What does it mean to make history public, participatory, and grounded in the communities to whom it belongs?
The Histories We Tell: Lessons from Africa convenes scholars, archivists, artists, journalists, and cultural practitioners from across Africa and the Afro-diaspora, to explore how histories are made visible, preserved, and carried forward.
Organized through PHACS’ (Public History as the New Citizen Science of the Past) from the C²DH at the University of Luxembourg in collaboration with African Digital Heritage, this one-day workshop forms part of a longer-term series of conversations on the ethics and politics of co-production in local, transnational, and global contexts. From activist archiving and visual satire to community archives and digital preservation, the program considers how history is shaped collectively, how communities remain central to the histories that concern them, and how the historical record can speak meaningfully to the present.
Venue: Unseen Nairobi
Workshop Program
10:00–10:30 | Opening and Welcome
Speakers: Thomas Cauvin, Myriam Dalal, Andreas Fickers, Mutanu Kyany’a
10:30–12:00 | Session I: Politics and Practices of Activist Archiving
This panel explores activist archiving as both a political practice and a historical method. Bringing into conversation public history and activist archives in South Africa, the documentation of suppressed and movement-linked histories in Kenya, family-held records of left and pro-democracy struggles in Nigeria, and feminist, justice-centered approaches to knowledge production, it asks how archives emerge from struggle, how they are shaped by power, and how they can resist erasure.
With Prof. Noor Nieftagodien, Dr. Njuki Githethwa, Dr. Sa’eed Husaini, and Dr. Njoki Wamai, the session considers what it means to build archives that do not simply document struggle after the fact, but remain part of it.
12:15–13:15 | Session II: Art, Diversity and Histor(ies)
This conversation turns to comics, cartoons, and curatorial practice as forms of archiving. Through political cartooning from Sudan and Kenya, alongside curatorial and critical work on politically engaged art, it asks how visual culture records conflict, dissent, and everyday political feeling, especially where official archives are silent, selective, or hostile.
With Khalid Albaih, Maddo, and Dr. Larissa-Diana Fuhrmann, the session reflects on what comics, satire, and exhibition-making can preserve beyond events themselves: tone, irony, contradiction, and public sentiment.
13:15–14:00: Lunch
14:00–15:30: Session III _ Building Participatory Community Archives
Looking across neighborhood archiving in Cairo, heritage and liberation histories in Namibia, community collaboration around the Old Location, and oral history-based digital heritage in Morocco, this session asks why communities create their own archives, what makes participation meaningful, and how such work can remain accessible, relevant, and accountable over time.
With Dr. Mina Ibrahim, Dr. Martha Akawa, Julia Göke, and Dr. Meriem Sahli, the conversation reflects on how community archives often emerge in response to urgent social, historical, and political needs, and how memory work can remain useful to the people whose lives it concerns.
15:30–17:00: Session IV _ Public Histories, Digital Futures
This session explores how digital archives are built, preserved, and shared in ways that remain publicly meaningful, historically grounded, and accountable to the communities they represent. Moving beyond digitization as a purely technical exercise, the conversation considers digital preservation as a question of public history, infrastructure, access, collaboration, and power.
Bringing together perspectives from public history, digital heritage, journalism, and participatory practice, the panel asks what it takes to build digital archives that do not simply store materials, but make African histories visible, usable, and durable on local terms.
17:00 – 17:30: Break
17:30 – 19:00: Closing Screening _ The People Shall
This screening is in honor and memory of Nick Wambugu, a contributor to the inaugural ‘The Histories we Tell’.
Their film, The People Shall traces Kenya’s year-long uprising, highlighting the role of young people and women in mobilizing one of the most significant movements in recent Kenyan history.
The film also speaks directly to the workshop’s central themes by showing how communities archive events in real time, creating public records that connect struggles, preserve testimony, and counter attempts to erase or revise history.
19:00-21:00PM: Social Time
Panelist Bios
Chao Tayiana Maina is a Kenyan historian and digital heritage specialist whose work lies at the crossroads of memory, technology, and public engagement. With a background in computer science and a focus on heritage studies, she is deeply invested in uncovering African histories and building the digital infrastructure necessary for their preservation and accessibility. She is the founder of African Digital Heritage, and co-founder of both the Museum of British Colonialism and the Open Restitution Africa initiative.
Julia Göke is a doctoral researcher at the Luxembourg Center for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH)- The University of Luxembourg. She is working on a collaborative project with the University of Namibia (UNAM) on a community archive of the “Old Location”, a segregated Black neighborhood in Windhoek, Namibia, that got demolished in 1968 by the South African colonial government. Her main focus in this project is to make digitized historical sources accessible to areas with low internet connectivity. Göke has a Master of Arts from the University of Tübingen in history with a focus on digital humanities, as well as a Bachelor of Education in history and German from the University of Konstanz.
