State of Emergency

About the book

State of Emergency: Harakati za Mau Mau kwa Haki, Usawa na Ardhi Yetu (Mau Mau Movement for Justice, Equality and Our Land) is the result of a ten-year collaboration with Mau Mau freedom fighters and Kenyans who survived colonial atrocities. Through in-person reenactments, or "demonstrations", they visualise again the fight for independence from British rule in the 1950s, bringing past experience into the present with a future audience in mind.

With most of the colonial archives deliberately destroyed, hidden, or manipulated, the project shines a light on history's blind spots by creating new 'imagined records' that fill the gaps. It interweaves fragmentary colonial archives, photographs of architectural and symbolic remnants, mass grave sites, demonstrations, and the testimonies of people who experienced and survived the war.

Together with the National Museums of Kenya and members of the Mau Mau War Veterans Association, the book is a collective response aimed at healing, without erasing, the still open wounds of colonial violence. It has also led to an ecological initiative, managed by the veterans association, to restore ancestral forest land exhausted by the felling of hardwood and the planting of water-draining eucalyptus, cypress, and pine. Those forests sheltered the freedom fighters, and the long-term goal is a sustainable future for the veteran communities and their children.