Academia
African Voices Archive
Prof. Enocent Msindo
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Professor Bongasu Tanla Kishani ( 21 June 1944 - 23 February 2024) was a prominent Cameroonian philosopher, poet, academic and activist known for his profound explorations of cultural identity and the intersection of African oral traditions with Western philosophy. In 1974, as a student in Germany, he discovered Ngonnso's [Queen Mother of the Nso people] whereabouts. During this encounter, he photographed Ngonnso in the Ethnological Museum in Dahlem. This photograph became important at a later stage for the design of replications of Ngonnso. In 1976, upon his return to Cameroon, he initiated campaigns to restitute Ngonnso. His activism continued throughout his career as a lecturer and then Professor of Philosophy at the University of Yaounde I.
Affiliation(s): University of Yaounde
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Published Work: Les philosophies d'expression orale chez les Nso' du Cameroun : (essai sur la pluralite culturelle)
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Prof Enocent Msindo is an Associate Professor and currently the Dean of Humanities, Rhodes University. He completed his MPhil and PhD in History at the University of Cambridge, and was subsequently awarded a Mellon Postdoctoral Scholarship in Rhodes University's History Department in 2005/6. He was then appointed as a lecturer on the Next Generation Academic Programme from 2007 to 2009, also funded by Mellon He is a National Research Foundation (NRF, RSA) rated researcher. He has wide-ranging research interests in African social and political history. Over the years, he has researched and published on social and political identities such as ethnicity, nationalism, and chieftaincy, and also on marginalization in precolonial, colonial, and post-colonial Zimbabwe. He completed a major work on ethnicity and its intersection with other identities in Southern Zimbabwe which he published in his well-received monograph entitled Ethnicity in Zimbabwe: Transformations in Kalanga and Ndebele Societies, 1860-1990. As a post-doctoral fellow at Rhodes University, he was part of the community of Zimbabwean scholars in South Africa who debated the contents of the Ian Smith Papers that were housed at Rhodes University. At the time, the Papers were only accessible through special permission. This inter-Africa diapsoric community joined the Zimbabwean archival community in calling for an investigation into the nature of the collection's content. In 2010, Msindo was commissioned by the President Robert Mugabe to produce a report. Msindo's investigation found that more than 90% of the documents contained in the collection were governmental in nature. His investigation into what are now termed The Rhodesia Cabinet Files lay the foundation for Zimbabwe to demand the repatriation of the collection.
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Heba Abd el Gawad is an Indigenous Egyptian heritage and museum activist and researcher. She is Senior Curator of Anthropology at the Horniman Museum and Gardens, facilitating Indigenous community research, care, and access to cultural belongings from North Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. She has co-developed, with UCL’s Prof. Alice Stevenson, the AHRC funded project: ‘Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage: Views from Egypt’, aiming at amplifying the voice, visibility and validity of modern Egyptian communities in UK museums. She focuses on developing meaningful and equitable community partnerships as a means of building relevant, relatable, and responsive social and economic futures for colonially extracted and exploited cultural belongings in UK museums. Abd el Gawas is committed to community-led participatory museum and research practices centred around and respectful of Indigenous ways of seeing, being and doing. She was selected as one of the most influential 21 Egyptian women in 2021 for her community work in the heritage sector.
Affiliation(s): Hornimam Museum and Gardens University College London Disrupting & Reorienting Restitution
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Published Work: Egypt’s dispersed heritage: Multi-directional storytelling through comic art ; Strategic Narcissism: A Lived Experience of ‘Decolonising’, Inclusion of and ‘Collaborations’ with Indigenous Researchers
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Ahmed Farouk Ghoneim is currently a Professor in the Faculty of Economics and Political Science, Cairo University. He is a research fellow at the Economic Research Forum for Arab Countries, Iran and Turkey (ERF) as well as at Center for Social and Economic Research (CASE) in Poland. He works as a consultant to several international and national organizations including the World Bank, WTO, UNCTAD, UNDP, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). He holds a Ph.D. in Economics and his special interests in research include mainly trade policy, trade in services, regional trade integration, the multilateral trading system, the World Trade Organization, the economics of Intellectual Property Rights, institutional economics, law and economics, and political economy in which he has published widely. Following a global career in trade policy, he returned to Egypt, as a Professor of Economics and Cairo University and In August, 2020 he was appointed as the Head of the Economic Authority of the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization (NMEC). He serves as a board member for a number of institutions including NMEC, Grand Egyptian Museum, Supreme Council of Antiquities, and Fund for Tourism and Antiquities. He also served as an advisor to the Minister of Planning and Economic Development on trade policy issues. In October 2024, he was appointed as the CEO of the Grand Egyptian Museum.
