The 4th Africa Media Festival (external link) convened in Nairobi, Kenya, from 25 to 26 February 2026. Baraza Media Lab (external link)hosted the event under the theme “Resilient Storytelling: Reimagining Media Freedom.” This festival allowed journalists, editors, and civil society actors to address newsroom sustainability, artificial intelligence, and the rising legal pressures facing reporters.
For AfaLab, the festival provided a vital space to analyze how media shapes public understanding of colonial injustice and restitution. Our team reconnected with Kenya-based AfaRise fellows and deepened ties with the Wakati Wetu Collective. This collaboration remains significant as Baraza Media Lab (external link) previously partnered with us for the 2025 Wakati Wetu Festival in Nairobi. These relationships reinforce our shared commitment to local storytelling and institutional accountability.
This commitment speaks directly to resilient storytelling. For AfaLab, resilience means more than keeping newsrooms alive under pressure. It also means resisting colonial frames, protecting community memory, and trusting African knowledge as a source of public truth.
Media institutions do more than report history. They help construct it. During the colonial period, newspapers and photography produced images of Africa as a territory requiring external control. These narratives justified empire and shaped a global imagination of the continent that still influences reporting today.
That legacy persists when major Western outlets frame Africa through crisis and rescue, while sidelining African voices and knowledge systems. It also appears in coverage of stolen African artifacts, where Western institutions often become the default authorities and originating communities receive little room to narrate their own histories.
The way media tells a story shapes what the public believes is owed, whose loss deserves repair, and who has the authority to define justice. When newsrooms reproduce colonial frames, they narrow the public imagination of restitution and accountability.
For AfaLab, narrative justice sits at the center of reparative justice. Reparations require the return of stolen objects and the formal recognition of harm. They also require sustained investment in African voices, African knowledge, and the digital infrastructure that allows communities to tell their own stories on their own terms.