Where is the Seeker Who Searches for Another? Decolonial Approaches to Digital Public History

1 Where is the Seeker Who Searches for Another? – Decolonial Approaches to Digital Public History

The late 1940s–1960s were a critical period for the British Empire. As multiple countries gained their independence, from India to Malaya, Ceylon to Gold Coast, and Cyprus to Kenya, this period marked the end of one world and the beginning of another. At the forefront, the promise of independence resoundingly meant that control of a nation’s political, social, and economic structures moved from the colonial power to the colonized. However, behind closed doors, it also laid bare the need to control something much less tangible but equally enduring: memory. As nation-states crafted and projected visions of new identities onto the future, British colonial administrators were concerned with visions of the past. How would they be remembered? What exactly would be remembered, and how may this memory be used against them in the future?

This concern around the control of narrative and memory set in motion a worldwide operation that would later be called Operation Legacy. This was a policy that saw several colonial authorities in multiple countries secretly destroy and migrate records that were deemed too sensitive, damning, or personal to be inherited by newly independent states. Shohei Sato describes this as “one of the most spectacular destruction of historical records known in our time.”^[1] Although the practical execution of the policy varied depending on the local context, the motive for destruction was the same: to destroy records that could embarrass the Queen’s government and its various actors, records that would compromise intelligence sources, or those that could be used unethically by successor governments.

In recent times, ethical considerations surrounding colonial records have undergone a significant shift. The focus has moved from concerns over their potential use, as once feared by colonial authorities, to the intentional destruction and concealment of these records.^[2] This issue was highlighted in 2009 when five veterans of the Mau Mau uprising – a grassroots guerrilla movement also known as the Kenya Land and Freedom Army^[3] – sought legal redress against the British government for human rights abuses endured during the 1952–1960 state of emergency.^[4] The uprising, which began as a response to long-standing grievances around land dispossession, forced evictions, heavy taxation, and systemic class and racial discrimination, gained momentum in the late 1940s.^[5] It was infamous for its widespread oath-taking ceremonies and daring attacks on European settler farms, underpinned by the primary demand for land and freedom. The colonial government’s response to this was to declare a state of emergency in 1952, thereby granting itself sweeping powers to suppress the movement through the deployment of excessive force and the allocation of substantial state resources.

Confirming long standing suspicions among scholars, in 2012, the foreign office was compelled to acknowledge that numerous records pertaining to the emergency period had indeed been secretly destroyed and that others had been unlawfully retained in the United Kingdom for over fifty years.^[6] These records validated Mau Mau veterans’ allegations of torture and severe human rights violations, leading to a historic ruling in their favor; the British government was obliged to offer financial compensation to the veterans as an acknowledgment of the suffering inflicted upon them and several thousand others.^[7]

Operation Legacy and the destruction of records illustrate what Michel-Rolph Trouillot has called the “power in the story,” the recognition that human beings actively participate in history as actors and narrators. Thus, ultimately, history itself is not neutral or impartial; it is a construct shaped by human agency.^[8] This article considers what it means to be a creator of history within the context of suppressed and erased colonial pasts. It asks what it means to work as a public historian navigating various power structures and inequalities. How can historical work be decolonial in output and practice? Ultimately, what role can digital technologies play in supporting and enhancing this cause? The author draws on their experience as a public historian working in Kenya and as a co-founding member of the Museum of British Colonialism public history collective.^[9]

2 Case Study – Museum of British Colonialism

In 2018, a transnational volunteer collective called the Museum of British Colonialism (MBC) (Figure 1) was formed by scholars and practitioners from Kenya and the United Kingdom who came together to explore, engage, and disseminate more grounded, community-based understandings of the British colonial experience. The impetus for the convergence was not to create a group of experts that simply teach colonial history to the public but to collaborate as individuals and practitioners confronting British colonial legacies and sharing their learnings with the public in creative and accessible ways.^[10]

Figure 1:

Screenshot of the Museum of British Colonialism’s website.

