Archive

Dr. Joanna Wasilewska is an art historian and museologist, vice-president of the National Committee of ICOM (International Council of Museums) Poland, and member of the Polish Institute of World Art Studies. She also teaches at the university level. Her research interests include intercultural relations as reflected in art, fashion, and museum collections. From 2013 to 2023, she served as Director of the Asia and Pacific Museum in Warsaw, where she introduced major changes, including the museum’s first permanent exhibition project and a critical shift in its approach to collections. She is currently a member of the committee for the interdisciplinary Costume Studies Conference, scheduled for October 2025 in Warsaw, and has been collaborating with the Polish Institute in Belgrade since 2023.

Emilia Epštajn obtained her BA in Ethnology and Anthropology at the Faculty of Philosophy, and MA in Culture and Gender Studies at the Faculty of Political Sciences (University of Belgrade). She has developed as a curator primarily through her work at the Museum of African Art in Belgrade and currently serves on the executive board of ICOM Serbia. Her recent projects and research-exhibitions have explored feminist perspectives on archives, the cultural heritage of the Non-Aligned Movement, decolonisation within museum practice, as well as the history of African art collections and issues of restitution and repatriation. Her writing has been published in exhibition catalogues and academic journals, and she also works extensively as a translator in the fields of museology, feminist studies, and art theory. She was a co-curator of the project "Hope is Discipline", a segment of the 60th October Salon (2024). She has been awarded the Reconstruction Women’s Fund “Žarana Papić” Stipend (2011) and is an alumna of the Robert Anderson Research Charitable Trust (UK, 2007) and the Open World Leadership Program (U.S. Congress, 2022).

Dr. Tina Palaić is an anthropologist and museologist who holds the position of the Head of the Curatorial Department at the Slovene Ethnographic Museum in Ljubljana. Her research interests include investigating colonial projects and their afterlives from the perspective of the European periphery, as revealed through museum collections. She is also interested in the role of heritage in ethnic and minority communities, the management of non-European collections, and the decolonization of museums in Central, Eastern, and Southeast Europe. Tina is currently working with missionary collections from Asia and exploring new possibilities for their museum interpretation. At the same time, she is collaborating with the Roma community to create a Roma heritage archive. Tina has completed a PhD at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Ljubljana, where she explored ethnological and museological practices of knowledge production on non-European cultures that emerged during the Non-Aligned Movement in Slovenia. She has published numerous scientific and professional articles in both Slovenian and foreign journals, presented at national and international conferences, and organized exhibitions and various events. Among her exhibitions are: Intertwined Worlds: The Non-European Collections in the Time of the Non-Aligned Movement (2024), White Gold: Stories of Cotton (2023), Africa and Slovenia: A Web of People and Objects (2018), Birth: Experiences of Roma Women (2015).

This presentation examines the complex process of decolonization in Central, Eastern and South Eastern European museums by focusing on the case of the Slovene Ethnographic Museum. It argues that these regions hold an ambivalent historical position, simultaneously being subjects of imperial oppression and, to some extent, participants in the colonial project. The resulting ambivalences are explored through an analysis of museum narratives on non-European peoples and cultures during the Yugoslav era. These discourses clearly show how museum collections can be used to understand the "Heart of Darkness" trope, the lens that enabled these regions to participate in the exploitation of resources and people from other continents. The author focuses on the Museum of Non-European Cultures, a dislocated unit of the Slovene Ethnographic Museum, that operated from 1964 to 2001 in the Goričane mansion near Ljubljana. As the first museum in Yugoslavia dedicated to exhibiting primarily non-European collections, it played a central role in shaping narratives about "the other", including the reproduction of ideas from earlier periods. By analysing the museum's own and visiting exhibitions, the author reveals how its discourses reflected a complex ambivalence toward both developing countries and the West. On the one hand, they sought to build solidarity with other cultures, but on the other, they worked to create distance and reinforce a national identity that aligned with the "civilized West."

A view of the exhibition "Africa in the Collections of the Slovene Ethnographic Museum"
at the Goričane mansion in 1966. SEM Documentation.

