“There is a lot of power in reclaiming agency over your own past,” Ms. Tayiana says.
塔伊亚娜说: “有很多力量在收回过去的代理权。”
“Having someone else define who you are … is very detrimental to how you see yourself.”
“让别人定义你是谁……对你如何看待自己是非常不利的。”
On a recent Friday night, dozens gathered on a Nairobi skyscraper rooftop to hear Ms. Tayiana talk about Africa’s astronomical heritage at an event called “Space for Culture.”
最近一个周五的晚上，数十人相聚于内罗毕一座摩天大楼的屋顶上，在一个名为“文化空间”的活动上，倾听塔伊亚娜谈论非洲的天文遗产。
Speaking under a cloudy sky, she asked why African knowledge is so poorly represented in the global field, even though many Africans historically have incorporated complex astronomical observations into their lives.
她在阴霾的天空下进行着演讲，她问道，尽管历史上有许多非洲人将复杂的天文观测融入到生活中，但为什么代表非洲的天文知识在全球领域却如此之少。
Next, she played a video interview with a man from Kenya’s semi-nomadic Samburu pastoralist community, who traditionally live in vast drylands of northern Kenya.
接下来，她播放了一段采访视频，采访了一名来自肯尼亚半游牧区桑布鲁的男子，该区的牧民历来都生活在肯尼亚北部广阔的干旱地区。
Without hesitation, the elder described and named several celestial features – Nkakwa for the Milky Way, and Ngurikinyeji for Orion’s Belt.
这位长者不假思索地描述并命名了几个天体特征——“Nkakwa”代表银河系，“Ngurikinyeji”代表猎户座星群。
“It helps to build more confidence in ourselves as Africans and realize that we’ve always had agency and knowledge of what was happening around us,” says Karen Mwangi, who sat captivated through the talk.
“这有助于我们对自己作为非洲人建立更多的信心，并意识到我们一直都有能力了解周围发生的事情，也有知识对其进行了解，”卡伦·姆旺吉说，她全神贯注地坐在那里。
“We may not have written about it the same way other communities did, but we still knew about it, and it was something that we interacted with.”
“我们可能没有像其他群体那样对其进行文字记录，但我们仍然对其有所了解，它是我们与之互动的东西。”
Meanwhile, the value of African astronomy has become increasingly apparent in recent years.
与此同时，非洲天文学的价值近年来越来越得到凸显。
Last year, the Southern African Large Telescope in South Africa, one of the largest telescopes in the Southern Hemisphere, contributed to the discovery of a system of four stars orbiting each other.
去年，南半球最大的望远镜之一，南非的“非洲南部大型望远镜”，为发现一个由四颗相互环绕的恒星组成的星系做出了贡献。
Digital heritage – the use of digital technology to present, preserve, and understand cultural or natural heritage – is a small but growing field in Africa.
数字遗产——利用数字技术呈现、保护和了解文化或自然遗产——在非洲是一个规模虽小但正在发展的领域。
Recent projects run the gamut from digital archaeology to conservation projects.
近期的项目涵盖了从数字考古到保护项目的各个领域。
And, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the field expanded further as cultural institutions looked to digital solutions to keep afloat.
新冠疫情期间，各家文化机构寻求数字解决方案来维持运营，该领域进一步得到扩大。
Homegrown initiatives are “incredibly important” because organizations from North America or Europe have long held financial and institutional power over Africa’s cultural heritage, says Colleen Morgan, a senior lecturer in digital archaeology and heritage at the University of York in England.
英国约克大学数字考古与遗产高级讲师科琳·摩根表示，本土项目“至关重要”，因为北美或欧洲的各个组织长期把持着非洲文化遗产的财政权和制度权。
While such organizations can be well intentioned, their work tends to extract local and Indigenous knowledge to disseminate as they see fit, without making the data or tools available to local contributors, she adds.
她还补充道，虽然这些组织的意图可能很好，但它们的工作往往是提取非洲本地知识和土著知识，以其认为合适的方式进行传播，没有利用当地贡献者用到的数据或工具。
