Changing memorials should make Kenyans reflect on their history

When moving around Nairobi recently, I was struck by how much the city’s memorials have changed.

First, there are the colonial and Kenyatta-era statues, which — as geographer Laragh Larsen has pointed out — are designed to embody state authority.

Then there are more figurative monuments of the Moi regime, when focus shifted to an assertion of state power.

Think here of the Nyayo monument at Uhuru Park, which depicts Moi’s rungu-bearing fist bursting through the top of Mount Kenya (the home of God himself in Kikuyu oral tradition).

Under Mwai Kibaki, the style of memorialisation focused on heroes.

Here, statues of Mau Mau leader Dedan Kimathi and trade unionist Tom Mboya, which were unveiled in February 2007 and October 2011 respectively, feature prominently.

As Larsen notes, “Kibaki’s hero phase in Nairobi’s monumental landscape indicates a desire to create a Kenyan identity through celebration of national heroes”.

More recently, there has been the Mau Mau memorial, which was put on display for the first time in September 2015, as part of a compensation package from the British for those tortured during the state of emergency.

The memorial depicts a male fighter being handed a basket by a female insurgent.

I appreciate these memorials as pieces of public art, but also as reminders of different aspects of Kenya’s history.

However, I am conscious of the fact that a majority of Kenyans walk straight past them.

As a result, they can be thought to constitute what Nietzsche called “antiquarian history”, in which the past is cut off from the present and seen as a quaint and distant time that has no relevance to the contemporary world.

There are exceptions. This includes collections at the National Museum and the American Embassy Memorial Garden, which seek to engage visitors in a more structured way with the past.

The latter, for example, features a memorial with the names of more than 200 people killed in the 1998 US embassy bombing alongside a garden, several statues and an interesting museum.

Nevertheless, I cannot help but think that the city would benefit from what Sebastian Brett and others have called ‘sites of conscience’ — the idea of “public memorials that make a specific commitment to democratic engagement through programmes that stimulate dialogue on pressing social issues today and provide opportunities for public involvement in those issues”.

SITE OF CONSCIENCE
It seems that one possible site for such a memorial would be the infamous torture chambers at the Nyayo House basement.

A Kenya Human Rights Commission report reminds us, that “each of the 13 rooms has a vent connected to a common machine…which was used to blow in ice cold air, hot air and thick dust intermittently to coerce ‘prisoners’ to speak”.

Certainly, victims of the torture in these cells have long lobbied for such a conversion — something the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission also recommended — as a form of acknowledgement and symbolic reparation.

However, one former inmate has a more ambitious plan.

He says the cells should be converted into a space where people are encouraged to talk about their past and learn from it.

In February 2012, I had the opportunity to the basement of Nyayo House when it was opened for a special TJRC hearing on state torture.

In addition to hearing the testimony of former victims, I was shown around the cells by a man who spoke of his experience in one of the tiny windowless rooms, naked and in the dark, not knowing when officers would come to collect him for interrogation.

As the man spoke, the atmosphere became heavy with our thoughts of what had happened in these dark and dusty rooms, and I was struck by the need for this history to never be repeated.

Because of this history and atmosphere and the demands of victims, Nyayo House seems a fitting place for a site of conscience.

It should be a space where — with some careful planning — people might be encouraged to discuss what happened and why, and the kind of Kenya that citizens want now and in the future.

Gabrielle Lynch, Associate Professor of Comparative Politics, University of Warwick, UK ([email protected])