Agata Stasińska works in the Gallery of Art 12th–15th cent. at the National Museum in Wrocław and is a PhD candidate in Cultural Science at the University of Wrocław. A member of ICOM Poland, she was the head of a grant-funded project researching archival materials from the museum’s medieval art collection and has published widely both scholarly and popular articles. Her research interests include late Gothic sculpture in Silesia, medieval piety and devotion, and provenance research; she also studies German ethnology, decolonization, and non-European art in Breslau—particularly the collections of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in pre-war Wrocław. She co-curated the exhibition Entangled – Historical Non-European Ethnographic Collection of the University of Wrocław.

The presentation will focus on African artifacts that, before World War II, formed part of the collection at the University of Wrocław, Poland (formerly Breslau, in the German Empire). Although this city has long been overlooked in discussions of colonialism, it once housed several thousand non-European objects, including a substantial number of African artworks and crafts. A significant portion of these objects, having fortunately survived the war, are now held in Warsaw. The talk will explore how these artifacts arrived in Silesia and identify the individuals responsible for acquiring them. It will also take a closer look at the objects themselves — the criteria for their selection and the ways in which they were managed. Tracing these threads offers an opportunity to better understand the complex, multi-layered history of the collection and its deep connection to the history of Breslau/Wrocław.

Wooden stool from Cameroon, University of Wrocław. Photo: Marcin Szala

Dr. Robert Piętek is a Professor at the Institute of History, University of Siedlce, Poland. His researches focus on the history of Pre-colonia Africa, and European – African relation, especially on the history of the Kingdom of Congo. He wrote books: Garcia II władca Konga a Kościół katolicki (Garcia II king of Congo and Catholic Church) Warszawa 2009, Bunty i rewolty w Kongu w pierwszej połowie XVII w. (Mutines and Riots in Congo in the first Half of the 17th Century) Siedlce 2021. He is currently conducting research on transformation in the ideology of power in the Kingdom of Congo.

The aim of the presentation is to show the consequences of establishing contacts between Africa and Europe in the pre-colonial period on the example of Congo. In 2016, the documentary film "Kimpa Vita Mother of African Revolution" by Ne Kunda Nlab was made, the same director made the film "Kingdom of Congo: In Search of the Destroyed Kingdom" in 2020. In both films, he tries to prove that the Portuguese destroyed the local rich culture, and similarly contributed to the collapse of the state. These views are recognized by many people interested in Africa. Historical sources indicate, however, that the Portuguese were unable to subjugate the Congo in the pre-colonial period, and that the Congolese rulers and political elites willingly and voluntarily adopted a number of European patterns. In 1491 the ruler voluntarily was baptized, and from that moment on, Christianity became an important part of the ideology of power. The Congolese elites, as well as a large part of the population, considered themselves Christians and were perceived as such by Europeans. In the pre-colonial period in the Congo, as in other parts of Africa, Europeans did not have the resources to impose their will.

Bart Ouvry has been Director General of the AfricaMuseum in Tervuren since May 2023. He studied history and communications at Ghent University and has been a Belgian diplomat since 1986. He has served in the Middle East, Europe and Africa - particularly in multilateral posts such as the IAEA in Vienna, the United Nations in Geneva, UNEP in Nairobi and the Council of the European Union in Brussels. At the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he was spokesman and Director of Human Rights and Democracy. He was Belgium's Ambassador to Nairobi and then the European Union's Ambassador to Kinshasa and then to Bamako. Throughout his career he has been passionate about cultural and scientific cooperation, which is one of the main thrusts of his current mandate in Tervuren.

The AfricaMuseum in Tervuren was created in 1898 by Leopold II, Belgian king and also the self appointed sovereign and owner of the Congo Free State. In a context of exploitation of rubber with a terrible impact on the population this was an instrument of local propaganda. Today we are in the process of reinventing this Museum within the historic walls of the colonial museum. This is both a challenge and a blessing. The pictural language of colonial propaganda is part of our infrastructure and collections: this allows us to demonstrate and deconstruct this language. Surveys show that this deconstruction is not an easy task and when denouncing colonial language there is always the risk of reproducing colonial language and thus repeating past mistakes or manipulation. Our upcoming temporary exhibition on a Congopanorama dating back to 1913 strives to efficiently deconstruct and document colonial propaganda. While museums traditionally use text boxes to explain the background of certain images, this proves more often than not to be ineffective. First and foremost the mediation of professional guides is an efficient way of accompanying visitors and showing how ‘fake news’ was produced in colonial times. Counter-images and particularly images and testimony by descendants of colonized people are also particularly efficient.

