Unhistories is an ongoing documentary project in collaboration with Mau Mau war veterans, Kenyans who survived colonial atrocities, historians, artists, activists, writers, archivists, universities and museums. Together, we aim to (re)visualize the fight for independence from British colonial rule in the 1950s. With most of the colonial archives deliberately destroyed, hidden or manipulated, we attempt to shine a light on this history’s blind spots by creating new “imagined records” that fill in the missing gaps of historical archives. A collaborative attempt at rebuilding and reimagining possible futures of reparation and reconciliation.

How can one visualize the past by photographing the present with a future audience in mind? The “in-person” reenactment, or demonstration, allows us to speak about the past in the present tense, and about the present in the future tense. In Unhistories, survivors demonstrate their past experiences in which they claim their roles as heroic victims instead of terrorists to create communal images as a response to the trauma of colonial violence. Zigzagging through history’s ghost notes, Unhistories interweaves fragmentary colonial archives, architectural and symbolic remnants from the past, mass grave sites, and the testimonies of people who experienced and survived the war themselves. A visual historiography in which ambiguity, uncertainty and speculation are inherent to the retelling and reclaiming of unresolved historical narratives based on memory, photography and physical traces.

Unhistories on the Pan-African platform The Elephant:
➳ The Elephant / Unhistories, Part I – Kenya’s Mau Mau: A Walk Through the Archives
➳ The Elephant / Unhistories, Part II – Kenya’s Mau Mau: Detention Camps and Torture
➳ The Elephant / Unhistories, Part III – Kenya’s Mau Mau: Resistance, Mass Graves and Compensation