Khalid Albaih is a Romania-born, Doha-raised, Oslo-based Sudanese political cartoonist, writer, and cultural producer. His work is widely known as “Khartoon.” His artworks have been shown internationally, including at Documenta 15 (Germany), MOCA Florida (USA), Mathaf (Qatar), and NIROX Sculpture Park (South Africa) and Sydney Biennial (2026). His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and other global platforms. Albaih is the author of Khartoon! (2018), co-editor of Sudan Retold (2019) and co-Sudan Retold 1½ (2025), and the creator of the Graphic Novel of Professional Foreigner (2026). He is the founder of KhartoonMag.com and @DohaFashionFridays and was shortlisted for the Freedom of Expression Award (2025).
Dr. Larissa-Diana Fuhrmann is a postdoctoral researcher at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF) and converges academic research with curatorial practices. She is interested in theoretical and artistic engagements with political violence, focusing on resistant practices and critically questioning the production and transfer of knowledge in academic, artistic and medial contexts. In recent years, she has published in various media, curated numerous exhibitions, advised cultural institutions and led workshops on critical curatorial practice and politically engaged art.
Maddo: Paul Kelemba writes and illustrates the weekly It’s a Madd, Madd World in The Standard Newspaper. The column has run uninterrupted for over 35 years – one of the longest running in a tabloid on the African continent. It is a full-page satirical, composite cartoon feature that comments on politics, society, culture and the arts. He uses the penname “Maddo”. He previously worked as an editorial at cartoonist at The Daily Nation and The Standard. Kelemba is a comics artist as well and produced the action hero series Miguel Sede in the 1990s besides several others commissioned by various agencies. He is an alumni of the Bellagio Study & Conference Center and is a recipient of several awards including CNN Multi-Choice African Journalists Awards (GE Energy Category), Recognition for Outstanding Contribution and Achievements Towards the History of Kenya (Kenya @ 50 Kenyatta University Heroes Award, 2013) and Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of the Knight of Arts and Letters). He sits on the board at Ketebul Music and Buni Media.
Dr. Martha Akawa is a senior lecturer for History and the Associate Dean of the School of Education and the School of Humanities, Society & Development at the University of Namibia. She has a PhD from the University of Basel, a master’s degree in Anthropology from the University of Western Cape, bachelor’s degree in education from the University of Namibia and a Diploma in Heritage and Museum Studies from the University of the Western Cape. Her area of interest is the liberation struggle of Namibia, particularly the area of gender and Heritage related issues.
Dr. Meriem Sahli is an Assistant Professor at Al Akhawayn University, where she leads the Arabic Unit. She holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics from Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University. With over two decades in higher education, she specializes in Arabic as a Foreign Language, multilingual education, and technology-enhanced learning. She is the founder and director of Atlas Voices: a flagship digital heritage initiative dedicated to preserving Moroccan oral history and cultural knowledge in Moroccan Arabic and Tamazight, with multilingual educational outputs. The project integrates oral archives, digital storytelling, e-books, and interactive learning resources and has received national and international institutional funding and recognition. In addition to her research, Dr. Sahli has played a central role in curriculum development, faculty training, academic leadership, and international academic partnerships.
Dr. Mina Ibrahim is an anthropologist and community archivist from Cairo, and a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Conflict Studies at the University of Marburg, Germany (within the Human Rights Discourse in Migration Societies (MeDiMi) research group). His work asks how archives are made, withheld, and fought over, and what it means to build memory and justice “from below” in contexts shaped by violence, displacement, and uneven access to official records. In 2022, he completed a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies at the University of Gießen and in 2021, Ibrahim founded Shubra’s Archive, Egypt’s first neighborhood-based community archive, rooted in Shubra and adjacent neighborhoods in North Cairo. The archive documents everyday histories through collective storytelling, digitization, and a meta-database of family and private collections, and its learning–research programs have produced the Shubra’s Archive Logs series. Between 2018 and 2025, he served as coordinator and later program manager of the Beirut/Berlin-based MENA Prison Forum, curating a regional living archive that brings together former detainees, artists, and researchers through exhibitions, film screenings, and public events.