MBC’s practice has attempted to do this by employing grassroots participatory approaches that rely heavily on relationship building, community co-curation, interdisciplinary collaborations, use of multiple sources, and dissemination through publicly accessible digital platforms. In this regard, the collective’s work is set firmly within the domains of public history, a field that centers on working with different publics, interpreting history through multiple lenses, and using history as an active tool in society.^[11]

During the colonial period, museums perpetuated troublesome and stereotypical notions of non-Western societies to the Western public.^[12] For colonial powers, colonialism needed to be seen as a mission that advanced good and brought civilization to the millions of people still stuck in time, those still living under darkness and needing rescuing from the depths of primitive traditions.^[13] In Africa, materials of cultural heritage, everyday objects, spiritual relics, and human remains were looted and migrated from the continent en masse. These materials then found their way into exhibitions and basements of museums across the West, where 90 % are estimated to still reside today.^[14]

In recent years, the concept of a museum as governed by these foundational practices of collecting and observing the history of ‘the other’ has come under intense scrutiny for how acts of imperial violence are camouflaged under the guise of benevolent preservation and harmless observation. These conversations have called for a critical rethinking of what museums represent in our societies today, the harm they continue to perpetuate, and how museums can reevaluate their practice to justify their existence in a future world.^[15] Amidst these debates and contradictions, MBC’s choice to identify as a museum might appear paradoxical or at odds with the spirit of our work. Nevertheless, our aim is not to conform to outdated portrayals but to intentionally show that a museum can adopt a new significance, one that expands the future imaginations of what a museum could be and demonstrates that a museum does not have to be tied to brick and mortar or hordes of physical possessions. Instead, it can embody people-centered practices of knowledge-sharing and meaning-making within history.^[16]

Historically, the relationship between public history practitioners and museums has been divergent and unbalanced.^[17] While museums have taken on a position of authority that presents singular histories, public historians have based their practice on tenets of shared authority and poly-perspectivity.^[18] Despite these differences, scholars have demonstrated that museum practice and public history can? Complement each other greatly through skills transfer, increased access to material culture, exposure to new audiences, and inclusion of diverse perspectives.^[19] Therefore, MBC’s approach navigates these tensions between public history and museum practice, between colonial representations and resistance to these very colonial structures, by asking how public history can be practiced outside logics that further entrench authority, imbalance, and bias. And how can these principles be reflected in praxis and output alike?

3 Public History as a Source

In Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot reflects on the relationship between historical production and historical sources. Arguing that human beings collect, thematize, and designate what is or is not classified as a historical source, Trouillot shows that these actions imbue these sources with inherent silences and absences. By this process, sources become not just instances of history; they embody traces of inequality, inclusion, and dispossession.^[20] MBC’s flagship project in Kenya sought to engage with the history of British internment and detention camps set up during the state of emergency between 1952 and 1960 by expanding the range of sources used to understand the history of these sites.

Historians of the empire estimate that the British colonial government set up more than one hundred centers of detention across the country during the state of emergency in an attempt to quell the Mau Mau freedom uprising.^[21] After independence, some detention camps were turned into schools, prisons, administrative offices, and irrigation farms (Figure 2). The destruction of archives and the absorption of these sites into seemingly mundane and benign state infrastructure contributed to their erasure from public memory.^[22] Thus, despite their physical prevalence and geographical spread, it is difficult for many young Kenyans to name and locate a single camp today. Against this onslaught of forces, the history of detention has endured in several almost stubborn ways, such as in the memories of those who lived through this period, in the landscape that still bears evidence of infrastructure, and, finally, in the labyrinth of buildings, that although used for different purposes today, still bear evidence of their original intention.

Figure 2:

A plaque honoring the memory of those who endured torture and abuse at what was once Mweru Works Camp in central Kenya, now the site of Mweru High School. Credit: Museum of British Colonialism.

In this interplay between what is erased and what remains, MBC explores the history of the camps by tracing their present-day locations and documenting their tangible and intangible remnants. In 2018, the team conducted their first fieldwork exercise to two former detention sites in central Kenya – Aguthi^[23] and Mweru camp^[24] –, both of which are secondary schools today (Figure 3). Without records showing exact locations, the team relied on local knowledge and expertise from the community liaison and National Museum of Kenya curator Anthony Maina, who directed us to the sites. Here we encountered buildings such as mass cells and solitary confinement cells that were part of the original camp infrastructure. Identification of these buildings was a process informed by oral history, community participation, and observation.

