Whose heritage is this?

About the speakers

Pauline Malenga

Pauline Malenga is a speaker, writer and press officer at the AfricaMuseum, originally from Brussels. She focuses on (de)colonial issues, with particular attention to the legacies of the Belgian-Congolese colonial past, cultural representation and identity. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Educational Sciences and a Master’s in Conflict & Development Studies from Ghent University, specialising in postcolonial theory, gender and globalisation. She is also active in the Congolese Circle, an Antwerp-based non-profit run by young people from the Congolese diaspora in Flanders. The organisation works on education and the revaluation of Congolese cultures and histories.

Lies Busselen 

Lies Busselen is a historian and anthropologist. She is completing a PhD at KU Leuven on colonial grave robbery and the future challenges of colonial collections of human remains. Her research combines archival and fieldwork in Belgium and Congo, focusing on colonial collecting practices, epistemic injustice and postcolonial power relations. She spent several years in Kinshasa as a representative for the NGO Viva Salud and later as provenance researcher at the AfricaMuseum. Acting as a bridge between Kinshasa and Brussels, she connects critical academic work with social challenges.

Injonge Karangwa

Injonge Karangwa is a cultural programme maker with more than ten years’ experience designing and leading interdisciplinary health programmes in Sub-Saharan Africa. She earned a Master’s in Global Health Programme Management at the University of Global Health Equity (UGHE), where in 2019 she also founded the Hamwe Festival to build bridges between healthcare and the arts. Her initiatives include film productions, podcasts and collaborations with museums. In 2024, she began a PhD at KU Leuven on the relationship between well-being and African artists’ access to colonial-era collections. She is also part of the curatorial team of the exhibition 'The Pursuit of Knowledge', organised to mark 600 years of KU Leuven, which explores the contemporary meaning of the university’s ethnographic collections.

Bert Demarsin

Bert Demarsin (he/him) is a heritage lawyer. He completed his doctoral thesis at KU Leuven and subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford Law School. Today he is Professor at the Faculty of Law and Criminology at KU Leuven. He specialises in disputes concerning the ownership and possession of cultural property. Since 2022, he has also been Director of the Academic and Historical Heritage Service, overseeing all non-library heritage collections of KU Leuven.

Jonas Van Mulder

Jonas Van Mulder (he/him) is a cultural historian. In 2016, he obtained his doctorate at the University of Antwerp with a dissertation on religious culture in the Low Countries. Since 2018, he has been working as a researcher, curator and public engagement officer at KADOC, KU Leuven’s documentation and research centre for religion, culture and society, where he is responsible for the overall work relating to the international collections. In his own research, he explores the multiple relationships between religion and colonialism.