As I sit here at my desk, I am aware of an intense gaze looking down on me from the top of my bookcase, the stare of Dedan Kimathi, immortalized in 1956 by a British photographer as he lay wounded and manacled on a stretcher. This stark image looks out from a plate sold in 1973 as part of a fund-raising campaign for the Kimathi Institute of Technology in Nyeri. Ten years after independence, recognition of the Mau Mau hero was a delicate matter. Except for the naming of Kimathi Street in Nairobi, it only seemed to be acceptable to memorialize Kimathi in Nyeri itself, the province of his birth and his guerrilla operations.

Yet neglect and repression of the Mau Mau leader’s memory seemed to keep Kimathi alive, especially in the writings of activists like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Maina wa Kinyatti. But there were ironies in this, and those ironies still live. As Annie E. Coombes, Lotte Hughes, and Karega-Munene remind us, Mau Mau skeptics like B. A. Ogot and Atieno Odhiambo argued during the historians’ debate in the 1980s that a hero cult focused on Kimathi could create major problems for a national history of Kenya, not least because it would strengthen the centrality of the Gĩkũyũ and seem to marginalize other Kenyan peoples in the struggle for freedom. The authors’ discussion of the controversy over the Kimathi statue in 2006–7—from the beginning of the competition among sculptors to the contentious aftermath of the dedication of the monument—shows that these problems remain present, given a sinister edge by the horrific postelection violence of 2007–8.

The authors argue that “Kenya remains deeply ill at ease with both national and nationalist history” (186). Kenyans do not trust the historical narratives offered by their politicians, but are not sure themselves how history should be presented to convey “Kenyan-ness” as opposed to localism (232). The authors are especially concerned with three ongoing developments: the increasing fragmentation of the national past, the tendency to replace “history” with culture, and the commercialization of heritage (typified by Bomas of Kenya) to appeal to both national and international constituencies. They are impressed with the nationwide effort after 2008, led by Sultan Somjee, to establish “community peace museums” to illustrate traditional local and ethnic means of conflict resolution and peace-making. The Lari Community Peace Museum in Kimende, which has a board composed of both Mau Mau and Home Guard veterans, is an example of a successful local museum along these lines. They are concerned, however, that especially after the adoption of a new constitution that divides the country into forty-seven counties, the peace museums movement will devolve into just one element in the splintering of the nation.

As an example of problems in Kenya’s presentation of its past, the authors consider the history exhibit in the Nairobi National Museum, which in their view tends to substitute noncontroversial traditional “culture” for history and continues the unfortunate trend of centering historical presentation on “the triumphs of ‘big men’” (especially Mau Mau heroes) rather than on “ordinary people’s struggles” (205). Moreover, the tendency of the exhibit to encourage “binary oppositions” (e.g., resisters versus collaborators) discourages “critical inquiry” into the complex realities of the past (212). The book’s conclusion quotes the response of “one elderly Maasai woman” to a survey questioner who asked her “What makes you Kenyan?” Her answer was telling: “Being a Swahili speaker, holding a national identity card, and nothing beyond this” (232). The authors lay most of the blame on “the political class,” whose self-serving actions since 1963 have fueled the desire of ordinary citizens “to retreat into the comfort of localized ethnicities” (232).

A few concluding remarks of my own. On the continent, Kenya’s struggles with history and memory may most closely resemble South Africa’s, with the key role of white settlers in both countries. Annie E. Coombes’s fine earlier work dealt, in part, with tensions over monuments and memorialization in South Africa. Managing Heritage, Making Peace is a sensitive, thought-provoking work. My only serious criticism deals with the limited role of Karega-Munene in the book; he wrote the admirable first chapter, “Origins and Development of Institutionalised Heritage Management in Kenya,” but he was not, at least apparently, involved in the rest of it. I was disappointed that the introduction and conclusion were written just by Annie Coombes and Lotte Hughes.