Inscribing memory, healing a nation: post-election violence and the search for truth and justice in Kenya Burning

Abstract

The violence in the wake of the Kenya general elections in December 2007 found one of its most profoundly haunting, provocative and creative expressions in a photographic text called Kenya Burning. This article renders a reading of photographs in Kenya Burning in an attempt to lay bare the complex sphere of multiple narratives that speak to the issues of what ails Kenya. We argue that as an artistic piece of work, the picture-text represents the ways in which the photographers as artists have constructed representations of the realities of Kenya's socio-political life around and up to the eruption of the post-election violence. In engaging with these pictures, we unveil the complex history of Kenya's multi-party politics and the burden of ignored or forgotten narratives. We navigate a terrain of sordid pictures capturing death, destruction and mayhem, pictures that attest to the truth that the memory of the collective populace cannot be “shut down” just for political expediency. The article's conclusion signals the ways in which versions and subversions around the pictures embrace a spirit of remembering and shared collective experience that speaks volumes to the place of the creative arts in confronting violence and building bridges between divergent communities in Eastern Africa.