Photography against the grain: rethinking the colonial archive in Kenyan museums

Abstract

This article revisits the representation of the state of emergency in Kenya, focusing on two instances where the colonial photographic archive has been worked against the grain: the National Museum of Kenya (Nairobi) and the Lari Memorial Peace Museum. I argue that these two examples effectively destabilize the colonial archive's conventionally reiterated truths in ways that afford the possibility for the viewer to think ‘otherwise'. Located in distinctive museal spaces (national and community-based) from which their operations draw further potency, both institutions conversely offer ways to reimagine the museum itself as archive.

Keywords:

• Kenyan museums
• photographic archives
• colonial photographs
• Miriam Syowia Kyambi
• colonial and postcolonial monuments
• monuments
• museums
• Kenya
• Mau Mau
• Loyalist forces in Kenya
• Lari massacres
• Lari Memorial Peace Museum
• British colonial propaganda

Acknowledgments

This paper has been given in different versions at a number of conferences and has benefited from the questions and discussions from participants present at each gathering. I am grateful to Michael O'Hanlon and Clare Harris at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford University, for inviting me to speak at ‘The Future of Ethnographic Museums’ conference at the Pitt Rivers Museum; to Ferdinand de Jong and Paul Basu, for their invitation to participate in the final conference of their AHRC Networking grant, ‘Utopian Archives: Pasts and Futures’ at the University of East Anglia; and to John Giblin and Gaye Sculthorpe of the British Museum, who invited my contribution to their conference, ‘Challenging Colonial Legacies Today: Museums and Communities in Australia and East Africa’ in connection with the exhibition Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation at the British Museum.

Part of the research in this article was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Grant AH/FO18215/1: ‘Managing Heritage, Building Peace: Museums, Memorialisation and the Uses of Memory in Kenya'). From 2008 to 2011, I was sole co-investigator on this collaborative AHRC award with Lotte Hughes (principal investigator) and Karega-Munene (lead consultant) exploring the legacy of Kenya's colonial past and how it inflects the present. A core aspect of my research on the project dealt with the impact of the Lari massacres, seen by some historians as a critical turning-point in the struggle for an independent Kenya. I am deeply grateful to the two Elders who co-founded the Lari Memorial Peace Museum, Joseph Kaboro Tumbo and Kariuki Douglas Wainana, for allowing me to interview them extensively over the period of the research. My thanks also to the many others from both the former Loyalist Home Guard and the Mau Mau veteran communities who were affected by the events at Lari and who generously shared their life stories with me. Without the knowledgeable assistance and translation skills of Waihenya Njoroge, the museum's curator, and Stanford Chege, a founding board member of the Museum, I would not have been able to conduct any of my research at Lari. I thank them both. My thanks also to Waihenya's wonderful family, who generously hosted me on a number of occasions; to Elizabeth Njogu, who assisted me with transcription and translation; and to Harun Muraya, who drove us to numerous destinations and whose consummate diplomatic skills enabled us to safely navigate many police road blocks.

Notes on contributor

Annie E. Coombes is Professor of Material and Visual Culture in the Department of History of Art and is the Founding Director of the Peltz Gallery, at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of prize-winning books including Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (Yale University Press, 1994) and History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Duke University Press, 2003). Coombes is co-author (with L. Hughes and Karega-Munene) of Managing Heritage, Making Peace: History, Identity and Memory in Contemporary Kenya (I.B. Taurus, 2013) and co-editor (with Ruth B. Phillips) of Museum Transformations vol. 4 of The International Handbooks of Museum Studies (John Wiley & Sons, 2015), as well as editor of Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and South Africa (Manchester University Press, 2006).

Notes

1. Afua Hirsch, ‘Obscure law “used” to dismiss Mau Mau claims', The Guardian, 25 January 2010.

2. Ben Macintyre, ‘Secret colonial files may show more blood on British hands', The Times, 7 April 2011 and ‘Britain in Kenya: “If we are going to sin, then we must sin quietly”’, The Times, 8 April 2011; Ben Macintyre and Billy Kenber, ‘Foreign Office says sorry for misplacing Mau Mau papers', The Times, 12 April 2011.

3. In a statement on the settlement of claims of Kenyans relating to events during the period of emergency up to 1963 delivered to Parliament on 6 June 2013, Hague had this to say: ‘The colonial authorities made unprecedented use of capital punishment and sanctioned harsh prison so-called “rehabilitation” regimes. Many of those detained were never tried and the links of many with the Mau Mau were never proven. There was recognition at the time of the brutality of these repressive measures and the shocking level of violence, including an important debate in this House on the infamous events at Hola Camp in 1959 … I would like to make clear now and for the first time, on behalf of Her Majesty's Government, that we understand the pain and grievance felt by those who were involved in the events of the Emergency in Kenya. The British government recognizes that Kenyans were subject to torture and other forms of ill treatment at the hands of the colonial administration. The British government sincerely regrets that these abuses took place, and that they marred Kenya's progress towards independence. Torture and ill treatment are abhorrent violations of human dignity which we unreservedly condemn’. He added, however, that the settlement did not establish a precedent in relation to any other former British colonial administration, since ‘We continue to deny liability on behalf of the government and British taxpayers today for the actions of the colonial administration in respect of the claims, and indeed the courts have made no finding of liability against the government in the case.' See www.gov.uk/government/news/statement-to-parliament-on-settlement-of-mau-mau-claims.

4. National Museums of Kenya, artists’ brief for ‘The Face of the Museum’ commissions (2007), p. 2.

5. Vincent Simiyu, ‘Report of the Taskforce for Country-Wide Data Collection on criteria and modalities of honouring national heroes and heroines’ (2007, unpublished).

6. For example, on 26 March, the Saturday Nation reported three stories from both Home Guard and Mau Mau families about the continuing impact of the Lari massacres on their lives. There was considerable bitterness expressed by some individuals about the relative wealth of former Home Guard families who they claimed had stolen their land during the colonial period. The government was also blamed for not recognizing Mau Mau and for not reinstating land titles to former Mau Mau families.

7. A few years later, in 1957, F.D. Corfield was commissioned by the British government to carry out an inquiry into the origins of Mau Mau. Published in 1960 as The Origins and Growth of Mau Mau: An Historical Survey, it presented what Bruce Berman and others have called ‘the official colonial history against self-rule’ (Berman 1992: 291). Two other accounts of Mau Mau, cited as official, are J.C. Carothers, The Psychology of Mau Mau (1964) and The Mau Mau in Kenya (Anon., 1954).