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Annie E. Coombes, Lotte Hughes, and Karega-Munene. Managing Heritage, Making Peace: History, Identity and Memory in Contemporary Kenya. London: I. B.Tauris, 2014. xviii +258 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $95.00. Cloth.
As I sit here at my desk, I am aware of an intense gaze looking down on me from the top of my bookcase, the stare of Dedan Kimathi, immortalized in 1956 by a British photographer as he lay wounded and manacled on a stretcher. This stark image looks out from a plate sold in 1973 as part of a fund-raising campaign for the Kimathi Institute of Technology in Nyeri. Ten years after independence, recognition of the Mau Mau hero was a delicate matter. Except for the naming of Kimathi Street in Nairobi, it only seemed to be acceptable to memorialize Kimathi in Nyeri itself, the province of his birth and his guerrilla operations.
Yet neglect and repression of the Mau Mau leader's memory seemed to keep Kimathi alive, especially in the writings of activists like Ngügî wa Thiong'o and Maina wa Kinyatti. But there were ironies in this, and those ironies still live. As Annie E. Coombes, Lotte Hughes,...