Arts
African Voices Archive
Ngwatilo Mawiyoo
Field:
Field:
Field:
Tuuda Haitula highlights the role of museums in the restitution process, viewing it as an opportunity for healing and reconnecting with cultural heritage. Until 2025, Tuuda worked as a Museum Development Officer at the Museums Association of Namibia (MAN), dedicated to nurturing the growth and resilience of museums across the country. Haitula plays a key role in supporting the development of Namibian heritage institutions, ensuring they remain sustainable and relevant.
Country:
Field:
Raphael Chikukwa is a Zimbabwean curator and the Executive Director of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe since 2020. Prior to this, he was Chief Curator at the same institution and before that he has worked for a decade as an independent curator. He has also contributed in a number of Publications that includes Mowonero: Insights in Zimbabwean Contemporary Art, Zimbabwe Pavilion Catalogues (Seeing Ourselves 2011, Dudziro 2013, Pixels of Ubuntu/Unhu 2015, Deconstructing Boundaries 2017 and Soko Risina Musoro – A Tale Without. Head 2019) Kaboo Ka Muwala: Migration and Mobility Exhibition 2016
Country:
Field:
Prof. Forget Chaterera-Zambuko is an Assistant Professor at Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi with over 15 years of experience in teaching, research, and academic leadership in archival science, records management, and museum studies. Her research explores digital curation, sustainable digital records management, blockchain and AI in records management systems, and the politics of displaced and migrated archives. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Comma, the journal of the International Council on Archives (ICA), and a member of the ICA’s Advocacy Expert Group. Her work has received multiple international recognitions, including the 2020 Digital Preservation Award by the Dutch Digital Heritage Network for Teaching and Communications, the 2020 United States National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation Award (Category: Educators), and a Y2 researcher rating from South Africa’s National Research Foundation. Her leadership extends to serving as Programme Chair for the 2024 Archival Education and Research Institute and contributing to SUAD’s initiative on Electronic Document and Records System. Dr Chaterera-Zambuko has an interdisciplinary lens to heritage and information governance and is committed to fostering inclusive, technologically resilient archival futures
Affiliation(s): Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi
Country:
Published Work: Real and Imagined Archives: The Emotional Impact of Zimbabwe’s Displaced Rhodesian Army Archives; Lost Unities: An Exhibition for Archival Repatriation ; Lost Unities
Field:
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
Country:
Published Work: Getting Heard: [Re]claiming Performance Space in Kenya; Reclaiming our Heritage
Field:
Ngwatilo Mawiyoo is a Kenyan writer, filmmaker, and actor best known for her poetry. Her first collection, Blue Mothertongue, was published in 2010. She creates cultural and entertainment products across various disciplines, including literature, music and film. Ngwatilo is the director, screenwriter and narrator for Open Restitution Africa's Restitution 101. This is a 5-part explainer video series that covers the need-to-know issues about African Heritage Restitution. The videos highlight these issues in short, easy-to-understand ways and were created in collaboration with Ngwatilo Mawiyoo and Verge, a Kenya-based digital content group.
Affiliation(s): Teren Teren
Country:
Field:
’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.
Country:
Field:
Barbara Mosima Joyce Masekela is an academic, activist and poet, who has been lauded for her stayed dedication to the arts and social transformation, and commitment to cultural activism and fight for humanity. In the 1980s, while exiled in Zambia, she became the head of the African National Congress’s Department of Arts and Culture, which had a major influence on the academic and cultural boycotts that formed part of the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa. As the South African ambassador to France and UNESCO, she was responsible for leading the official demand and diplomatic negotiations surrounding one of the first human ancestor repatriations to Africa, this being the return of Sara Baartman to South Africa from France's Musée de l'Homme. In the lead up to the demand, she publicly supported artists like filmmaker, Zola Maseko (The Life and Times of Sara Baartman) and poet Diana Ferrus (I've Come To Take You Home) who advocated for the return of Sara Baartman through their artistic works. In 2025, she received an honorary doctorate from Rhodes University and University of Johannesburg for her immense contributions to the political and cultural spheres in South Africa.
