The Politics of Historical Memory and Commemoration in Africa

Cassandra Mark-Thiesen, Moritz Mihatsch, Michelle Sikes, Cassandra Mark-Thiesen, Moritz Mihatsch, Michelle Sikes

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9783110655490
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Essays in Memory of Jan-Georg Deutsch

The volume observes some of the principles that drove Prof. Jan-Georg Deutsch's research: highlighting present-day politics for the way they shape historical remembrance, learning from people on the ground through fieldwork and oral history, and bringing various parts of the African continent into discussion with one another.

From Cape Town to Charlottesville, many societies are grappling with historical consciousness and the production of public memory. In particular, how and why societies remember and forget, what should serve as symbols of collective memory, and whether there exists space for multiple memory cultures are questions being vigorously debated once again. These discussions present particular challenges not only to official memory bound to ideological constructions of nationhood but also to the teaching of history and its links to social justice movements.

The volume re-centres Africa and African history in memory studies, with each chapter drawing parallels to comparable cases in Africa and the world. An underlying assumption is that what can be learned from the politics of historical memory in Africa will have relevance for contemporary politics globally and for understanding how memories can be mobilised for political ends.

II Political Commemoration & Memory

Remembering Mzee: The Making and Re-making of “Kenyatta Day,” 1958 – 2010

Edward Goodman

Abstract

While a concern with memory, in particular of the Mau Mau rebellion, has a well-established place in Kenya’s historiography, little attention has yet been paid to the postcolonial Kenyan state’s official memory regime, to what Kenya’s citizens have been asked to remember. The following chapter aims to fill this gap. It traces the origins of “Kenyatta Day,” celebrated from 1964 onwards on 20^th October each year, and the four successive stories that were told about it by first its proponents, figures associated with the KANU government and the state, and then its critics in parliament and civil society whose attainment of power led to the re-dedication of the day as “Heroes Day” in 2010, when Kenya’s “Second Republic” was inaugurated by a new constitution.

In the early hours of the morning of 20^th October 1952, British security services in Kenya set in motion the plan codenamed “Operation Jock Scott,” a strategy devised over the course of the previous few days, with the intention of decapitating the so-called Mau Mau movement.¹ The rounding-up of around 150 Kenya African Union (KAU) activists would, it was hoped, leave the movement rudderless, allowing security services the opportunity to regain control in the increasingly fraught circumstances of Kenya’s Central Province and Rift Valley. At the top of the list (and by the time of his arrest, apparently aware of what was coming) was the name of Jomo Kenyatta, leader of the KAU, author of Facing Mount Kenya, and future president of independent Kenya.² So began the Emergency, which was to last eight long years.

The roundup was followed by a show trial of Kenyatta and five other men, Fred Kubai, Bildad Kaggia, Paul Ngei, Kungu Karumba and Achieng’ Oneko, accused by the colonial state of “managing” Mau Mau. Kenyatta, according to Ransley Thacker, a former Kenyan High Court Judge and Attorney-General of Fiji, brought out of retirement to preside over the case, was the “master mind” behind Mau Mau, the man who had “let loose upon this land a flood of misery and unhappiness affecting the daily lives of all the races in it, including,” he made clear, “those of your own people.” The KAU’s leader, he insisted, had taken “fullest advantage of the power and influence” which he held, the product, according to Thacker, of his education and long immersion in British society, where he had lived from the early 1930s to the mid-1940s. He had done so, the judge claimed, in order to turn back the “progress that had been made” under colonial tutelage “towards an enlightened civilisation” amongst his people, preying on “the primitive instincts which you know lie deep down in their characters,” plunging these dupes “back to a state which shows little of humanity,” and persuading them “in secret to murder, to burn and to commit evil atrocities which it will take,” the judge gravely intoned, “many years to forget.” Convinced of his guilt, Thacker sentenced Kenyatta, and the other five, to seven years’ hard labour.³ The future president was to remain in detention until August 1961.

Over the course of the last 60 years, it has been the movement that Kenyatta was convicted (quite wrongly) of managing that has stood “[a]t the heart of Kenya’s modern history.”⁴ Mau Mau has been the central concern of those interested in the question of how “a conscious sense of the past, as something meaningfully connected to the present, is sustained and developed within human individuals and human cultures,” the imperative – etched onto the memorial to the self-declared state of Somaliland’s experience of war under General Siad Barre, and described in this volume by Mohamed Haji Ingriis – to “respect and remember.”⁵ Marshall Clough, for example, has traced “the elusive, changing [and] divisive” memory of Mau Mau in Kenya through successive postcolonial “moments of crisis.” The image of the rebellion, he argued, has been mobilised and counter-mobilised at particular times by both opposition forces, a critique of Kenya’s post-independence direction, and successive governments, a means to disable the effectiveness of their opponents’ arguments and imagery.⁶ “[T]he history of Mau Mau, being so evocative,” wrote E.S. Atieno Odhiambo, summing up this interest, “is often discussed in public in high enough decibels to be shouted.”⁷

Recent writers have been no less impressed by the centrality of representations of Mau Mau in postcolonial Kenya, nor by the difficulty posed by the rebellion. But, in light of the violence that accompanied the 2007 general election, harking back to a theme first considered by scholars in the 1960s, they have added a more central emphasis on the apparent failure or unwillingness of successive Kenyan governments to grapple with Kenya’s difficult history, to seek to create a genuinely national history at the centre of the story, criticising their tendency to take refuge in “culture heritage” at the expense of history.⁸ In the Kenyan case, the need for amnesia has been, according to Annie Coombes, “a persistently repeated refrain” stretching across fifty years of postcolonial history.⁹

Both are significant themes which have an important place in what follows. The Kenyan state did not, however, only forget. Nor was its interest in the cultivation of memory solely reactive. While in other parts of East Africa, scholarly attention has been paid to official memory regimes – the state-led memorialisation of particular aspects of the past – and the way in which they have been used by both government, as a tool of political persuasion,¹⁰ and its critics, little attention has yet been paid to this in Kenya.¹¹ The following pages aim to begin to fill this gap. Central to this official memory regime, was the 20^th October, the date of Kenyatta’s arrest, which was enshrined in Kenya’s public calendar as “Kenyatta Day” by the Kenya African National Union (KANU) government in the days leading up to independence on 12^th December 1963. In this chapter, I trace the origins of this day and the four successive stories that were told about it by, first, its proponents and defenders, figures connected with the KANU government, and then its critics in parliament and civil society (but not beyond¹²), critics whose attainment of power led to the re-dedication of the day as “Heroes Day” in 2010 with the passage of the new constitution, the promulgation of Kenya’s “Second Republic.”

Colonial Origins

The e...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Public Memorialisation and the Politics of Historical Memory in Africa
• I Struggles with Heritage & Historicity
• II Political Commemoration & Memory
• III Nostalgia – between Social Connection & Social Ordering
• Epilogue
• Figures
• List of Contributors
• Index of names
• Index of places