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Dr. Monica Hanna, a prominent figure in the global Archaeology community, began her academic journey by studying Egyptology and Archaeological Chemistry at the American University of Cairo (AUC) in 2004. She furthered her education with an MA at AUC and a doctorate in archaeology at the University of Pisa, Italy. Her research, which delves into the spatial, cognitive, and identity aspects of archaeological sites, mainly focused on heritage’s diverse interpretations and influences on spatial and communal identities. Monica’s academic prowess was further honed as a post-doctoral fellow in the Topoi Cluster of Excellence in the Department of Egyptology and North African Studies at Humboldt University from July 2011 to November 2012. After 2011, Hanna has been working with the media and a group of volunteers to bring awareness to the plight of different archaeological sites in Egypt. She courageously spoke and defended the heritage of Egypt and its protection. Hanna has been granted numerous awards, including the SAFE Beacon Award for 2014, for her efforts in salvaging antiquities under conflict. She was also named by UNESCO the Monuments Woman of 2014. She has also received ‘Distinguished AUC Alumna’ twice, once in Cairo in 2014 and the other in New York in 2015. She founded the College of Archaeology and Cultural Heritage in Aswan with several departments and a substantial cohort of students and professors. In 2020, Dr. Monica Hanna’s influence in Egypt was further solidified when she was selected as one of the 50 most influential women in the country under the auspices of the Egyptian Prime Minister. Her impact is also evident in her collaboration with the University of Oxford, where she was awarded a research grant as part of Action for Restitution in Africa. Her current research focuses on decolonizing archaeology, repatriation, and restitution amongst methods for accessibility to archaeology and heritage for the wider public, with a particular interest in digital humanities. In 2022, she and her research team launched the first public movement to repatriate the Rosetta Stone and the Bust of Nefertiti.
Affiliation(s): Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport
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Published Work: Repatriating Cultural Identity: The Egyptian Discontinuity Pretext; The Future of Egyptology
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Salama Moussa (4 February 1887 – 4 August 1958) was an Egyptian journalist, writer and political theorist who is lauded for having written/translated over 40 published books. While attending secondary school in Cairo, Moussa was exposed to writers such as Farah Antun, Jurji Zaydan, and Ahmad Lutfi Al-Sayyid that discussed modern and, at the time, radical ideas such as Social Darwinism, women's rights, and nationalism. He is credited for later popularising the idea of socialism in Egypt and for advocating for an egalitarian socialism where women's sovereignty was upheld. He was also an Egyptian Nationalist who championed unity amongst Egyptians, and called for the political and economic independence of Egypt from British occupation. In the 1920s, at the height of a cultural and literary renaissance in Egypt, he established the Egyptian Academy for Scientific Education. During this time he also participated in public debates around restitution, through his contributions to Al Ahram, where he called for the return of Egyptian cultural belongings as a matter of resistance to colonialism and reclamaition of identity. Following the closure of the academy by the government in the 1930s, he founded the magazine, Al Majalla Al Jadida,which was in circulation until the mid 1940s. In the 1950s he served as the supervisor of the science section in Akhbar el-Yom, a role he served in until his death in 1958.
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Taha Hussein (15 November 1889 – 28 October 1973) was a seminal Egyptian intellectual, writer, and educational reformer known as the "Dean of Arabic Literature". Despite losing his sight at age two, he became the first PhD graduate of Cairo University, and later became the first rector of the University of Alexandria. He was a leader of the Nahda (Arab Renaissance), advocating for modern education, secularism, and critical thought, and a proponent of Egyptian Nationalism. As Minister of Education (1950–1952), he famously championed free, universal education. In the 1920s and 1930s, Hussein made contributions to Al Ahram, where he drew attention to the exploitation and misrepresentation of Egyptian heritage by colonial powers, and called for the restitution of Egyptian belongings as anchors of national identity.
Affiliation(s): Cairo University University of Alexandria
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Prof. Abdelouahed Ben-Ncer is a professor of Prehistoric Archaeology and a recipient of the Royal Order of Merit "Al Kafaa Al Fikria". He holds a PhD in Paleoanthropology from the University of Bordeaux, and Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR) from Mohammed V University's Faculty of Sciences, Rabat-Agdal. As both a Professor of Higher Education and Director of the Institut National des Sciences de l’Archéologie et du Patrimoine / National Institute of Archaeological Sciences and Heritage (INSAP), he directs and/or co-directs several national and international research programs, with a focus on rebalancing Morocco-Franco research relationships, prioritising Moroccan stewarship of knowledge production, and infusing both cultural and scientific dimension into this work. As the Director of INSAP, he was responsible for receiving a large collection of human ancestors from the University of Bordeaux, France that were excavated from the Rouazi-Skhirat necropolis in the 1980s, and is currently overseeing their integration into the institute's Osteotheque.
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Joudia Hassar-Benslimane (1943 – 22 May 2018) was a Moroccan historian and archeologist who specialized in Islamic archaeology, history and architecture. She was one of the first Moroccan female experts in archaeology, and made important contributions to advancing archeological research in Morocco, over her 30 years of career. She is generally considered as one of the most important figures in Moroccan archaeology. Hassar-Benslimane invested much effort in training the next generation of Moroccan archeologists, and in preserving the cultural heritage of the country. She was a professor of archeology and art history at Mohammed V University in Rabat, from 1978 to 1983; and was instrumental in founding the National Institute of Archaeology and Heritage (INSAP), and became its first director in 1986. The role of the institute includes the education and training of archeology students and research and excavation of sites in Morocco, in collaboration with the international community. Hassar-Benslimane played a critical role in emancipating Moroccan archaeology from colonialist hypotheses and interpretations which dominated during the French and Spanish protectorates, and led to the creation of a ""Moroccan school of archeology"". Furthermore, the number of archeological programs in Morocco went from 4 in 1975, to around 40 when she retired from her position as director of INSAP in 2005, overseeing the training of more than 200 young specialists in various areas of archeology up to that point.
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