Figure 3:

Solitary Confinement Cells at former detention camp (Aguthi Works Camp), now a secondary school (Kangubiri Girls High School). Credit: Museum of British Colonialism.

Evidence such as worn barbed wire along the roofs of certain buildings was present, and the lack of windows and ventilation also alluded to buildings designed for torture and isolation (Figure 4). At the same time, groundskeepers indicated which buildings were part of the original detention camp and what alterations had been made when the camps were turned into schools.^[25] Aside from the buildings, the team also encountered evidence of man-made trenches on the landscape within and around the sites. Fortified trenches were a primary characteristic of detention camps and concentrated villages. They would average ten feet deep and fifteen feet wide and were dug using forced labor from detainees and villagers.^[26]

Figure 4:

Remaining traces of the detention structures at the former Aguthi Works Camp, present day Kangubiri Girls High School, 2018. Credit: Museum of British Colonialism.

In addition to documenting the tangible manifestations of detention in landscape and infrastructure, the team prioritized an oral history approach to contextualize the lived experience of being in the camps with the physical structures we see today. This reality further underscored the importance of oral history, especially given that much of it is moving out of living memory as veterans pass on from old age, ill health, and psychological and physical wounds they still carry. In 2018, the team interviewed Wambugu wa Nyingi, who was arrested in December 1952 and held in more than ten camps across the country where he experienced forced labor, torture, and egregious human rights violations (Figure 5).^[27]

Figure 5:

Interview of Wambugu wa Nyingi at his home in Nyeri, Central Kenya in 2018. Credit: Museum of British Colonialism.

Kangubiri Girls High School now stands on the site of Aguthi Works Camp. Oral history points to the name Kangubiri being a Kikuyu corruption of the English phrase “you can go free.” It is said that this was a phrase that detainees would hear once they were found to have successfully been rehabilitated (that is, renounced their adherence to the Mau Mau movement and oath). In exploring the etymology of the local reference Kangubiri as stemming from the English phrase you ‘can go free,’ one identifies another source of history: language.

MBC’s fieldwork visits revealed much more than the physical evidence of historical buildings; they made visible the complex entanglements of history as embedded deeply within people, infrastructure, landscape, language, and memory. By expanding the sources upon which knowledge of camps relies, these layered narratives demonstrate how this history continues to evolve and manifest today. The very act of centering and seeking out alternative sources of history outside archival records whose creation, access, and preservation are framed directly by colonial control thus becomes an act of refusal and resistance, a decolonial praxis in response to a colonial framework.

4 Public History as a Medium

Although the history of colonialism in Kenya has been the subject of extensive academic scholarship for many decades, it has failed to permeate public memory and discourse because of the inaccessibility of academic materials, varying literacy levels, language barriers, licensing restrictions, and paywalls. Embarking on a public history of colonialism in Kenya necessitates a rethinking of mediums through which this history is consumed and accessed. In seeking to communicate findings from fieldwork exercises, MBC took a primarily digital approach by disseminating outputs on multiple digital platforms, a decision informed by both affordability and accessibility.

The ongoing and dynamic transformation that digital technology brings to historical practice has been the subject of much reflection in the recent past. At a global level, the digital shift has raised many epistemological and methodological issues in a discipline that was already uncertain and anxious about the future of conventional historical writing and is now faced with novel digital ways of telling the past.^[28] While the digital age has brought many transformational opportunities, some have been critical and cautious about this transformation and its potential to alienate practitioners who have traditionally worked outside the digital realm.^[29] In addition, the implementation of digital practice is not a one-size-fits-all approach, and for digital technologies to have an impact they also have to be implemented with purpose and intentionality, taking into consideration the legacies, infrastructure, audiences, and environments they stem from.^[30] Therefore, in specific contexts, using digital technology in public history practice becomes less about choice and more about urgency and agency: the urgency to confront histories that are rapidly disappearing from living memory and the agency of those directly affected by this past to have the opportunity to tell their own stories and engage with this history outside of the mediation of dominant structures.^[31]

MBC’s digital outputs are decentralized across multiple platforms – YouTube for field work documentaries and oral histories, Sketchfab for 3D models, GIS platforms for maps, a website for text and image-based media, and social media for communication on project updates, resources, and outputs.^[32] This decentralized digital archive, where different sets of information are hosted in different mediums, stands in stark contrast to the centralized physical archive, where access is monitored and controlled and where transparency can be withdrawn or given at the behest of an institution. The latter scenario is clearly illustrated by Mandy Banton’s extensive research on migrated archives held in the UK and the troubles various nation-states and researchers went through in trying to access records held by the Foreign Office.^[33] The choice of where to store an archive and how it will be accessed thus becomes crucial in the life cycle of historical outputs and demonstrates that mediums of presenting, storing, and disseminating history are not merely neutral infrastructures, they are also living reflections of whom an archive welcomes in and whom it locks out.

