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

这项研究将考察自1963年导致肯尼亚独立的茂茂战争结束以来，肯尼亚的记忆和历史创造过程。以前的学术研究表明，肯尼亚独立后的政府和英国政府都试图“忘记”——并压制茅茅战争事件的记录。在过去的二十年里，学术研究以及公众和官方对茅茅的纪念，推翻了这种选择性遗忘。通过深入的口述历史，这个项目将探索战争各方的幸存者和他们的后代，包括那些与英国合作镇压叛乱的肯尼亚人，是如何记住茅茅的。许多学术研究似乎认为，这些记忆只是蛰伏在大众的头脑中，等待着学术项目的激活。这个项目将质疑这一假设，并调查人们如何反思他们的经历，并以构成记忆工作的方式谈论它们，即使是在不鼓励记忆的年代。我将进行大约80次口述历史访谈，以探索在政治遗忘之后，大众记忆是什么样子的，以及在茅茅战争结束和研究者开始对它感兴趣之间，记忆研究采取了什么形式。这将涉及到记忆工作的代际性质，以及后代对茅茅记忆的所有权和作者的方式。这项研究还将涉及肯尼亚茅茅流行记忆的“可见”地点：例如，退伍军人协会，人们家中的照片和文件，以及前集中营的位置。

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.