The event consisted of two enlightening panels, with different panellists from diverse academic and artistic backgrounds providing thematic discussions on decolonising African/Black material cultures, embodied heritage, and extractive industries legacies, and exploring how they shape and are shaped by the ongoing complex and intertwined transnational entanglements between Africa and Europe. Below are some of the highlights:

In the first panel, chaired by Olupemi Oludare (Assistant Professor of Black History, University of Amsterdam), the panellists including Rachel Gillett (Assistant Professor of Cultural History & European Colonialism, Utrecht University), Amara Diabate (Master drummer, kora player, and instructor, Djembe-Amara), Ayaovi Kokousse (Master drummer, dancer, and instructor, Forêt Sacrée Obouibé), and Carlo Hoops (Cultural heritage scholar; master drummer, performing artist, and instructor) spoke about Black cultural production and how material cultures and embodied heritage serve as primary sources of African/Black histories, and how they inform understandings of identity, belonging, resistance, and empowerment contexts emerging from the ongoing Afropean entanglements.

The second panel, chaired by Madeline Young (Researcher/Lecturer at Exeter Centre for Research on Africa & Camborne School of Mines, University of Exeter), featured Edward Oludare (Educator, Geologist, and cultural practitioner, Dowen College Lagos), joined by Olupemi Oludare and Rachel Gillett who discussed the influences of colonial and postcolonial dynamics on the sociocultural materialities associated with mining and material cultures in Africa and Europe, and the advocacies that can be initiated for sustainable and equitable development in African resources and material cultures that engages a reflective approach to the Afropean entangled history and cultural legacy.

Both panels afterwards interacted with the lively audience, who not only asked very inquisitive questions, but also made valuable contributions which are germane to the dialogues engaged in the symposium.