Sultan Somjee

For four decades Sultan Somjee worked on the material culture of Kenya while living among diverse cultural groups of Bantu, Cushitic and Nilotic heritages. He co-curated exhibitions of material culture with these communities in villages and at the National Museum in Nairobi. In 1985 Somjee introduced the teaching of indigenous material culture in the Kenyan school curriculum and wrote an accompanying textbook for students and teachers. While he was the Head of Ethnography at the National Museums of Kenya (1994), Somjee started village peace museums and trained young men and women to be community-based curators with funding from the Mennonite Central Committee. The museums highlight four areas of the indigenous cultures: languages, material culture, oral traditions and the arts used over generations for sustaining a heritage for the spiritual, environmental and community well-being called Utu in Swahili. Today, the peace museums function as grassroots civil societies and have spread from Kenya to Uganda and South Sudan as a people to people movement in regions of tension due to past and on-going conflicts. In South Sudan, he co-founded the first community museum of the African Child Soldier with Lomudak Okech, a former child soldier. In 2001, the United Nations named Sultan Somjee one among the twelve ‘Unsung Heroes of Dialogue Among Civilizations’ worldwide in recognition of his work on Museums of Peace. In 2002, Sultan Somjee was appointed on the Global Advisory Board of Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies.