Research focus
One main objective is to examine the recent history of heritage management in Kenya, and citizens’ engagement with heritage, in order to understand the different ways in which this postcolonial nation is coming to terms with its past – a precondition for moving forward.
By ‘engagement’ we mean the wide variety of activities that may lie outside the state-managed national heritage sector and are inclusive of ordinary Kenyans, such as creating local community museums, commemorating local heroes, conserving cultural artifacts, sacred sites and intangible heritage such as language and song.
These different sectors – national and local, state and community-led – are of course interconnected. But there are contestations between and within them. For example, ordinary citizens may have different ideas about what should happen at a particular site of memory, who should be commemorated and why, which particular group’s history should be privileged above another. Sometimes state and citizens seem to be talking two different languages, in terms of the past or imagined past, and future prospects for nation-building, peace, truth and reconciliation. Our earlier pilot study showed that these tensions were already evident before the post-electoral crisis of 2007/8, but this brought them into sharper focus – because, while constitutional and political, it was more fundamentally a crisis of nationhood, identity, history, memory and heritage that will take far longer to resolve. These tensions are manifested in the activities we are studying, and the discourses around them.
• The research involves multi-sited fieldwork. Our approach is historical, informed by anthropology and the study of visual culture. Two-way knowledge transfer is a key objective.
 |
 |
• Principal Investigator Dr Lotte Hughes also held (until November 2010) a concurrent award under the British Academy’s UK-Africa Academic Partnerships scheme for research on a similar theme. This award was specifically designed to build capacity through research collaboration with African partners and foster long-term links between UK and African scholars. Our thanks go to the AHRC and British Academy for making this project possible, and to the Ferguson Trust for funding the initial pilot study. The British Academy has praised this as ‘one of the British Academy’s most successful UK-Africa Partnerships’, highlighting the way we involved a wide range of citizens and impacted on grassroots peace initiatives, booklet Working with Africa: Human and Social Science Research in Action, launched London, 3 March 2011. Booklet Pdf (1,571 kb)
• Other core team members are: Prof. Annie Coombes (Co-Investigator), Birkbeck College, University of London; Prof. Karega Munene, United States International University, Nairobi; and Dr Anna Bohlin, Göteborg University, Sweden; Dr Neil Carrier, University of Oxford, has also undertaken a series of short-term consultancies for the project.