Open Restitution Africa with Dr. Njoki Ngumi

The Nest Collective’s Dr. Njoki Ngumi had a great, insightful conversation with the Open Restitution team for the launch of the Open Restitution Africa Project on their YouTube live webinar this past September, where they dove deep into the topic of restitution, museum values and their processes. We were thrilled to have this conversation with 2 amazing women: Kenya’s Chao Tayiana and South Africa’s Molemo Moiloa, who started Open Restitution Africa because of the great need to have more open and honest conversations around restitution. They’re exploring this through three phases: public awareness that gives the spotlight to important voices of Africans to have restitution dialogues; indepth research to allow an understanding of the needs of African practitioners; and the subsequent building of an open data platform featuring this new research, to broaden access to information on the return of African objects, artifacts and archives.

In their discussion, Njoki speaks about the scale of plunder that must be recognized when restitution and return of Africa’s cultural objects is on the table, as well as on the importance of moving these conversations beyond museums to allow wider publics to engage beyond exhibition level. Njoki, Chao and Molemo also discuss the roles that nations on the African continent is playing, in restitution and the need to call for broader continental engagement to create a faster path towards a critical mass whose demands will give rise to the policies that address the issue of object return. 

Watch the conversation on the Youtube channel here.