation. He is the Country Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA), and Historian in the Department of History, Archaeology and Political Studies at Kenyatta University. As the Country Director of BIEA he has prioritised pivoting the work of the Institute to serve African interests, which has included repatriating belongings and human ancestors in colonial-era collection to countries and communities of origin.
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Emmanuel Ndiema is a prominent archaeologist and senior researcher at the National Museums of Kenya (NMK), currently serving as the Head of Earth Sciences. He is actively involved in the documentation and management of Kenya's cultural and natural heritage, with a strong focus on community engagement and the repatriation of cultural artifacts. He is currently part of the working group that is developing a framework for restitution in Kenya.
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’Mamokuena Makhema is a director of Morija Museum and Archives. Her passion for decoloniality permeates the approaches and programming that have emerged at the Morija Museum under her leadership. She has numerous outputs on television and in films as a content creator; writer, director and producer. In recent years she has added expertise in the development of human rights advocacy content for Southern African audiences to her repertoire of skills. Makhema holds two master’s degrees; one in Film and Television Studies from Wits School of Arts at the University of Witwatersrand, and another in Gender Studies and International Law from SOAS, University of London. She previously worked as a Lecturer at the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) Film and Television programme. Makhema continues to actively mentor and teach artists and cultural practitioners in various disciplines.
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Professor Emeritus Phillip Tobias was a South African palaeoanthropologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He is known both for his vast body of work on South African hominid fossil sites, and his anti-Apartheid activism, which began in his student years, and continued throughout his professional career as an academic. Tobias was appointed to lead the Reference Group that supported one of the first human ancestor repatriations to Africa, this being the return of Sara Baartman to South Africa from France's Musee de l'Homme, and her subsequent reburial and memorialisation in her homeland in the Eastern Cape. His networks were critical in creating a bridge for dialogue between the Reference Group, the South African government and Musée de l'Homme.
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Abba Isa Tijani is a Nigerian Professor of Museology and Anthropology and Director of the SDG Graduate School Performing Sustainability at the University of Maiduguri since February 2025. After an education in Creative Arts, Museum Studies and Anthropology he concluded with a PhD Thesis on Tradition and Modernity – The Gamergu (Malgwa) of North-Eastern Nigeria. Tijani directed the Centre for the Study and Promotion of Cultural Sustainability at the University of Maiduguri from 2016 to 2020, before being appointed Director General/CEO of the National Commission for Museums and Monuments in Abuja, Nigeria (NCMM). During his tenure at NCMM [2020 - 2024] Tijani spearheaded a strategic, non-litigious and diplomatic approach to restitution, which resulted in the repatriation and return of numerous Nigerian belongings from institutions in North America and Europe.
Affiliation(s): National Commission for Museums and Monuments University of Maiduguri University of Hildesheim
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