Gloria Mogango Alumbi Ma Ekonzo is a Congolese-born French scholar, oral historian, and cultural heritage researcher whose work explores memory, identity, belonging, and cultural transmission within African and Afrodescendant communities.
Raised in France by Congolese parents, Gloria has navigated multiple cultural and social worlds throughout her life. This experience has shaped her interest in the ways people inherit, negotiate, transform, and sometimes question the cultural identities they are expected to carry. Her interdisciplinary training spans Art History, Anthropology, Political Science, and Oral History, bringing together historical research, ethnography, oral testimony, and cultural heritage.
During her Master’s in Oral History at Columbia University, Gloria’s research led her to examine how the histories of slavery and colonialism continue to shape contemporary understandings of identity, culture, and belonging among younger generations of the African diaspora. Her work became an opportunity to reflect not only on inherited histories, but also on the complex ways individuals construct identities across cultures and generations. Through this process, she began exploring the concept of “third culture” as a framework for understanding diasporic identities that emerge between, across, and beyond inherited cultural worlds.
Her OHMA training in oral history gave her new ways of approaching these questions through life stories, memory, and personal testimony. It also opened a path from academic research toward public history and cultural heritage work, allowing her to consider storytelling not only as a research method, but as a way of preserving memory, making histories visible, and creating space for communities to articulate their own experiences.
Gloria currently works as a consultant for UNESCO’s Routes of Enslaved Peoples Programme, where she contributes to work related to Afrodescendant communities, storytelling, memory, and the legacies of enslavement and the transatlantic slave trade. The programme seeks to break the silence surrounding the history of slavery and the slave trade through research, memory transmission, intercultural dialogue, and initiatives connected to heritage and collective healing.
