The Memory Project
This project seeks to examine how memory both informs and troubles debates about the nature of the postcolonial state in Africa, the practice of politics, historical recollection, and imaginative being.
About the Project
Here is the premise of this memory project: preservation of memories and experiences through visual and audio technology has a number of advantages over written materials: it enables representation and subsequent preservation of raw voices. But what happens when memories are suppressed? To respond to this question, my memory project uses documentary biographies of leading African intellectuals to interrogate the African condition, histories and memories. This approach opens up dialogues about justice, domination, and citizenship.
Micere Githae Mugo
Although we often hear of her tireless commitment to political and cultural activism, Micere Githae Mugo has played a critical role in the recovery of the voices of African subalterns. Her foundational contributions to the expressive culture and orature is a rejection of the authorized mandate to speak for the privileged and embraced the despised voices of Kenyan subalterns as her own.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Although he is known primarily as a novelist and playwright, Ngugi has spent most of his career as a university professor, teaching in universities in Africa, Europe, and the United States. In this context, he has been a key participant in debates on questions of African identity, the role of culture in politics, the crisis of postcolonial society, language, and the nature and meaning of historical memory.
Ali A. Mazrui
An author of several dozen books and hundreds of journal articles and book chapters, Ali Mazrui was one of the leading African intellectuals whose charisma and eloquence made Kenya and Africa visible on the highest echelons of intellectual. I documented his life for ten years and traveled with him in three continents.
Wole Soyinka
Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka, known as Wole Soyinka, is a Nigerian playwright, poet and essayist. The Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986 was awarded to Soyinka "who in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence."