At festival in Kenya, artists and writers discuss role arts can play in continent’s growing push for redress over colonial crimes

• More than money: the logic of slavery reparations

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.