Faculty of Science, Technology and Medicine
Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance
Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences
Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust
Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine
Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History
Luxembourg Centre for European Law
Luxembourg Centre for Socio-Environmental Systems
This talk draws on the work of African Digital Heritage to examine what public history looks like when it is built from the ground up, by and with African communities. It traces the political, ethical, and practical dimensions of digital heritage work on the continent: who owns the power to tell history, the risks of digitization without safeguard, and the possibilities that open up when communities are treated as the primary authors of their own (hi)stories. It makes the case that digital tools, used with intention, empathy, and a commitment to community sovereignty, are powerful instruments of truth-telling, cultural reclamation, and ancestral intelligence.
About the speaker
Mutanu Kyany’a is a cultural technologist, digital society scholar, and Director of Research and Programs at African Digital Heritage (ADH), a Nairobi-based non-profit working at the intersection of technology and African cultural heritage. With a background in Computer Science and a specialisation in community development and digital cultures, her work is fuelled by a curiosity about how communities gather online, what stories they tell, what infrastructures shape those acts of telling, and how those spaces become sites where African communities actively re-document, interrogate, and reclaim their (hi)stories on their own terms.