Paper long abstract:

Kenya’s recent post-electoral crisis was at one level political and constitutional. At another, it can be read as a crisis of history, heritage, identity and memory which will take much longer to resolve. The fractures and social fragmentation exposed in early 2008 are also manifested in heritage activities involving both state and non-state actors. Citizens are busy engaging with, and reconstructing, their heritage and history as never before. This phenomenon appears to signify a renaissance of civil society activism around new forms of struggle. Community-led heritage activities include the creation of peace and community museums, eco-mapping of sacred forests and community ecological governance. The state, concerned with top-down national heritage management that continues to follow a colonial-era model to some extent, largely frowns upon these initiatives, and seeks to control non-state heritage actors. This paper draws on research-in-progress to explore some of these tensions, through examples from the state and non-state heritage sectors.