Max Cegielski is a writer, journalist, and curator. He is the author of several novels and works of reportage, including Oko Świata. Od Konstantynopola do Stambułu, for which he received the Beata Pawlak Award. He also serves as a member of the Management Board of the Unia Literacka Association. As a curator, he has developed a number of art projects, including the exhibition Sklep Polsko-Indyjski/Prince Polonia, co-curated with Janek Simon and presented at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Clark House Initiative in Mumbai, and TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art in Szczecin (2017–2018). He is currently collaborating with Simon on the research project and exhibition One Man Does Not Rule a Nation, which explores Polish–Ghanaian relations in the 1960s and has been presented at the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, TRAFO Szczecin, FCA Ghana, Red Clay Studio in Tamale, and the Museum of African Art in Belgrade.

The colonial ambivalence embodied in Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad also reflects Poland’s own position within global networks of geography and power. While Chinua Achebe denounced Conrad as a “bloody racist,” the novella continues to provoke widely divergent interpretations. Conrad himself left his homeland at a time when, in the 19th century, Poland was effectively a colony of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Prussian empires. After regaining independence in 1918, Poland even dreamed of acquiring its own overseas territories. This colonial aspiration was evident in the activities of the Maritime and Colonial League and in Tadeusz Dębicki’s book Moienzi Nzadi. At the Gate of the Congo, which directly references Conrad. After World War II, and especially following Stalin’s death, socialist internationalism redefined Poland’s foreign policy, fostering new relations of solidarity with decolonizing countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. A striking symbol of this anti-colonial turn was the Sword Monument dedicated to Kwame Nkrumah, erected in Ghana in 1965 by the sculptor Alina Ślesińska.

Dr. Nemanja Radonjić is an Assistant Professor at the Contemporary History, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade where he teaches courses on the Cold War, colonialism and anticolonialism, and imagology. He is also a research associate at the Institute for Recent History of Serbia. He has been engaged with a number of international projects (Socialism Goes Global, University of Exeter, Changing Representations of Socialist Yugoslavia, Humboldt University). He is the co-leader of COST action working group on the project National Identification Documents in European History (University of Maynouth), has published nationally and internationally with publishers including De Gruyter, Bloomsbury, and McGill–Queen’s University Press, and has presented at over a dozen international conferences in cities such as Graz, Budapest, Leipzig, Berlin, Singapore, Copenhagen, Prague, Paris, and Pisa. He has been an invited lecturer at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Belgrade and in Global Studies at the University of Bologna. His research focuses on the intersections of global and Cold War history, with particular emphasis on imagology and anticolonial networks in the Mediterranean. Notable publications include: Slika Afrike u Jugoslaviji [ Image of Africa in Yugoslavia], Institut za noviju istoriju Srbije, Beograd, 2023, 530 str. ISBN 978-86-7005-184-3; Radonjić Nemanja, Anticolonial Constellations: All African Student Conference in Belgrade 1962, (ed.) Dallywater, Lena, Eastern Europe, Soviet Union and African Decolonization, Berlin-Boston, De Gruyter, 2023., 263-289; La Yougoslavie "globale" et le "monde non aligné": quelques observations préliminaires en vue d’une future recherche, Balkanologie. Revue d’etudes pluridisciplinaires, Vol. 17, no 2, 2022.

Yugoslavs learned about the Congo through both foreign and domestic literature. Alongside the appearance of Heart of Darkness came works such as Serbian Letters from the Congo, so that both imported and homegrown accounts shaped an image of a distant, unfamiliar land that often came to stand for the entire African continent. During the era of decolonization and the Cold War, the Congo moved to the center of colonial–anticolonial debates. Yugoslavia emerged as an “unexpected” actor in this crisis, and its travelogues reveal a distinctly Yugoslav perspective on these events and a particular way of remembering the Congo.

