The sight of skulls of resistance and stench of deaths from Kenya’s colonial history hit the senses right from the opening scenes of the documentary film Our Land, Our Freedom (2023), directed by Meena Nanji and Zippy Kimundu.
Situating Evelyn Wanjugu Kimathi as the narrator in this story, the documentary film takes the viewer through the sands of history—digging into colonial mass graves, personal accounts of Mau Mau veterans, footage from concentration camps, and Kenya’s independence ceremony in 1963.
The film is built on the conflict between the colonizer and the colonized. Prior to Kenya’s independence in 1963, the British government took ownership of the land—a symbol of economic power.
Although Dedan Kimathi was the martyr of the Mau Mau struggle, Wanjugu’s quest for justice and closure transcended her initial effort to find the remains of her father at Kamiti Maximum Prison. Through the eyes of General Karari Njama, a Mau Mau veteran, as well as other Kakuzi evictees, the harrowing story of land struggle is rehashed.
From eyewitnesses’ accounts of Kenyan colonial history of land ownership to modern-day oppression, social realities were unearthed by Nanji and Kimundu. The directors project Mukami Kimathi as an aged widow and field marshal of the Kenyan Land and Freedom Army. Trailing her first-hand personal experience of colonial brutality, Mukami’s dying wish was to find and bury her husband’s remains. Instead, she witnessed the first wave of forced resettlement of descendants of the Mau-Mau freedom fighters, where she—as the heroine of the struggle—reinvigorated the crowd’s desire for true emancipation with her rousing speech at the Resettlement Site in Rumuruti, thus demonstrating in clear terms that the fight for freedom is a continuum.
Inadvertently woven on Marxist aesthetics, Our Land, Our Freedom projects the class war that persists long after British colonial rule in Kenya (Figure 1). A case in point is the Kakuzi company, a British-owned Kenyan agricultural company famed for cultivating avocados, blueberries, and livestock, among others.
Mukami Kimathi, Freedom fighter and widow of Dedan Kimathi, addressing the audience at the Resettlement Site, Rumuruti.
Documented accounts from displaced persons and colonial detainees in Makuyu communities, where the Kakuzi prison was located, held horror stories of guards who grossly violated human rights and dignity to forcefully obtain land from the Kenyans. The land—a focal point in the film—has economic, cultural, and spiritual significance in the lives of Kenyans. As agrarians, the Kenyans needed the land for farming, maintaining connections with their ancestors, and burying their dead.
With the establishment of Dedan Kimathi Foundation, Wanjugu’s new mandate is to preserve the narrative that Mau Mau fighters are not terrorists but freedom fighters. In addition, she is working to ensure all the aggrieved get their land through resettlement, using instruments of law and humanity.
Though Kenyan courts have failed to deliver justice for Mau Mau veterans and their descendants, the search continues. Swaleh’s far-reaching quest for justice garnered international attention that led to a market boycott, renewed interest in land reclamation, and a call for action.
Not just another anti-colonial documentary, Our Land, Our Freedom provides grounds for neocolonial discourse. Tracing political power from Jomo Kenyatta to William Ruto, the camera zooms in on layers of history laden with unfulfilled promises to raise questions of what true liberation should mean to the Kenyan people. Through an exploration of collective memory, the documentary reveals how this communal trauma underscores the reality that political independence does not necessarily guarantee economic freedom.
Language—a relatively conspicuous device deployed in the storytelling—opens up an introspection into the linguistics of the colonized. Wanjugu’s character exemplifies the dilemma of an educated colonized African, torn between conforming to standards set by colonizers and conversing in one’s mother tongue. Notably, Nanji and Kimundu place shutters on objective sources. And that raises the question: do documentary filmmakers have a responsibility to be objective? Maybe not. They are legitimately biased, owing to their owing to the lived experiences that predate the visual storytelling. In all, Our Land, Our Freedom neatly executes the task of amplifying the missing links between ceremonial independence and true liberation of the colonized African.
