12 Oct 2007: ISS Today: Reclaiming History in Kenya

12 October 2007: Reclaiming History in Kenya

 

Could it be that the amnesia that is one of the persistent qualities of Kenyan political and intellectual life is beginning to relent?  The Kenyan government has very recently retrieved more than two million pages of documents that were carted out of the country on the eve of independence by the departing colonial administrators.  As happened in the other colonies that gained their independence in the 1950s and 60s, on handing over the British made off with records that might have implicated them for crimes and misdemeanours in their exercise of imperial power.  The newly independent states, whether brought to that happy circumstance by virtue of rebellion or peaceful negotiation, invariably ushered in the future with a pledge to forget the past.  The sins of the coloniser would be forgotten if not forgiven, occasionally used in some rousing rhetorical flourish, but otherwise stowed away when it came to any apportionment of legal and political redress. 

 

Since 2003, Kenya’s National Heritage ministry and its dedicated staff has aggressively renovated and updated the archives.  Yet change is more than a matter of the fresh coat of paint on the pillared, multi-story building that stands at the heart of Nairobi’s central business district on Moi Avenue, or the new digital technologies and filing systems housed within.  Two hundred yards from the archive’s doors, across a large and busy square dominated by the Hilton Hotel’s cylindrical tower is a bronze statue (pictured) of the Mau Mau general Dedan Kimathi, unveiled in February 2007 by the same government that has given a significantly higher priority to the archives than its predecessors.

 

These changes as welcome as they suggest a recognition of the need for a deeper renovation of Kenya’s relationship with its past.  They speak to the continuing need for a production of historical knowledge that can inform Kenya’s evolving and clashing notions of nationhood and citizenship.  The need for this history, currently housed in the United Kingdom’s hidden cellars and in boxes strewn about government offices, is very great.  There is a critical need to address the amnesia cynically demanded of the victims of high crimes who successive rulers, be they British or Kenyan, have urged and threatened to look to the future and never the past.  The past is an explosion, a bomb of pain whose fuse is the information hidden away in those faraway nooks. 

 

Perhaps it is not a stretch to suggest that the transformation of the National Archives now underway is the beginning of the reclamation of memories that have been maligned and outlawed by the state since independence.  There are no Sarkozy peasants in Kenya: those Africans who he informed a Dakar audience have never entered history and are unable to fashion a destiny.  There are no Kenyans who live in timeless, childlike rhythms in accord with nature.  What does exist are Kenyans with a deep need to reconcile their present hopes as citizens with a country founded on a century of despotic colonial and post-independence rule.  Kimathi’s statue is flanked by and towered over by tourist hotels and corporate office blocks.  He seems to peer into at the future as he tightly grips a home-made gun and machete.  It is an image of resolute action to benefit a future that has arrived but that looks at him with hesitance and confusion.

 

Martin Kimani, Senior Counter Terrorism Advisor: IGAD Capacity Building Programme Against Terrorism (ICPAT), ISS Nairobi