Dr. Kosta Dinić

Dr. Elżbieta Binczycka-Gacek is an Assistant Professor of cultural studies at the Institute of Intercultural Studies, Jagiellonian University. She is actively involved in the Critical Heritage Studies Hub at JU and the Jagiellonian Research Centre for African Studies. She specializes in Black studies and postcolonial studies. Her research examines the heritage of slavery, Afrofuturism, West African literature, and the intersections of race, myth, and cultural memory. She has published widely on identity and representation in postcolonial and speculative fiction, and conducted field research on LGBTQ+ activism in Africa, the difficult memory of slavery and refugee experiences. She currently leads a project on musealization of slavery heritage in the U.S. South funded by the Polish National Science Centre (NCN).

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) has long provoked conflicting interpretations: celebrated as a modernist critique of imperialism, yet condemned for its dehumanizing portrayal of Africans. Chinua Achebe’s famous lecture and later essay, An Image of Africa (1975) crystallized this tension by accusing Conrad of racism. Achebe shows how the novella systematically strips Africans of speech, individuality, and cultural identity. They appear not as characters but as a collective backdrop against which European figures enact their moral struggles. Africa is reduced to a metaphorical “other world,” a site of “prehistory” and irrationality, existing only in relation to Europe. For Achebe, this denial of African humanity is not incidental but structural: Conrad’s prose depends on the dehumanization of Africans to dramatize the spiritual crisis of Europe. This makes Heart of Darkness complicit in perpetuating colonial stereotypes, even as it denounces imperial violence. Achebe asks whether a novel that renders an entire race mute and subhuman deserves to be considered a great work of art. This lecture revisits Achebe’s critique to explore how it reshaped the reception of Heart of Darkness and continues to challenge us to confront the ethical consequences of its racial imagination.

Isidora Ilić and Boško Prostran work under the name of doplgenger artist duo. Their practice revolves around the relation between art and politics by exploring the regimes of moving images and the modes of their reception. doplgenger relies on the tradition of experimental and avant-garde film and through some of the actions of these traditions intervene on the existing media products or work in expanded cinema forms. Although their main media is moving images, their work is realised through the text, installations, performances, lectures and discussions. Works of doplgenger are in public collections in Serbia and have been shown internationally at art institutions and film festivals. Ilić and Prostran coedited the publication Amateurs for Film (Belgrade, 2017) and Film and Struggle (Belgrade, 2025). They are recipients of fellowships and artists residences, film awards and the Politika Award „Vladislav Ribnikar”.

In this lecture-performance, the artist duo doplgenger engages with landscape as a site of ideological inscription and a mirror of political power. Drawing on their artistic research and video installation, the work interrogates how landscapes shaped by extractivism reflect divergent socio-economic regimes—particularly the contrast between the visible labor inscriptions of socialist industrial landscapes and the erasure of such traces in liberal-capitalist contexts.

By combining newly produced footage with archival material, doplgenger situates extractive processes within a longue durée framework, considering the “deep history” of minerals alongside the visual and political economies of the 20th century. The project brings into dialogue contemporary scenes of mining and environmental degradation with historical moments such as the 1935 Wallachian uprising—understood as one of the first environmental protests in Europe—and archival segments from the Yugoslav television series Anti-colonial Struggle.

The work conceptualizes the audiovisual archive not as a neutral repository, but as a contested terrain through which fragmented, resistant, and non-linear narratives may emerge. Through this lens, doplgenger foregrounds the political potential of the image, tracing a trajectory from colonial extractivism through socialist emancipation projects to the neo-colonial conditions underpinning present-day extractive operations in Serbia. The lecture-performance thus intervenes in broader discourses on post-socialism, media archaeology, and environmental humanities, offering a critical re-reading of both historical and contemporary visual regimes of resource extraction.

