Managing Heritage, Making Peace: History, Identity and Memory in Contemporary Kenya by Annie E. Coombes & Lotte Hughes & Karega Munene

Author:Annie E. Coombes & Lotte Hughes & Karega Munene [Coombes, Annie E. & Hughes, Lotte & Munene, Karega]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Africa, Military, Social Science, Social History, Peace, Political Science, Anthropology, History, Cultural & Social, Colonialism & Post-Colonialism, General
ISBN: 9781780761527
Google: cQDeDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17454497
Publisher: I. B. Tauris
Published: 2013-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

20: From left: museum curator Francis Muritu, Terence Ranger (University of Oxford) and Kimunyi Gitau (a Mau Mau veteran from Karima Forest) in Agikuyu Community Peace Museum, Nyeri. In the background is a small display on Mau Mau. No weapons are on display, in contrast to other types of memorial museum.

‘The community should be allowed to preserve the hills and use them for their ceremonies because they are the best protector of all these things,’ said Gladys Parkesian, one of many informants who mentioned their sacredness in interview.115 The recent successful struggle by an NGO and local people to oppose the appropriation of another site sacred to the Maasai, Loita Forest in Narok District, has some parallels with the Karima case, though protection of livelihoods rather than sacred sites was the main priority for campaigners.116

There is a problematic ‘New Age primitivism’ apparent in these mobilisation narratives, unwittingly promoted by Western NGOs such as the well-meaning but naïve Gaia Foundation, and enthusiastically taken up by Porini, which has successfully yoked a parochial ethnic agenda to a global one.117 The literature produced as a result of these alliances, in which I include The Sacred Footprint, ‘reiterates the negative as well as the potentially positive features of the archaism attributed to Aborigines,’ portraying people as unchanging, idealised and ‘culturally stable since the beginning of humanity,’ in touch with a higher and more authentic consciousness ‘which possesses virtues that are plainly absent from a rapacious and expanding white modernity.’118 Again, this is understandably appealing to rural communities which have undergone rapid and not entirely welcome change in the past one hundred years. Anxiety about modernity, eroded values, the sheer complexity of the modern world and social change are repeated refrains in the interviews I gathered, from elders in this and other communities, including Maasai. A perceived loss of respect for elders is also a central feature; the newly-constructed narratives of Karima are important locally because they have reinforced elderly male authority – something which could increase under the terms of the new constitution’s cultural heritage provisions, at the expense of the rights of women and youth. Gaia appears to be aware of some of this, without understanding the wider implications or the deeper history, when its director writes of ‘Elder knowledge-holders’ prioritising the revival and protection of sacred sites ‘in order to bring back the traditional social order.’ These same elders believe, she goes on (without questioning the wisdom of this particular piece of folklore), that HIV/AIDS – which very likely killed Kariuki – together with ‘youth violence and material poverty . . . are all consequences of disrespect and violation of traditional norms within their territories, and especially their sacred sites.’119 This belief, in my view, together with the belief that HIV/AIDS is a Western plot to kill Africans, may partly explain why Kariuki refused treatment and denied his status. R.I.P.

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