In this episode, we travel to Benin City, Nigeria, to speak with Ore Disu, a visionary cultural strategist and founding director of the Institute of the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA). Ore is reshaping how we understand history, art, and African identity. From childhood days spent leafing through family photo albums in Lagos to building a groundbreaking institution at the heart of Nigeria’s cultural resurgence, Ore’s journey is rooted in care and creative reclamation. In this conversation, she reflects on how objects, stories, and even food become vessels of memory and belonging—and why repatriation must mean more than the return of artifacts but also be about revitalizing artist spaces so African creativity can flourish.

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02:00… Ore starts the conversation with an invocation in Yoruba: “The river, no matter how far it flows, always knows its source.”

04:40… Ore explains how museums create spaces where you can connect to people who “don't immediately have an obvious association or commonality with you”.

06:50… Learn about the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) as both a space of memory and of evidenced history, but also a space for current creativity and future imagining.

08:30… The connection between Timbuktu and the work of MOWWA and why reimagining “citadels of knowledge” and investing in memory is so important.

12:30… Ore discusses how in African culture and traditions, community was often more important than permanence and how that can help us define modern African cultural values.

16:50… Ore pushes back against being “villagized” and instead highlights the importance of movement across the continent to tell African stories.

20:54… Ore goes on to look at how art and material culture can erase artificial lines and colonial boundaries.

25:26… “Dream big!” Ore looks at what restitution could look like, beyond just the returning of objects, but revitalizing ecosystems for artists and artisanal spaces which she says has the potential to be a more powerful enterprise.

33.00… To ward off from this becoming a “restitution moment” of feel-good photo ops, what do we as Africans, as Black people, want out of it?

33.50… This week, something special as Dreaming in Color’s Cora Daniels rounds out the program with her outro debut.

In this episode, we journey to Johannesburg to speak with Nwabisa Mayema, a dynamic social entrepreneur and fierce advocate for women’s leadership across Africa. Nwabisa brings a bold and grounded presence to every space she enters. Her path—from accounting student to self-made entrepreneur, partnership strategist, and global convener—has been shaped by a deep belief in purpose, community, and the radical power of relationships. With roots in South Africa’s Eastern Cape and a lineage of what she calls “wild women,” Nwabisa shares how social capital, collective wisdom, and vulnerability can transform both businesses and societies. In this conversation, she explores what it means to lead with integrity, build community instead of networks, and embrace entrepreneurship not as hustle, but as healing and legacy-making.

In this week’s episode, we travel to Nairobi to speak with Tom Osborn, a visionary social entrepreneur and community-rooted leader whose work is reshaping how we think about mental health, sustainability, and youth empowerment in Africa. From growing up in a rural Kenyan village to launching his first clean energy venture at 18 and studying at Harvard, Tom’s path has been guided by a radical belief in community-first solutions and local agency. Now the founder and CEO of Shamiri Institute, Africa’s largest youth mental health provider, Tom shares how culturally grounded care, deep listening, and collective healing can transform not just individual lives but entire systems. Co-host Elisabeth Makumbi leads this beautiful conversation, which explores how to decolonize mental health care, reframe recovery on community terms, and rethink what it means to lead with humility, courage, and local knowledge.