Elizabeth Asafo-Adjei is Senior Curator at the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board, specialising in fine art collections and research-based exhibition development. Her curatorial projects include Unsettling the Dust (2021), Stitching Cultures Together, and Ghana 1957: Art After Independence, which forms the basis of her ongoing research into Ghana’s post-independence visual culture. She mentors emerging museum professionals and presented at the 19th Triennial ACASA Conference. A member of BlaxTARLINES KNUST and the MuseumsLab 2024 Curatorial Team, she engages in pan-African curatorial collaborations. An alumna of ITP 2019 and IVLP 2024, she is co-leading the establishment of Ghana’s Parliamentary Museum.

Ghana 1957: Art, Independence, Liberation explores the impact of Ghana’s independence on African, Ghanaian, and Black artistic expression from the 1950s to the 1970s, and its global resonance today. It examines postcolonial art infrastructures, Pan-Africanism, U.S. Civil Rights, and Cold War cultural diplomacy through works by Ghanaian, African-American, and contemporary artists. The exhibition positions Ghanaian contemporary art within a deep historical lineage, challenging market narratives of spontaneous emergence and affirming its roots in a rich independence-era artistic legacy. The presentation will cover the following sections: Arts of Independence investigates Kwame Nkrumah’s use of art to shape national identity, featuring commissioned works, state photography, and parallel artistic voices within the celebratory post-independence atmosphere. Art and Liberation on the International Stage traces Ghana’s influence on American artists and political movements, alongside cultural diplomacy exchanges with both U.S. and Eastern Bloc nations. Art Practices and Pedagogy considers post-independence educational reforms and debates over decolonial aesthetics, blending local traditions with global exchanges. Transatlantic Dialogues documents personal and institutional relationships between Ghanaian and African-American artists, fostering enduring cross-cultural exchange. Reverberations focuses on contemporary works reflecting on independence-era ideals, highlighting the continuity between Ghana’s pioneering artists and today’s vibrant art scene, including collectives like blaxTARLINES.

Ernest Vincent Asihene, A Peep into the Future, 1963, 32.5 cm x 42.2 cm, watercolour and gouache

Dr. Patrick Laviolette is a researcher on the project Czechs & the Colonial World: Art, Design and Visual Culture since 1848 at the Centre for Modern Art History, Masaryk University, Czech Republic. He is an anthropologist specializing in material and visual culture studies, political ecology, and the history of science. Co-editor of Ethnologia Europaea, his notable publications include: Hitchhiking: Cultural Inroads (Palgrave); Repair, Brokenness, Breakthroughs (Berghahn, with Fran Martínez); Things in Culture, Culture in Things (Tartu University Press, with Anu Kannike); and Mana and Māori Culture (in History & Anthropology). His current research focuses on decolonial “car-culture” issues, alongside a biographical project on the life of Raymond Firth.

anna řičář libanská is currently a researcher at Masaryk University, Brno (Centre for Modern Art and Theory: Czechs and the Colonial World: Design and Visual Culture since 1848 (GX25-15630X) - the project led by Matthew Rampley), and a PhD candidate at the Center for Ibero-American Studies at Charles University, Prague (dissertation topic: Representation of Native American masculinities in Czech popular culture between 1948-1989). She is also affiliated with the Centre for African Studies at Charles University. Her research interests include: representations of otherness in Czech (pop)culture; gender; and contemporary reflections of colonialism. She has been a co-author on two publications which will be out in 2025: Historia oculta – Representación de la mujer en la conquista y colonización del Nuevo mundo and Hlasy dekoloniálního feminismu (Voices of Decolonial Feminism – an anthology of collaborative translations of decolonial feminist texts into Czech). Activism: She is a co-founder of Kroužek Intersekce (Intersection Circle) – an independent space for shared learning, and a collective that organizes collective readings in Prague, primarily focused on intersectional feminist texts. Together with other members of the collective, she is now involved in preparations for the side program of the Prague Biennale 2026. She is also involved in Dekrim (a collective for the decriminalization of sex work). In the past, she was one of the initiators of the Manifesto of Decolonization (Manifest dekolonizace), co-organized the first Mad Pride in Prague, and she has been active in various feminist collectives for years.

