Forgive and Forget? Mau Mau and the Making of Memory and History in Post-Colonial Kenya

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This research will examine processes of memory and history-making in Kenya since the end of the MauMau War, which led to Kenya's independence in 1963. Previous scholarship has shown how both Kenya'spost-independence government and the British government sought to 'forget' - and to suppress therecord of - the events of the Mau Mau War. In the last two decades, that selective amnesia has beenoverturned, by academic studies and by popular and official memorialization of Mau Mau. Through in-depth oral histories, this project will explore the ways survivors and their descendants on all sides of theWar, including those Kenyans who collaborated with the British counterinsurgency, have rememberedMau Mau. Much of the scholarship seems to assume that these memories have simply lain dormant inthe popular mind, awaiting their activation by academic projects. This project will dispute thisassumption and investigate how people have reflected on their experiences and talked about them inways that constitute memory-work even in the years when remembering was discouraged.I will conduct around eighty oral history interviews to explore what popular memory looked like in theaftermath of political forgetting, and what forms memory-work took between the end of the Mau MauWar and the beginning of researchers' interest in it. This will involve a consideration of the inter-generational nature of memory-work, and the ways subsequent generations have taken ownership andauthorship of Mau Mau memories. The research will also engage with the 'visible' sites of Mau Mau'spopular memory in Kenya: Veteran's Associations, photographs and documents held in people's homes,and the locations of former concentration camps, for example.