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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.
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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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Patrick Mudekereza is a writer and cultural producer from in Lubumbashi, D.R. Congo. He is currently director of Waza, Centre d’art de Lubumbashi, previously known as Picha Art Centre. He co-founded and run the first three editions of Rencontres Picha, Lubumbashi Biennial. He was involved in several art projects, including the collective Vicanos Club, was editor of the cultural magazine Nzenze organised and participated in several exhibitions in Congo and abroad such as Congo Far West. He coordinated and edited publications such as Les Chroniques du Congo and exhibitions catalogues. His critical articles were published, among others, in African Art and Contemporary And. His last curatorial project Revolution Room/Chumba cha Mapinduzi, in collaboration with Visual Arts Network South Africa, explores the potentials of collaboration between artists and communities from the mining industries in Southern Congo and Johannesburg.
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Jinty Jackson is a researcher, writer, and communications consultant who works at the intersection of storytelling, justice, and urban change. She has worked with think tanks, international media, and grassroots organisations. Jinty worked with Open Restitution Africa to develop on insight on Inventories that was drawn from a study undertaken by ORA on behalf of the South African Cultural Observatory & the National Department of Sport, Arts and Culture in South Africa (2024).
Affiliation(s): Independent
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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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Albert Gouaffo is a literary and cultural scholar at the University of Dschang in western Cameroon and researches the culture of remembrance, post-colonialism and German-African literature. He completed his doctorate in 1997 at Saarland University on the experience of being an outsider, as examined in francophone African literature in the German-language and cultural context. He was also a Georg Forster Fellow at Saarland University from 2004 to 2006, where he subsequently completed his Habilitation. With a wide range of publications in German, French and English, he promotes intercultural German studies and the examination of the German colonial period in Cameroon. As the founder of a German studies journal and Vice President of the association "German Studies in Sub-Saharan Africa", he is also committed to networking German studies on the continent. In 2025, he was awarded the Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm Prize.
Affiliation(s): University of Dschang
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Published Work: Similarities and differences: An interim assessment of the debate on the looting and restitution of Cameroonian cultural property in Germany; Décentrer la question des restitutions : l’exemple des biens culturels issus de contextes coloniaux en Afrique face aux micro-histoires régionales; Whose Voices? On Power, Terminology and the Definition of Community : A Postscript
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Babatunde E. Adebiyi, PhD, is Legal Adviser and Director of Legal Services at the National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM) of Nigeria. He has represented Nigeria at UNESCO’s General Assembly and meetings of States Parties to its Cultural Heritage Conventions, and acts as Nigeria’s legal counsel in international forums concerning heritage return claims and negotiations. He is a resource person for ECOWAS and the African Union, and a member of the Benin Dialogue Group, the Benin Initiative Switzerland/The Restitution Forum, the Global Action for Restitution of African Artefacts, ICOMOS, and the ICOMOS Climate Change and Heritage Working Group in Nigeria. His publications include ‘Legal and Other Issues in Repatriating Nigeria’s Looted Artefacts’, ‘Towards the Perfect Law’, ‘Return or Recirculation?’, and ‘The Fault Is Not in Our Stars’.
Affiliation(s): National Commission for Museums and Monuments
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Published Work: Legal and other Issues in Repatriating Nigeria's Looted Artefacts
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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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'Mats'osane is currently serving the the Ministry of Tourism, Environment and Culture, as the Director of the Department of Culture. She is responsible for overseeing the mandate of the Department of Culture which is to protect both the tangible and intangible heritage of Lesotho for present and future generations, and to work working in partnership with other institutions. She is currently overseeing the development of the Lesotho National Museum and Art Gallery, and the exhibitions that will be displayed there. Matsosane holds a Master’s degree in Museum and Heritage Studies from the University of Pretoria, South Africa. With her background in museum studies, she has had the opportunity to engage in a number of museum and exhibition projects. She facilitated the development of an exhibition at Ha Baroana which showcased rock art paintings. She also worked as a supervisor and coordinator during the development of Thaba Bosiu National Monument (site museum), renowned for its rich cultural heritage.
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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.