Czechs and the Colonial World: Design and Visual Culture since 1848 (GX25-15630X)

In Czechoslovak representations of Africa, motorised road vehicles became a literal and symbolic embodiment of colonial modernity. They offered a means of exploring, controlling and aestheticising various African landscapes, whilst reinforcing the idea of a clear divide between modern, mobile Europeans and “static/backward” African people. Travelling to Africa during the (long/short) 20th century reveals more about Czechoslovak travellers than the people they encountered. The continent served as a projection screen – a performative manifestation for staging Central European modernity, nationalisms and other ideologies/identities, which were articulated through contrast and imagined “conquest.” The motorcar’s aesthetic and technological prowess for rapid (almost limitless) mobility has mediated many of these imaginaries, often into boundless roadscapes. Drawing on examples from book and magazine sketches/photographs, across exhibitions and pop-culture imagery, the “multi-media” presentation outline will, among other things, highlight: 20th-century colonial systems and Czechoslovakia; Adventure, science and propaganda: Historical-political context; Imagined contrasts between modernity and backwardness: Vehicles & visual culture; etc.

Dr. Nikola Krstović is an Associate Professor at the University of Belgrade – Faculty of Philosophy, where he teaches Museology and Heritage Studies. He also lectures at the Universities of Arts in Belgrade and Ljubljana. He has been awarded several international research grants and has held visiting lectureships in Poland, Slovakia, the USA, and France. Alongside his academic career, Krstović worked as a curator for 12 years. In 2017, he received the Museum Professional of the Year Award from ICOM Serbia, where he later served as Chair from 2019 to 2023. He authored the publication Nine Lives of a Curator: From Museology to Museography (2022), and museum exhibitions between 2014–2016: Frontiers in Retreat (2016); Heritage (in a) Supermarket (2018); and Code: Gender. His research projects include Museum OFF Boundaries (USA, 2017), East & W/Rest (Poland, 2017), I-Deal Museum (Slovakia, 2024), and Reality of Nows (Poland, 2024). His current work, Fluidity of Museality – I-Deal Museum deals with reviving the philosophy of the Eastern European school of museology, with a focus on rediscovering anticolonial mindsets.

The presentation explores how narrative stereotypes about slavery and colonialism—once rooted in overt racial hierarchies—have often been reshaped into subtler forms of classism that persist within museum programming and operations, particularly in the United States. It examines how the legacy of the third American president, Thomas Jefferson, and his successors has been "imagineered" into heritage interpretation, reflecting the enduring influence of racial and colonial mindsets within the cultural power structures of museum outreach. The case study of Colonial Williamsburg, the largest living history museum in the world, serves as a primary lens for this investigation. Through an analysis of its management strategies and interpretive frameworks, the presentation highlights how historical narratives are curated, negotiated, and, at times, sanitized to maintain institutional authority and visitor appeal. Performative programs such as Jefferson and Jupiter and The Road to Redemption exemplify how these narratives are staged, revealing tensions between historical accuracy, public engagement, and contemporary calls for decolonization. By situating these examples within a broader comparative context, the presentation questions how museums can move beyond inherited stereotypes and foster critical reflection, ultimately challenging audiences to reimagine how heritage is interpreted in a post-colonial and socially conscious ecosystem.

Dr. Hanna Rubinkowska-Anioł is an Africanist historian and professor at the Department of African Languages and Cultures of the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Warsaw. Her scholarly interests focus on the history of modern Ethiopia, particularly Ethiopian political culture. She explores the symbolism and legitimisation of power from the late 19th century to the present day. Her research includes studies on iconographic representations of authority, the spatial dimensions of power, and the concept of power in space from a longue durée perspective. These themes are explored in depth in her monograph Ethiopia Between Tradition and Modernity: The Symbolism of the Coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie I (Elipsa, 2016), which analyzes the 1930 coronation as a carefully staged ritual of imperial legitimacy. In addition, she has co-edited several volumes that expand on the intersections between art, orality, and cultural expression in Africa. Notably, The Art, the Oral and the Written Intertwined in African Cultures (Tako, 2020), part of the series The Artistic Traditions of Non-European Cultures, which investigates the layered nature of African communication systems through material, spoken, and textual forms. She served for many years as chairperson and currently acts as deputy chairperson of the Polish African Society. She is also a member of the board of the Polish Institute of World Art Studies.

