Kenya Land and Freedom Depository

Kenya Land and Freedom Depository

Exhibited at; 2015 Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India, 2015; This Is Not A Gateway, Bishopsgate Institute, London, 2014; Old Limehouse Town Hall, 646 Commercial Road,London 2014.

Kenyan born artist Tajender Sagoo and activist Saleh Mamon invited artists, activists, journalists, thinkers and citizens to contribute to a depository of experiences, reflecting on life in the British colony of Kenya, especially during the Emergency 1950 – 1960 and the Mau Mau liberation struggle.

The Kenya Land & Freedom Depositiory project seeks to explore the silences present in the ongoing British narrative of Kenya via the construction of a new visual dialogue and aiming to create a space for untold stories. The project became part of an exhibition held in London at the end of the year.

“Listening to my father talking about the reality of living and working in British Kenya made me realise how much the British state have hidden from us,” says Sagoo.

(All types of *physical or non- physical items and ideas can be deposited in the project. It can be text based, oral or a photograph of an object or a copy of a Kipande (pass card) or a Loyalty certificate. (Other items might be essays, articles, diaries, schoolbooks, adverts, tickets, domestic items, textiles, recipes, songs, poetry etc.) Or you may want to present a talk or event that can be recorded for the depository.)

Background

In October 1952 the British declared a state of emergency in Kenya to suppress a growing independence movement commonly known as the Mau Mau war of liberation. (Mau Mau was also referred to as the Kenya Land and Freedom Army).

There are many people living today who were in Kenya during the Emergency period, in which the British administration operated a colour bar system, racially segregating the African, South Asian and European communities.

The Kenya Emergency was a brutal campaign of detention without trial characterised by a system of punitive punishments put in place to counter the calls for independence. Communities were interned in camps and underwent a system of “cleansing” called the Pipeline. People were classified into White, Grey or Black groups according to how loyal to the Kenyan State they were. White being the most loyal and Black being ‘Mau Mau’.

Recently, in a case spanning 10 years, three Kenyans Jane Muthoni Mara, 73, Paulo Muoka Nzili, 85 and Wambugu wa Nyingi, 84 took legal action against the UK Government for the torture they suffered at the hands of British officials during the Mau Mau uprising between 1952 and 1960.

In an historic judgment (October 2012), the High Court rejected the British Government’s attempt to strike out the claims of the three Kenyan victims of British Colonial torture on the grounds that the claims were time barred.

About

Saleh Mamon is co- curator of the Kenya Land & Freedom Depository project. Born in Kenya he is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the Goldsmith Centre of Culture Studies. He witnessed the forced removal of Kenyan African men by armed soldiers on open trucks in Nairobi at the age of twelve. He is interested in the 'hidden' history of the Third World. In the mainstream discourse the violent process of colonisation and suppression of resistance by armed force remains largely erased. He believes strongly that this production of history needs to be challenged and an alternative explored to reveal the experience of the colonised peoples.

Born in Kenya, Tajender Sagoo is an artist/weaver and curator of the Pop Samiti project based in London. Her practice uses textiles in a multi disciplinary approach. She has a strong interest in using pattern and colour to investigates the relationships between objects and the ideas that they express in the historical and modern experience.

Shiraz Durrani graduated from the University of Nairobi and then worked at the University of Nairobi Library until 1984. He was an active member of the then underground December Twelve Movement – now Mwakenya-DTM – in 1970s and 1980s. Following the publication in The Standard of his articles on Pio Gama Pinto in September 1984, Shiraz had to leave for Britain where he was recognised as a political refugee. Here, he worked at Hackney and Merton public library services before lecturing in Information Services Management at London Metropolitan University. He was active in the London-based Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners in Kenya and was also a founder member of Umoja-Kenya in London. His books include “Kimaathi, Mau Mau’s first Prime Minister of Kenya” (1986), “Never be silent: publishing and imperialism in Kenya, 1884-1963” (2006). Website http://vitabooks.co.uk

This is an independent project, it is not funded by any organisation or institution.

Postscript

Saleh Mamon left us in August 2024. Saleh was immensely compassionate and principled, and he is deeply missed. Please read about his extraordinary life at:

https://labourhub.org.uk/2024/08/30/saleh-mamon/

https://labourhub.org.uk/?s=saleh+mamon

https://www.essalumni.org/alumni/saleh-mamon.php

A selection of his articles:

Mamon, Saleh. "Mapping the attainment of Black children in Britain."·Race & class·46, no. 2 (2004): 78-91. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396804047727

Mamon, Saleh. "Fuel on the Fire: oil and politics in occupied Iraq." (2012): 98-100. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396811433985

Mamon, Saleh. "Out of This Earth: East India Adivasis and the aluminium cartel." (2013): 109-111. https://doi.org/10.1177/03063968124448