UK viewers are likely to be deeply shocked by Our Land, Our Freedom, the new film from Meena Nanji and Zippy Kimundu which received its world premiere in IDFA’s Frontlight this week. It reveals the brutality with which British colonial soldiers treated freedom fighters during the Kenyan Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s.
The British branded the Mau Mau as terrorists; incarcerated them in concentration camps; tortured them and killed them. The doc focuses on the experiences of Wanjugu Kimathi, whose father, Dedan Kimathi, was a Mau Mau leader put to death by the British. More than 60 years on, many of the same injustices her father was fighting against (notably the theft of land from the local people) still continue.
Meena Nanji is third-generation Kenyan but acknowledges that “none of us knew” about the scale of the British colonial atrocities. “It was an intentionally suppressed history,” she says. “I think that is one of our big aims [to expose it]. We are only scratching the surface with this film. We would have loved to have gone much deeper…maybe if Netflix offers us a 10-part series, we will!”
Growing up, students in Kenya were taught “British history” from British text books most of which roundly ignored the experiences and suffering of the Kenyans. Now, though, a process of “scholarly excavation” is well underway. Incriminating policy documents have been discovered in British archives. Harvard historian Caroline Elkins won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for her book, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story Of Britain’s Gulag In Kenya.
“It is very sobering to read and then you hear the personal testimonies,” Nanji notes. “They [the documents] are almost an architecture of destroying a people…it’s just something that needs to be unearthed and told.”
“Everyone feels short changed because they did not get the land,” Kimundu says of the legacy of this sinister late chapter in British imperial history.
Nanji first met Wanjugu when she was about to interview Wanjugu’s mother. She suggested that Kimundu come aboard the project. At the time, Kimundu had been researching a potential fictional movie on similar subject matter and was immediately keen to participate. That was seven years ago.
Early on, the filmmakers regarded Wanjugu primarily as their “fixer.” She could provide them with contacts and local knowledge. Gradually, though, they realised she should be their main character. After all, she was at the heart of the story. She was still looking for remains of her father.
“Half of the things we did not know,” says Kimundu. When the cameraman told them there was a mass grave just outside Nairobi, they travelled there with Wanjugu in tow. “We just drove a few miles out of the city but this family had been living there. They said when we dig for food, we find human bones.”
There are harrowing scenes of the elegantly dressed Wanjugu picking up objects from the ground and realising that these may be the remains of someone very close to her. An old woman told the filmmakers grim and astonishing stories of what she had witnessed. People had been hung. Bodies had been buried in three layers because there were so many of them.
Equally shocking is the trumped-up death warrant that the filmmakers have discovered. It transpires that UK officials have signed documents consigning Kenyans to death on the flimsiest of charges.
“Seeing that bureaucratic language, it is so cold and impersonal,” Nanji says of the death warrants which only recently came to light.
“It was thought all the documents were burned on the eve of independence in 1963. There were massive bonfires – that was documents being burned,” Nanji says. However, much of this paperwork survived and diligent researchers have found it hidden away in the Kew archives in London.
Before the documents surfaced, the Kenyans sometimes self-censored. As Kimundu remembers of the Mau Mau Rebellion, “no-one wanted to talk about it.” The experiences were too raw, too traumatic and there wasn’t, seemingly, the physical proof needed to incriminate the British. With the emergence of the documents, there was finally evidence to back up their claims about the British behaviour.
King Charles was in Kenya recently and made a semblance of an apology for past British misdeeds.
“I think it is mealy-mouthed. However, when the Queen died, the Kenyans were saying she was responsible. People were sad for the family personally but on a greater level it was, like, why should we mourn the head of this institution [the Royal Family]. England has already admitted to wrongdoing…I think it is too little too late,” says Nanji. “Kenyans don’t want punishment. They don’t want people in jail or criminalised or anything. What they want is what they had – which was their land. Of course, that is never going to come back without a real fight but that is the way to reconciliation.”
Kimundu believes it is a good moment for the film to come out. However, she also notes that old colonial attitudes still persist. Some in the UK are saying that the Kenyans should be grateful to the British. “We [in the UK] brought them English, we brought them democracy,’” is a line that, depressingly, is still heard. Kimundu reacts with disbelief that people still mouth such racist platitudes. “Do you really know what happened?” she asks. “I think there will be a conversation now.”
Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay, Monsoon Wedding) has just come aboard the film as an executive producer which is produced by Eliane Ferreira for Muiraquitã Filmes, Nanji for Twende Pictures an Kimundu for Afrofilms International Ltd.
“The people who actually fought in the forest, who were looking for land and freedom, did not get the land. Let’s start from there. Our film is about righting the wrongs,” Kimundu says of a documentary bound to intensify further the debate about land ownership in Kenya. She also hopes the film will encourage history to be rewritten and that the true story of the atrocities will finally be told in the text books. “Land is life,” she declares.