The western borderlands of Ethiopia were incorporated into the Ethiopian Empire at the end of the 19th century. To the imperial center, these territories were valued for their abundant water resources and fertile land. However, the people inhabiting these regions were often viewed as outsiders, marginalized within the broader Ethiopian society. Well into the 20th century, these areas remained a source of enslaved labor, reflecting deep-seated social hierarchies and exclusion. Today, the western borderlands remain peripheral in both geographic and political terms, despite the strategic importance of major infrastructure projects like the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, located on the Blue Nile near Ethiopia’s western frontier.

This presentation explores the complex and often fraught relationship between the Ethiopian state and the populations of the western borderlands, examining historical patterns of incorporation, marginalization, and contested development.

Dr. Nagmeldin Karamalla-Gaiballa is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Warsaw. His research spans political science, African studies, and migration, with a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and the Gulf States. He is the author of Obstacles to Democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa (Springer, 2025) and The Conflicts in Darfur: Causes, Motives and Possible Solutions. Dr. Karamalla-Gaiballa has published extensively on democratization, conflict, and postcolonial statehood. He currently researches the geopolitical dimensions of the armed conflict in Sudan.

This presentation examines Africa as a political construct, shaped by colonial power and sustained through systems of representation and silence that still influence Sub-Saharan political realities. It argues that colonialism was not only a project of territorial domination but also one of symbolic control, producing narratives that homogenized the continent and marginalized indigenous voices. The discussion is organized around three core themes. First, the colonial invention of “Africa” as a unified yet oversimplified geopolitical and cultural entity obscured historical and ethnic diversity, serving strategic and ideological aims. Second, the politics of silence practiced by colonial administrations and later by some postcolonial regimes suppressed alternative histories, dissenting perspectives, and narratives challenging dominant identities. Third, contemporary postcolonial identity struggles reveal tensions between inherited colonial frameworks and emerging movements for decolonization, pan-African unity, and the recovery of indigenous epistemologies. Drawing on postcolonial theory, historical analysis, and discourse studies, the presentation highlights the deep entanglement between Africa’s political identity and colonial legacies. It calls for reclaiming the continent’s narrative from within, fostering plural and self-defined visions that reject imposed representations and empower Africa to redefine its place in global politics.

Sekhou Sidi Diawara is a PhD student in International Relations at the Faculty of Political Science in Belgrade. Originally from Mali, he graduated in anthropology and, after defending his master’s thesis, enrolled in the Faculty of Political Science to pursue his doctoral studies. His dissertation focuses on religion and democracy in the Sahel countries - Mali, Niger, and Senegal - from a comparative perspective. Since 2022, he has published several articles in scientific journals, including Revue Internationale Donni in 2024. Since May 2022, he has also been working as an interpreter and cultural mediator at the Center for Youth Integration.

Colonization profoundly transformed pre-colonial African societies and political institutions, disrupting the traditional structures that underpinned societies, imposing a colonial administrative system that was often out of step with realities, and above all leaving a legacy of tension around territorial and identity claims throughout West Africa. As a result, since independence, most West African countries have suffered from chronic political and institutional crises. Yet before colonization, Africa was home to great empires (Mali, Great Zimbabwe, Kingdom of Congo, etc.) with sophisticated political systems, balanced social organization mechanisms, trans-Saharan trade networks, and intellectual contributions, such as the University of Timbuktu. The Kurunka-Fuga Charter (1235), which, like the Magna Carta (1215) laid the foundations of modern law for the British, set the stage for the political organization of a modern society, whose postulates continue to influence Mali today. However, the history and political systems of Africa before colonization do not seem to be sufficiently well known. They seem to have been forgotten or deliberately ignored. This is why former French President Nicolas Sarkozy stated in Dakar in July 2007 that Africa has not sufficiently entered into history. This discussion will therefore first seek to shed light on the political institutions of Mali (the Mandinka Empire) prior to colonization, drawing on the Kurunga-Fuga Charter. And this will be followed by an elucidation of the consequences of the colonial period on political institutions through the dismantling of traditional structures.

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