A practical workshop led by Koni Benson (Revolutionary Papers) and Wairimu Gathimba (Ukombozi Library), focused on how to teach radical African and Black anti-colonial histories using digital tools and archival materials.

June 27, 2025 McMillan Memorial Library, Banda Street, Nairobi, Kenya.

The workshop is organised and facilitated by Koni Benson (Revolutionary Papers) and Wairimu Gathimba (Ukombozi Library), featuring fellow makers of the Ukombozi digital teaching tool Njoki Wamai (Ukombozi Library) & Kimani Waweru (Ukombozi Library). They will be joined by a panel featuring Hon. Yusuf Hassan, who was part of the MWAKENYA/UKENYA movements; Mwongela Kamencu of Ukombozi Review; and Mutanu Kyany’a of African Digital Heritage, all who have worked in different capacities as cultural workers and curators of counterhegemonic histories.

Facilitators and speakers:

Koni Benson is a historian, organiser, and educator. She is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape. Her research focuses on collective interventions in histories of contested development and the mobilisation, demobilisation, and remobilisation of struggle history in southern Africa’s past and present. This involves working with various archives and coproducing life histories of self-organisation and unfolding political struggles of collective resistance against displacement and for access to land and public services (such as water, housing, and education) in South Africa.

Wairimu Gathimba is a writer and researcher within Kenya’s social justice movement. She is a member of Ukombozi Library and it’s offshoot the Kenya Organic Intellectuals Network. She is currently working as a research assistant on the global corridor project, which seeks to challenge the high modernist ways infrastructural projects are conceptualized by showing how these visions are often complicated by unconsidered realities on the ground, highlighting the need for the development of more inclusive development visions.

Njoki Wamai PhD, is an Assistant Professor in Politics and International Relations at USIU-A in Nairobi and member of the Ukombozi Management Committee. Her work has mainly focused on power and citizenship in the context of international interventions like the ICC and transitional justice in Africa, African feminisms and decolonial research practices. Her PhD focused on politics of international intervention in Kenya during the ICC intervention and she continues to research and consult on ethnicity, conflict, reconciling divided societies, gender and Decolonising Knowledge by questioning Eurocentric paradigms through African realities.

Mwongela Kamencu “Monaja” is a young Kenyan performing/recording artist whose style of music mostly fuses the sounds of African instruments with contemporary styles of music. Trained as a historian and previously a history lecturer, his music addresses sociopolitical themes often with a touch of humour. He has worked closely with leftist movements in Kenya and Tanzania for more than a decade and has had artistic engagements with citizens of both countries over the same period. His recently released album – June 25th – highlights the 2024 uprising by the Kenyan youth against Kenya’s political elite and their benefactors.

Mutanu Kyany’a is a digital society scholar who works with African communities to identify how they can use technology to protect, preserve and promote their culture and heritage assets. She has extensive experience in designing holistic digital approaches that support research and innovation that centre the needs and realities of communities in the cultural heritage sector in Kenya.