News Release

Babu Ayindo

NORTH MANCHESTER — Manchester University will welcome Kenyan peace builder and storyteller Babu Ayindo, Ph.D., for a presentation on Monday, Feb. 17.

The program will take place at 11 a.m. in Wine Recital Hall at the North Manchester campus. It is free and open to the public.

In his youth, Ayindo served as artistic director of a community theater ensemble, Chelepe Arts, in Nairobi, Kenya. In 1994, he co-founded Amani People’s Theatre, which drew from African Indigenous arts and Augusto Boal’s “Theatre of the Oppressed” to advance a “poetics of peace and justice” through participatory, dialogical and emancipatory art forms. He now works as a teacher, storyteller, researcher and facilitator of peace processes across the world, including teaching arts-based approaches to peacebuilding courses in Africa, Asia, North America and Oceania.

His presentation, “Arts, Peacebuilding and Decolonization,” will focus on the importance of the arts in conflict and trauma transformation.

The program is sponsored by the Refior Peace Lectureship and the Long Memorial Lecture Funds.