Arts
African Voices Archive
Ahmed Abokor
Temidayo Odutokun
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Ahmed Abokor is product designer and creative consultant. He has spent most of his career in digital advertising and experiential design. He has a versatile and expressive approach to visual communication, specialising in visual identities and conceptual design thinking. In 2021, Abokor co-founded the virtual restitution project Looty with Chidi Nwaubani. Named after a dog taken from China and given to Queen Victoria as a gift, the project contributes to the charged conversations around restitution in a witty and anarchic way. Looty produces NFTs of looted objects in major institutions and sells them, with 20 percent of the proceeds going to grants for young African artists. Looty uses an entirely legal process that sends representatives into institutions to digitally capture looted artifacts, render them in 3-D, and create NFTs from them. The next stage of the project will be the building of a virtual museum in the metaverse to house the reclaimed artifacts, as well as expansions into augmented reality and merchandise. The hope is to extend the project globally, creating a family of digital looters to add to the virtual museum.
Affiliation(s): Looty AOK London
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Published Work: Looting Back History: How This Digital Project Reclaims Stolen Artifacts
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Farouk Hosny is an Egyptian artist. He initially started his career as the Director of El- Anfoushy Culture Palace, during which time he painted landscapes and seascapes depicting Alexandria. In the late 1960s, while he was on a trip to France, Hosni began painting abstractions. From 1971 to 1978 he lived in Paris, where he served as Director of the Egyptian Culture Center. During that period, in 1971, Hosni was awarded the National Prize of the Cagnes-sur-Mer Festival in Southern France. In 1979, after a short stay in Cairo, Hosni moved to Rome as Vice Director and then Director of the Egyptian Academy in Rome. He continued to paint and received positive attention from Italian cities when his work was shown on several occasions in private and public spaces. In 1987 he returned to Cairo when he was appointed to the position of Minister of Culture. As Minister of Culture, he modernized Egypt's cultural infrastructure by spearheading major projects like the construction/restoration of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Nubian Museum and Alexandria National Museum, the renovation of Islamic, Coptic, and ancient sites, the expansion of art centers and cultural palaces, and the ""Reading for All"" initiative. During his tenure, Hosny announced the development of the Grand Egytian Museum (GEM); a modern, technologically advanced institution in Giza that would house, preserve and exhibit over 100,000 artefacts. Shortly thereafter he rebranded the Department of Antiquities as the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA); a high-level council that was tasked with directly managimg, regulating, and protecting all archaeological excavations and antiquities in Egypt. In the 2000s, GEM and SCA, under the leadership of Hosny and Dr. Zahi Hawass, then became central to the aggressive State campaign for the return of Egyptian artefacts to the country. After just over 20 years of service as the Minister of Culture, Hosny effectively moved away from politics, focusing exclusively on his role as a prominent, globally recognized artist and cultural benefactor in Egypt. He creates art and exhibits, and he established the Farouk Hosny Foundation for Culture and Arts to support young creatives. He also opened the Farouk Hosny Museum; a space of memory and beauty that seeks to revive aesthetic dialogue and to establish art as a sustainable human value and a fundamental source of cultural awareness.
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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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Temidayo Odutokun is an art curator and African history enthusiast. She holds an undergraduate degree in Fine Arts (Painting) and a Master’s degree in Art History from the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. She worked as curator at the National Gallery of Art, Nigeria, for 12 years and has undertaken independent curation in Accra, Ghana and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
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Lineo Segoete is an artistic research practitioner and cultural worker. With her creative roots in storytelling across various forms, her work is grounded in critical literacies spanning history and arts education. Her practice revolves around decoloniality, social justice and reparative cultural collaboration between academics and artists. She has worked within the cultural sector as co-director and co-founder of Ba re e ne re Literary Arts and as a steering committee member for the Pan-African arts research collective Another Roadmap Africa Cluster (ARAC). She is Managing Director and Curator at the Livingstone Office for Contemporary Art (LoCA) and one half of the ART.1.ST (Art First) consultancy in Lesotho.