Country:
Field:
Sylvain Djache Nzefa is a Cameroonian architect and curator, with strong ties to France. At the age of 19, he left to pursue his university studies in architecture in France. He arrived in Nantes in 1986 and obtained his architecture degree in 1992. Towards the latter years of his degree he became interested in traditional African architecture, in particular that of Cameroon. He continued to reside in France, and in 1997, he held the position of Deputy Mayor of Nantes for International Relations. More recently, Nzefa has served as the General Coordinator Routes Des Cheffries (RDC); a cultural organization specializing in heritage engineering in Cameroon and around the world. Created in 2012 following the success of the eponymous program, it is today at the origin of a network of more than of 26 museums, distributed in several regions of Cameroon. Its leadership and members are involved in cultural and tourist development programs of the territory, major museum projects, training and strengthening the employability of young people in the cultural field, or international exhibitions. Their main focus is on chiefdoms where tradition and creativity nourish each other to remain vibrant; and on heritage sites (community museums) that focus not on objects but rather on their uses; and to ritual practices that pave the way for spiritual cultivation. In 2022, Nzefa curated ""On the Road to the Chiefdoms of Cameroon: From the Visible to the Invisible,"" at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris. The exhibition The exhibition is celebrated as made a major event in Cameroon's cultural history, with its 250 exhibited works and nearly 230,000 visitors .
Affiliation(s): Routes des Chefferies
Country:
Published Work: La sauvegarde et la valorisation du patrimoine culturel au Cameroun
Field:
Hervé Youmbi is one of Cameroon’s most acclaimed and internationally prominent artists. His work broadly explores the reception and commodification of African art forms in the global contemporary art world, in international markets for “traditional” African art, and in local Grassfields communities of Western Cameroon. He attended Cameroon’s only dedicated art school at the time, IFA (Institut de Formation Artistique) (1993-96), studying art theory and installation art, which he later pursued, through both practice and research, in France at ESAD (Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg, renamed Haute Ecole des Arts du Rhin). While there, he produced his first video work (2000-2001). While Youmbi’s studio is in Douala, his research-centric artistic practice routinely takes him to the Grassfields to participate in ceremonies and collaborate with the sculptors, beaders, and ritual specialists, whose work he supports and integrates into his own. Juxtaposing indigenous African art traditions with contemporary global art conventions to destabilize the dichotomy is a key strategy of Youmbi ‘s series “Visages des Masques/Faces of Masks”. A departure point is to create and insert mask forms that diverge from the Western stereotypes of “African Art” for this region of Cameroon into local “traditional” Bamileke ritual performances, thus embodying these “foreign” forms with efficacy and making them authentic to the Bamileke context. Youmbi’s “Les Trônes Célestes” is an installation of beaded caryatid thrones “traditional” for rulers of the Cameroon Grasslands, each seat of power supported by an animal traditionally symbolic of idealized leadership—except for the tortoise that Youmbi has slyly inserted here to suggest that the deliberate creature might better epitomize leadership than, say, the leopard, a stealthy killer. Inscribed in reverse in the beading underneath each stool is a Cameroonian proverb about leadership, which would be invisible and illegible except for the fact that Youmbi suspends the stools above glass mirrors so that the truth they bespeak can be read by all. The fragility of ideals of stewardship hang in the balance of the framework that Youmbi has constructed. Hervé Youmbi has ceremonially gifted most of these thrones to Cameroonian kings, so if and when they are exhibited as art works, it is necessary for the venue to become involved in diplomatic arrangements with the Cameroonian rulers. Notions of circulation run through Youmbi’s work. By traveling sculptural works that have been ritually enacted in “the field” in Cameroon into art galleries and museums, and making allowance for them to return to the “field” afterward if their new owners desire, he challenges the permanence and function of art works in museums, and breaks the dichotomy between African “classical art” and “contemporary art.” Bamileke communities participating in Youmbi’s projects have awarded him with honorific titles for his support of local institutions. Hervé Youmbi also is one of the original five founding members of Cercle Kapsiki, a Cameroonian artist group established in 1998 that endeavors to enrich art education and programming in the country through artist-to-artist networks, exhibitions, residencies, and international commissions. The K Factory, the collective’s home, based in New Bell, one of the poorest but also one of the most dynamic districts of Douala, is a flexible space, experimental and open to a wide range of collaborations. Hervé Youmbi has been hosted on several artist residencies, which have facilitated his research of historical African art in European and American museum collections. Listed below are a selection of his numerous international exhibitions and public collections showing his work.
Affiliation(s): Cercle Kapsiki The K Factory
Country:
Published Work: Visages de Masques / Faces of Masks; New African Masquerades: Artistic Innovations and Collaborations
