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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Carlos Mureithi in Nairobi and Eromo Egbejule in Accra

‘History longs to heal’: how Africa hopes to advance campaign for reparative justice

Keynote speaker and award-winning author Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (left) in conversation with Kathryn Nwajiaku-Dahou, a director at the ODI Global thinktank, during the Wakati Wetu festival in Nairobi.
Keynote speaker and award-winning author Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (left) in conversation with Kathryn Nwajiaku-Dahou, a director at the ODI Global thinktank, during the Wakati Wetu festival in Nairobi. Photograph: Edwin Ndeke/The Guardian

One afternoon last October, at a hotel in a forest in a Nairobi suburb, a few dozen people sat quietly in a room watching the 2020 documentary If Objects Could Speak, which explores restitution by tracing the roots of a Kenyan artefact stored in a German museum.

The people were at the two-day Wakati Wetu (“Our Time” in Swahili) festival, aimed at sparking global conversations on reparative justice.

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