Description
In Kenya, the election of President Mwai Kibaki, (2007) and the devolution of power from the eight provinces to forty-seven counties (2013) ushered in a new era of memory politics. It has brought to the forefront the issue of the representation of communities whose history, struggles and culture have historically been marginalized by the central government and are not identified with the national dialectic.
In this presentation, I will examine the political dynamics surrounding various memorial institutions such as museums, mausoleums, jails, cemetery, and other memory spaces of colonial imprisonment in Kenya. I argue that despite being seldom examined by political science, these memory places are true socio-cultural puzzles that contribute to collective identity building by showing the complex articulation of colonial and post-colonial memory in the political domain.
To emphasize the uses of State but also more local memories in nation (re)building, I will present a variety of results that I have collected thanks to a micro-sociological and ethnographic approach. My second contribution will be to show how and why the pluralization of the memory of colonial brutality has led to the emergence of conflicting and competing memories, embedded in community-led museums or initiatives at a county level to restore, reinvent or publicize these memories.
