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Koehun Aziz-Kamara is a writer, historian and archivist whose work addresses epistemological violence and archival silence born out of slavery and colonialism in West Africa and the broader Atlantic diaspora. She studied History at the University of Warwick and Caribbean and Latin American Studies at University College London. As Communications Associate at Open Restitution Africa, she leads the organisation's communications strategy, working to open up access to restitution knowledge and centre African communities and civil society in driving their own heritage narratives and restitution efforts. She is co-founder of Kol Pot, a digital-first platform dedicated to preserving Sierra Leonean (hi)stories, reducing barriers to archival access, and contributing to the reconstitution of identity in a postwar context. Her prior work as Programme Assistant at Reform Initiatives supported reparatory justice capacity-building across West Africa. Koehun's scholarship and practice sit at the intersection of historical justice, Black geographies, and the politics of belonging.
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Syokau Mutonga is a Research and Operations Associate at Open Restitution Africa, an open-data platform seeking to make visible African voices in the restitution debate. For the past decade, she has worked in the cultural heritage sector as an academic, writer, activist and curator, seeking to amplify community voices. Her work explores what it might look like to practice an articulation of Kenya’s painful and problematic past while also leaving it as multiple, unfinished and present. At Open Restitution Africa, she leads the operational side of the work while supporting the research department. Her research work includes putting together databases of key restitution issues, creating research frameworks and carrying out case studies that support the open data platform and empower all stakeholders to make knowledge-based decisions.
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"Karen Byera Ijumba has worked at the intersection of research, culture, creativity and digital knowledge management for over 10 years; interchangeably serving as a trained physical and digital archivist, researcher and academic research project manager. She holds an LLB and BA (Hons) in Heritage and Public Culture from the University of Cape Town (South Africa), and an MA in Arts and Culture Management from the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa). She enjoys encountering different ways of being, looking at things as puzzles and maps, and thinking through how bits come together under one nuanced conceptual umbrella. Her work focuses on combining marginalised and fugitive knowledge with creative and digital tools, to address knowledge gaps and issues of power and perspective in knowledge production. She was awarded the NRF Innovation Masters Scholarship in 2016, and jointly received the (NI)HSS Creative Collections - Best Public Performance Award in 2023, for her co-curation of the hybrid 26th Poetry Africa Festival. She also led the development of the Poetry Africa Digital Map. As Senior Researcher at Open Restitution Africa her core responsibilities included working in collaboration with the project's co-founders / Digital and Research leads to conceptualise, develop and evaluate methodologies that embrace the complexities of building an Africa-centred restitution knowledge base and datasets, supporting the design and content population of the open data platform, and overseeing the work of the core and seasonal research team members."
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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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Ndapewoshali Ndahafa Ilunga is a historian, trained accountant, project manager and specialist in Namibian labour law. She has worked in the field of cultural heritage, art and culture since 2014. She is vehemently committed to the preservation, documentation and decolonisation of Namibia's historical landscape and cultural heritage. Between 2014 and 2024, Ndapewoshali worked at the Museums Association of Namibia (MAN) in various capacities, ultimately becoming its Director. She has more recently joined the FinNamKnow Project - a collaborative project between Finnish and Namibian scholar. The project seeks to explore ways to decolonise the history of the Finnish-Namibian relations, and to produce historical knowledge that is increasingly inclusive and multivocal, in a manner that overturns the epistemological legacies of European colonial projects. Here she is also exploring and growing in her identity as a Decolonial Christian Historian.
Affiliation(s): Henry Nxumalo Foundation Museums Association of Namibia FinNamKnow Project (Decolonizing History-Writing: Transcultural Production, Mobilization and Transformations of Knowledge in Finnish-Namibian Relations 1870–1990)
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Published Work: Confronting Colonial Pasts, Envisioning Creative Futures Documentary
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Owo Anietie is a Nigerian 3D afrofuturism artist. His career in art began in 2009 as a traditional artist doing portrait paintings and drawings as commissions. He transitioned to motion design, animation and digital illustration in 2012 with a desire to reach a wider audience, as an African artist. In 2021 he established AfroDroids by Owo, a 12k PFP NFT project that depicts human life through the eyes of Africans. Each Afrodroid is a piece of art with increasing value and a number of hidden benefits that become apparent as the project advances. For the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023, Anietie served as a technical collaborator for Looty’s ""Mnemonic"" installation. He provided the breathtaking visuals of looted African belongings, such as the Benin Bronzes, bringing the concept of digital restitution to life.
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Chidi Nwaubani is a visionary designer, artist and tech practitioner. He experiments with XR/AR to redefine art by providing captivating experiences, and seeks to empower artists and reimagine ideas of memorialising history and culture using technology. In 2021, Nwaubani co-founded the virtual restitution project Looty with Ahmed Abokor. 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 African Futures Institute (PinPoint)
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Published Work: Looting Back History: How This Digital Project Reclaims Stolen Artifacts
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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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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
Koehun Aziz-Kamara is a writer, historian and archivist whose work addresses epistemological violence and archival silence born out of slavery and colonialism in West Africa and the broader Atlantic diaspora. She studied History at the University of Warwick and Caribbean and Latin American Studies at University College London. As Communications Associate at Open Restitution Africa, she leads the organisation's communications strategy, working to open up access to restitution knowledge and centre African communities and civil society in driving their own heritage narratives and restitution efforts. She is co-founder of Kol Pot, a digital-first platform dedicated to preserving Sierra Leonean (hi)stories, reducing barriers to archival access, and contributing to the reconstitution of identity in a postwar context. Her prior work as Programme Assistant at Reform Initiatives supported reparatory justice capacity-building across West Africa. Koehun's scholarship and practice sit at the intersection of historical justice, Black geographies, and the politics of belonging.
