From the stone halls of the Vatican to the sunlit coast of Kenya, Kim Poole, founder of the Teaching Artist Institute (TAI), is leading an urgent campaign to confront centuries of land dispossession and cultural erasure. Her method, the Ukumbusho Cure, “remembrance” in Swahili — is a framework for truth-telling and repair, designed to cure the “historical amnesia” that protects powerful institutions from accountability.
The Ukumbusho Cure took shape during the 2025 Vatican Symposium on Reparatory Justice, co-hosted in partnership with Omnes Gentes of the Pontifical Urbaniana University, the Global Circle for Reparations and Healing, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) Italy. Held over African Liberation Weekend, the symposium drew leading voices from across Global Africa and beyond. University of Bristol professor Dr. José Lingna Nafafe unpacked the buried history of Lourenço da Silva Mendonça, the 17th-century Kongo abolitionist who petitioned the Vatican to condemn the transatlantic slave trade.
Photo Caption A hand reaches toward a weathered statue of Saint Francis Xavier inside the Portuguese Chapel in Malindi, Kenya — a relic of early missionary presence in East Africa and a reminder of Christianity’s arrival through Portuguese colonial expansion.
From Rome, Poole brought the work to what she calls “Ground Zero” in Kenya. In Malindi, she listened to families who still remember their displacement. In Mombasa, she explored Fort Jesus and spoke with Africans Rising’s Eunice Odhiambo, who pointed to church-owned lands in Kilifi County and promised to reveal more.
Eunice Odhiambo Reparations Officer, Africans Rising pictured at Pwani University talking Evangelical Land Grabs in her hometown Kilifi Kenya
At Pwani University, Poole met the King of the Pokomo people, whose face grew solemn as he told of the British theft of the community’s sacred drum; a spiritual heartbeat that remains missing to this day. He connected this theft to the ongoing land disputes between the Pocomo and Somali pastoralists, noting that scarcity fuels conflict.
The on-ground the team was pillared by TAI Kenya Native Erick Kiarie, a Teaching Artist Institute illustrator who joined the Vatican Symposium in Rome and now leads the team creating comic-book–style panels capturing the movement’s milestones. Erick’s return to his home country for this phase of the work is changing his own relationship with how to “be catholic” as he shares stories on how this work is fueling his new pursuit to be an “artivist, Kenyan and Catholic too.”
Photo Caption: His Majesty Haye Dr. Makorani-a-Mungase VII, King of the Pokomo people, stands with TAI Founder Kim Poole (right) and Africans Rising Reparations Officer Eunice Odhiambo (left) at Pwani University
The Kenya journey also unearthed deeper truths: in some communities, the memories of loss are intact; in others, forgetting has become a survival strategy. Poole sees the Ukumbusho Cure as both a methodology and a moral imperative, not just for faith institutions, but for all of Global Africa. Its pillars include land restitution, nullification of colonial-era decrees, an official declaration honoring Africa as the cradle of civilization and Christianity, the replanting of African spiritual heritage in Church life, and dedicating a permanent share of institutional wealth to real repair.
Photo Caption: Christina Ogutu, a Malindi-Native Catholic and trauma-informed human rights advocate, photographed at the historic Catholic cemetery in Malindi, Kenya.
“The Ukumbusho Cure is about memory,” Poole says. “It’s about dismantling the structures of forgetting. Once we remember, we can repair and when we repair, we rebalance the world.”
For Poole, this work is a “world-remaking exercise. In Global Africa from Benin to Haiti, from Recife to the Carolinas, the legacy of land theft still shapes borders, economies, and identities. By combining historical research, oral testimony, mapping, and cultural restoration, the Ukumbusho Cure offers a way forward.”
And according to Poole,it all began with a question: “How do you heal a centuries-old institution from the inside out?”