5 Public History as the Audience

A primary differentiator between public history and other forms of historical practice has been that public history is primarily targeted towards and created with public audiences in mind. Since many professional historians have been reluctant to communicate their work in forms that non-specialist audiences can relate to and understand, there has been a gap between the history being presented and the people being represented within those histories.^[34] To speak to an audience, one must first understand and identify it. For MBC, this understanding started with a reflection on three main questions: Who are we speaking to? Why is this work important to them? And where do we meet them? This triangulation of who, why, and where led us to the following definition of our primary audiences:

1. Who: Young people living in the UK and former British colonies

2. Why: Interested in history and looking for a deeper understanding of how colonialism has shaped their national, local, and community identities but do not know where to find this information

3. Where: Primarily engage with digital media on their smartphone or laptop and are active on online spaces such as social media and blogs.

Through this exploration, we were able to narrow in on a specific demographic that informed the kind of histories we shared, where they were shared, and what levels of sensitivity and awareness needed to be taken into consideration when telling these histories. However, to define an audience does not mean to limit it or be limited by it.

In his 1931 address, “Everyman His Own Historian,” Carl Becker, President of the American Historical Association, argued that history is a way of telling and interpreting the human experience.^[35] As such, it is an essential and imaginative endeavor that everyone participates in, knowingly or unknowingly, to make sense of themselves and their world. Therefore, the relationship between the audience and the public historian can be multi-directional (allowing for dialogue, critique, and interpretation across both parties) as well as multifaceted (allowing various perspectives, presentations, and reflections of the same past).

6 Public History as Iterative and Reflective

MBC’s approach to digital public history, while being experimental and innovative, has also come with multiple challenges. A major issue is the possible exclusion of important community groups, particularly those not well-versed in digital technology, such as Mau Mau veterans and people without internet access. With a substantial portion of oral testimonies coming from such non-digital groups, there is a responsibility to not only faithfully represent their stories but to also develop and implement methods that clearly convey to source communities the placement and usage of their narratives.^[36]

Operating from a position of shared authority also carries the responsibility of empowering audiences to engage and construct their own narratives. This involves fostering an environment that accommodates diverse viewpoints in both virtual and physical forums, while also safeguarding against potential harm, abuse, or aggression aimed at our team or audience members. Navigating this has become challenging in an era of polarizing political opinions and a rise in online hostility and aggression.

Resource constraints also pose a significant challenge to the sustainability and longevity of public history work online. Sustaining digital infrastructure means maintaining cloud storage, migrating data from medium to medium, cataloging data, updating websites, and putting in place data protection frameworks. This labor is dependent on specific skill sets and requires financial resources to maintain in the long term. Given that public history projects are often undertaken by volunteers and constrained by tight budgets, there is a frequent danger of burnout and fatigue. This happens when the team’s abilities are overextended, juggling the execution of the project with efforts to sustain the work in the long run. Lastly, it is essential to consider the positionality and well-being of the public historians themselves. The violence of colonialism also extends itself to the work done in uncovering it. Continuously working on painful, traumatic histories in close contact has negative impacts on mental health and well-being at an individual level.

In response to these challenges, the collective has tried different strategies, a core approach being the importance of allowing team members to take necessary breaks and incorporate periods of rest into their routine. This flexibility has given members the freedom to engage with the work as their personal schedules and capacities permit.

