BIEA Graduate Forum

Name: BIEA Graduate Forum
Start: 2025-10-30
End: 2025-10-30
Location: British Institute in Eastern Africa

We invite you to join the discussion on:

Reckoning with the Past – The Place of Historical Injustices in Contemporary Scholarship, Cultural Restitution, and Reparatory Justice in Kenya

with Godfrey K. Sang, Ph.D, historian, researcher, writer and published author with a focus on East African cultural, political, and socio-economic history

Abstract
Historical injustices constitute a central analytic category in contemporary Kenyan scholarship, particularly within debates on coloniality, restitution, and reparatory justice. Far from static episodes of the past, they persist as structural legacies embedded in land tenure, cultural heritage, and extractive economies. This talk interrogates the epistemological and political stakes of engaging historical injustices in twenty-first-century scholarship, foregrounding the Talai and Kipsigis communities of Kenya as a paradigmatic case. Drawing on archival and field research research, policy taskforces, and community advocacy, it examines the intersecting dynamics of land alienation, forced displacement, and the agro-colonial tea economy, situating them within global debates on the restitution of human remains, decolonial heritage, and reparations. I argue for an interdisciplinary praxis – bridging history, law, political economy, and memory studies – that both theorizes and actively participates in projects of cultural restitution and reparatory justice. In so doing, the humanities can reconfigure the normative boundaries of historical inquiry and serve as a vital interlocutor in struggles for justice and cultural healing.