MUTED HISTORIES: UNBUNDLING SILENCES IN KENYAN HISTORY

In the wider context of African historiography, Kenya’s history has come a long way. The 1960s was dominated by the overly nationalist thinking whose main project was the repudiation of colonial denial of the existence of African history based on oral traditions. This emphasis on the new relevance of orality, as a significant source material, laid the foundation for the budding local historical scholarship that was conspicuous by its absence in Kenya’s colony.

In the subsequent two decades, 1970s and 80s, the Kenya history project shifted, albeit amidst the vestiges of nationalist historiography, to the largely socialist polemics that elevated the local history into a discipline for a cause not necessarily for the creation of narrative knowledge only. The period teemed with abrasive debates about political and social justice justice, access to land or lack of it, Mau Mau and its use/misuse in Kenya’s colony and post-colony. This seismic period paved the way for the ‘dark ages’ of Kenya’s historical scholarship characterized by the twin misfortunes of state assault and persecution of scholars, on one hand, and, its corollary, dismal spaces for meaningful intellectual debate, on another. This resulted in an interesting binary of escape to exile by local scholars and a near-compulsory confinement to the safe areas of historical discourse: narrative histories, some kind of bourgeoisie history, as Ngugi wa Thiongó once described it, merely for academic survival and not least presence.

In our seminars for the current semester, we want to unbundle silences in Kenya’s history in a series themed “Muted Histories’’; muted because, at some point, they were either too dangerous to ‘unmute’ and bring into the university seminar rooms or they were ‘taboo’ subjects in the context of the independence consuming euphoria of being free at last. We have lined up scholars from within and without who will help us to debunk these themes every week until the end of the semester.