Dr. Myriam Dalal is a Research Associate currently affiliated with Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work draws on participatory practices, public history, and artistic research to document absence and silence in contexts of political violence. At the newly established Migrant Futures Institute, she leads the project The Virtual House of the Rejected, which proposes co-creating an affective archive with survivors, witnesses, and family members of people who went missing in the Mediterranean Sea over the past decade. Following her PhD in Arts and Sciences of Art from Sorbonne University in France, Dalal concluded a postdoctoral fellowship in public history, co-production, and participatory practices at the University of Luxembourg. She also served as a public history and outreach consultant for the public history axis at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History, where she managed multiple projects across the Global South.
Dr. Njoki Wamai Dr Njoki Wamai is an Assistant Professor in Politics and a feminist activist, and Pan-africanist whose work has focused on marginalized peoples everyday practices, African feminisms,human rights movements, post-conflict transitional justice, women rights and African politics using Critical, Feminist and Decolonial approaches. She has been a post graduate fellow at POLIS University of Cambridge where she obtained her PhD, an Iso-Lomso Fellow at Stellenbosch Insitute of Advanced Studies and Dean School of Politics, Policy and Governance (SPPG). She is a member of the management committee at Ukombozi Library and recently published with Ukombozi coordinator Kimani Waweru and Wairumu Gathimba at the Revolutionary Papers, 15 November 2025 on “Regimes and Resistance: Kenyan Resistance History Through Underground and Alternative Publications”
Dr. Njuki Githethwa is a Kenyan writer and activist scholar. His field of specialization is on revolution and social movements in Africa and in related post – independence contexts. Njuki is associated with two progressive libraries and archives in Nairobi. Ukombozi Library and Mashujaa Heritage Archives & Library. Ukombozi is a socialist library while Mashujaa Archives & Library is a physical and online space to document, archive, historicize and nurture people’s struggles and social movements in Kenya. He also serves as Managing Editor of Ukombozi Review Magazine whose mission is to amplify, reflect and connect people’s struggles based on progressive perspectives and Pan Africanism. He is also associated with Comrades Bookhouse, a literary collective in Kenya that specializes in nurturing and promotion of African literature. This is besides his association with the UK based Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) as a Contributing Editor. He is also an adjunct Lecturer at American University – Nairobi.
Prof. Noor Nieftagodien is the NRF South African Research Chair in Local Histories,Present Realities and is the Head of the History Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand. He has authored and co-edited books on histories of Alexandra, Ekurhuleni and Kathorus, Orlando West, the Soweto uprising, student politics, the African National Congress and the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union. His numerous published articles and book chapters have focused on aspects of popular insurgent struggles, public history, youth politics and local history, and is currently researching the history of the Congress of South African Students. Nieftagodien serves on the boards of the South African History Archives (SAHA), the Alternative Information and Development Centre (AIDC) and the Socio-Economic Rights Institute (SERI), as well as of the journals, African Studies, Sources, the book series, Traces, and the activist magazine, Amandla! He is involved in several public history projects, including the Soweto History and Archives Project, the Non-Racial Sports History Project and the development of activist archives.
Dr. Sa’eed Husaini is a researcher, organizer, and educator. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Center for Democracy and Development in Abuja Nigeria, where he leads a project to digitize the family-held archives of Nigerian left and pro-democracy activists from the 1940s – 1990s. His research examines how the economic and political transition at the end of the 20th century remapped the ideological spectrum in Nigeria. He holds a DPhil in International Development from the University of Oxford and was a 2023 Fellow of the African Humanities Program, supported by the American Council for Learned Societies. He has previously held research and teaching positions at the Universities of Oxford, Lagos, and Ghana. He is also a regional editor for Africa is a Country and has published on Nigerian left papers for Revolutionary Papers in a year long series with Africa is a Country.
Thomas Cauvin is Professor of Public History at the University of Luxembourg’s Centre for Contemporary and Digital History. He is a FNR-ATTRACT Fellow and leads thePublic History as the New Citizen Science of the Past(PHACS) project. Cauvin is the Director of the Master in Digital and Public History (MADiPH) and has been the President of theInternational Federation for Public History from 2018 to 2021. He received his PhD from the European University Institute (Florence, Italy, 2012) and worked for several years in the United States at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (2013-2017) and Colorado State University (2017-2020). He is the author ofPublic History. A Textbook of Practice (Routledge, 2022, second edition)
Zahid Rajan is a publisher (www.zandpress.com), by profession and has been Executive Editor of AwaaZ Magazine and the Samosa Festival for 25 years. He is an active citizen and a member of the Human Rights and Civil Society space in Kenya and Internationally and is a founder member of the Kenya Palestine Solidarity Movement. One of his current projects is the continuous digitization of Kenyan cartoons from 1986 to the present. He is a member of a Panafrican platform for recognition and promotion of Kenyan and African cartoons and tries to raise awareness of and resources for Kenyan cartoonists in particular.