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Paper short abstract:

The family is a vital part of African life, and a central unit of belonging. Drawing on oral history research in central Kenya, this paper looks at family memory as a space where history and politics with emotion and experience, a potent space for individual and collective self-imagining.

Paper long abstract:

The family continues to play a vibrant role in African life, and remains a central unit of belonging and solidarity. This paper draws on oral histories conducted in central Kenya, using them as a case study to explore wider questions of family history and memory in African futures. By exploring the ways intergenerational memory-work has shaped the history of Mau Mau in post-independence Kenya, the paper looks at family memories in the wider context of the nationalisations and contingencies of post-colonial African nationhood and belonging. Within this context, the paper examines the role of personal archives and material culture in the creation and propagation of family memories, and explores how these might feed into a reimagining of African archival futures. Thus, the paper also brushes up against some key methodological and ethical questions around using family memories to write African histories in the global post-colonial context. Through exploring these questions within the central Kenyan post-colonial context, the paper presents wider assertions about the place of family memory in individual and collective self-imagining. By looking at both the content and the context of family memories in Africa, this paper demonstrates that family memories are a space where history and politics blend with emotion and experience to become a potent space for solidarity, belonging and identity-formation.