Wakati Wetu Festival (Kenya)

Wakati Wetu Festival is Africa’s first reparations festival. Held in Nairobi from 22 to 23 October 2025. The two-day gathering brought together artists, activists, policymakers, scholars, cultural workers, civil society actors, philanthropists, and communities to advance reparatory justice through art, public dialogue, strategy, and collective imagination. “Wakati Wetu” means “our time” in Swahili.

The festival was convened in response to the African Union’s 2025 theme on justice for Africans and people of African descent through reparations. It also marked the beginning of a wider cultural and political process linked to the African Union’s Decade of Reparations, running from 2026 to 2036.

For too long, reparations have been treated as a technical debate. They have been confined to legal, academic, and policy spaces, while the lived consequences of slavery, colonialism, extraction, racial capitalism, and ongoing structural inequality continue to shape African lives.

Wakati Wetu responds to this gap. The festival recognizes that reparatory justice needs public power. It needs culture, memory, storytelling, legal strategy, community, and political imagination. It also recognizes that the reparations movement in Africa has not fully drawn on the power of artists, cultural workers, storytellers, and creative communities to shift public consciousness.