Affiliation(s): A.R.T.1.S.T
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Livingstone Muchefa is a curatorial and archiving expert, who is currently serving as the Operations and Administration Manager at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. He previously worked at the National Archives of Zimbabwe, from 2008 – 2020, where he ended his tenure as Chief Archivist. He remains deeply tied to the professional archival network in Zimbabwe, and their pursuit to repatriate the country’s migrated archival collections.
Affiliation(s): National Gallery of Zimbabwe
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Published Work: Zimbabwe’s Economic Decline, Archives Access Regimes, Professionalism, and Their Impact on Researcher-Archivist Relations at the National Archives of Zimbabwe
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"Alma Simba is a historian and sound practitioner whose work explores ancestral heritage through both academic research and non-academic approaches. She focuses on how indigenous Black Africans engage with history through oral traditions, memory, and imagination, with particular attention to Tanzanian heritage and oral histories shaped by violence and dislocation. Her artistic practice draws on the textures of urban life—recorded sounds, conversations, and readings of her writing—blending historical research with experimental sound and creative writing. Rooted in Black, feminist, and post-colonial perspectives, her work makes history accessible beyond academic spaces. She completed her Master of Arts in History (specialising in Ethnohistory and Museum Collections) at the University of Dar-es-Salaam, and served as an assistant lecturer in the Department of History, Archaeology and Heritage Studies. In 2022 was selected to participate in University of Göttingen’s Sensitive Provenance Research Fellowship Programme, in Germany. Through this experience she was able to work closely with the Isanzu community members, key advisors and stakeholders, to map and report on a community-centred approach to the restitution of Isanzu human ancestors. She is currently studying towards her PhD through the Justus Liebig University Giessen • Gießen, and is leading the project ""“Niko njiani…Nimefika” – Transit/Arrival: Women and Being in Urban Spaces"" located at the Global Center of Spatial Methods for Urban Sustainability (GCSMUS)."
Affiliation(s): University of Dar-es-Salaam
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Published Work: Community Awareness and Restitution of Isanzu Ancestors’ Human Remains from the University of Göttingen Collections to Mkalama District, Tanzania
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Mwape J. Mumbi, is a curator, writer, filmmaker, arts critic and independent researcher, originally from Kabwe and resident in Lusaka, Zambia. As an active member of the artistic, cultural and heritage community in Zambia, Mumbi is tapped into the network of people in these fields, who are critically engaging with the matter of restitution. His personal investment in realising the holistic restitution of Kabwe Man’s skull is intertwined with his long standing commitment to contribute to the self-affirming cultural reconstruction and strategic self-sustaining economic resuscitation of Kabwe, and Zambia as a whole.
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"Sherry Davis is a musician, filmmaker and curator whose current area of interest is Kenyan history and culture. She was born in London, UK to a Kenyan mother and Jamaican father. Having toured internationally as a vocalist and songwriter with some of the world’s biggest electronic music acts, Sherry is now working as an independent artist and producer in afro-soul and afro-classical music. She composed the soundtrack to the short film ‘Remember Who You Are’ by Vogue artist photographer Asiko, which made official selections for Film Africa and Out of Africa Film Festival. She is the project manager and curator of Ode to the Ancestors – a music, documentary and exhibition project that commemorates the Kenyan contribution to archaeology in Africa. Having secured funds from Arts Council England and the British Council, Sherry’s curatorial work has brought together National Museums of Kenya, the British Institute in East Africa, UCL, the Horniman Museum and National Archives in the UK to create an international exhibition of archive images that celebrate the pioneers of Kenyan archaeology and conservation. Sherry has also curated a touring case of Mesolithic stone tools from the Horniman museum’s Kenyan archaeology collection. The case is currently touring institutions in South-East England."
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