Recognizing that digital outreach does not impact all demographics equally due to disparities in access, literacy, gender, class, and location, the team has facilitated in-person events, inviting the public to interact with, question, and add to the content displayed, in order to encourage a more inclusive historical discourse.^[37] Previous exhibitions in Kenya and the UK have also featured handcrafted, scaled-down models of detention camps (Figures 6 and 7). These models, whose creation involves integrating various elements such as existing structures, oral history accounts, and archival records have been an opportunity to enhance the connection between tangible and virtual representations by providing physical counterparts to the digital 3D reconstructions.^[38]

Figure 6:

3D reconstruction of the watchtower, trench, and entrance to Aguthi Works Camp in Central Kenya. Reconstructed from archival sources and present day remains at the site. Credit: Museum of British Colonialism.

Figure 7:

A hand-made, miniature model of entrance at Aguthi Works Camp based on 3D reconstruction. On display at an in-person exhibition in Nairobi. Credit: Museum of British Colonialism.

In addition to disseminating the findings of their historical research, the team also publicly shares internal reflections on their work process, methodologies, and dilemmas faced while examining colonial history. In a dialogue between scholars and team members, Beth Rebisz and Suhayl Omar deliberate on the dynamics of colonial memorialization within and outside the academy and the distortion of marginalized historical narratives.^[39] This highlights how academic research often falls short in its engagement with grassroots anti-colonial activism and tends to dehumanize subjects by reducing them to mere data points. Suhayl Omar questions this approach, noting.

What’s happening here? Someone who fought in the struggle, their information is being stolen and it’s being packaged to suit a particular privileged ‘intellectual class.’ I realized that I don’t want to be part of this (…) However, if we all just withdraw from this, rather than directly confronting and implicating this issue, we’ll let colonialism continue infiltrating and indoctrinating students to come in the future. So how are we supposed to fight, within the confines of the academy?^[40]

The difficulties and approaches briefly highlighted above are by no means exhaustive. Yet, what they do illustrate is that public history work does not take place in a vacuum; the contentions faced in the real world also have implications on the success, impact, and longevity of public history practice online. While MBC has attempted to navigate these challenges in various ways, there remains a pressing need for wider acknowledgment and support for the role of public history in today’s digital landscape. The iterative nature of MBC’s decolonial work is evident in its continuous adaptation to these challenges. The collective’s efforts to balance digital and physical engagement, ensure ethical representation, and foster participatory storytelling are part of an ongoing process of self-reflection and action. This process is characterized by cycles of learning and unlearning in an attempt to reimagine the role of museums in society and expand the capacities of digital technologies. This underscores the cyclic nature of decolonial work, which requires persistent effort and innovation to maintain momentum and effect lasting change.

7 Conclusions

This article explores what a framework for decolonial digital public history may look like today. By highlighting the experience, methodologies, and challenges of the Museum of British Colonialism collective, the article demonstrates that there is no singular decolonial act. Instead, decolonization within digital public history is a series of multiple actions and decisions. In 2019, Francis Nyamnjoh used his keynote lecture, “ICTs as Juju: African Inspiration for Understanding the Compositeness of Being Human through Digital Technologies,” to invite scholars of digital humanities “to see in the region’s belief in incompleteness and the compositeness of being human, an indication that we have much to learn from the past on how best to understand and harness current purportedly innovative advances in information and communication technologies.”^[41] Through this invitation, we see that digital technologies are in and of themselves incomplete. They are not the end goal of digital historical practice; instead, they are a beginning whose trajectory is informed by sources, audiences, medium, and methodology. It is not the technology that determines what kinds of history one can produce; it is the historian who determines what the technology should do.

By 2023, MBC had documented nearly ten detention sites across Kenya and expanded its archive to include women’s histories, barbed wire villages, and site visits to detention centers that today serve as Kenya’s prisons. In addition to having a growing online presence, the collective collaborates with scholars and practitioners investigating British colonial history globally who contribute material in the form of guest blogs, panel conversations, and media outputs. This work continues to grow and evolve in response to an ever-changing digital and historical landscape.^[42] In his seminal book Devil on the Cross, published in 1980, Ngugi wa Thiong’o offers a sharp critique of the postcolonial conditions of Kenya and the ongoing struggles against colonialism, as characters navigate the complex entanglements and entrapments that come with colonial power and alignment with it.^[43] Resistance is framed not as an individual or isolated act but as a collective and relational one. Wariinga, the main character, asks: “Where is the seeker who searches for another?” That is a question that ultimately reminds us that public history is not just a responsibility to the past but also to each other.