Kileni Fernando is the inaugural San Visiting Fellow at the Pitt Rivers Museum, co-sponsored by the Oxford Africa Initiative and developed in association with the !Khwa ttu San Heritage Centre. The aim of the fellowship is to help build curatorial and educational opportunities for San heritage professionals as well as to improve museum knowledge about San collections in Oxford and more widely through staff and student consultation and public engagement activities. Kileni will be visiting Oxford in May and June 2024.
Kileni is a !Xung-speaking San woman from Namibia, currently pursuing a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) degree with the Open University of Tanzania. Since 2017 Kileni has acted as a voice for the San as a development consultant for the !Khwa ttu San Heritage Centre on the West Coast of South Africa. She is a co-founding member of an indigenous San youth organisation called ǁAna-Djeh San Trust (AST). Kileni has completed several courses on marginalization & inequality, as well as a diploma in legal history. She has also volunteered as a community facilitator for the Women’s Leadership Centre (Windhoek, Namibia) on the project “Speaking for ourselves, Voices of the San Young Women”.
