Memory and materiality in British-colonial detention camps in Kenya

The Mau Mau rebellion was an anti-colonial struggle in British-colonial Kenya from 1952-60. It was an asymmetrical conflict primarily fought between members of the Kikuyu ethnic group and Kenyan troops under British command, ending in a military victory for British forces. During the conflict, tens of thousands of Kikuyu and others were detained without trial in a network of British-run detention camps, where they suffered torture, starvation, sexual violence, forced labour, and extra-judicial killings. Following the end of the conflict, many of the over 100 detention camps were dismantled, and thousands of files were destroyed or concealed. The realities of the camps are now largely restricted to the memories of the few, aging survivors: there is thus an urgency to document, investigate, and confront this past before it slips from living memory. Several camps with surviving material remnants now operate as schools. In this process of transformation, confinement cells have been repurposed as dormitories and storage rooms, yet the structures persist in their material witnessing to the conflict. Traces of internment can be found in detainee-made bricks stamped with the camp name; the barbed wire that lines the eaves of storage buildings; the crumbling brick kiln left in the school grounds; the shallow trench, once a deep boundary ditch surrounding another camp, where banana trees now grow; and the mass graves that lie outside the school walls. My proposed project examines the remains of these detention camps as lived heritage sites with fraught relationships to contemporary Kenyan society. The project will take an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together archaeological survey methods with a community-based heritage mapping project, within a broader theoretical framework grounded in critical memory studies and postcolonial theory. This project will contribute novel data and methods to the historical archaeology of internment, but it also aims to expand and enrich the public understanding of colonial and anti-colonial heritage in Kenya and beyond, helping to confront the historical injustices of empire. The project considers not only the significance of this heritage to contemporary Kenyan and British experiences, but in a wider sense the role of heritage and archaeology in confronting colonial legacies, which institutions and universities worldwide are beginning to engage in.