Managing Heritage, Making Peace: History, Identity and Memory in Contemporary Kenya

Kenya stands at a crossroads in its history and heritage, as the nation celebrates its fiftieth anniversary of independence from Britain in 2013. At this important juncture, what parts of its history, including the Mau Mau uprising, do citizens and state wish to remember and commemorate and what is best forgotten or occluded? What does heritage mean to ordinary Kenyans, and what role does it play in building nationhood and forging peace and reconciliation? Focusing on the 1990s to the present, "Managing Heritage, Making Peace" is a timely exploration of the ways in which Kenyans are engaging with the past in the present, including such local initiatives as the community peace museums movement, local and national monuments and other notable commemorative actions. The authors show how Kenya is facing a continuing crisis over nationhood, heritage, memory and identity, which must be resolved to achieve social cohesion and peace.

Annie E. Coombes is Professor of Material and Visual Culture in the Department of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London where she is also Founding Director of the Peltz Gallery. Her research focuses on colonial histories and their legacy in the present in Britain, South Africa, Kenya and Australia. She also works with contemporary artists whose work addresses these legacies. Her books include Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (Yale, 1994) and the award-winning History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Duke, 2003). She recently edited (with Ruth B. Phillips), Museum Transformations: Decolonization and Democratisation (Wiley/Blackwells, 2015).

Lotte Hughes is an historian of Africa and empire, with a Kenya specialism. She was formerly Senior Research Fellow at The Open University (UK), and is now an independent scholar. She has led major research projects on Kenya, including the AHRC-funded 'Managing Heritage, Building Peace' (2008-11, on which research this book is based), and the ESRC-funded 'Cultural Rights and Kenya's New Constitution' (2014-17). She was consultant to the project '“Seeing” Conflict at the Margins', based at the University of Sussex (2017-20). Other key publications include Moving the Maasai: A Colonial Misadventure (2006), and Environment and Empire (2007, co-author William Beinart)

Karega Munene is Professor of History (Anthropology) at United States International University, Kenya.