On the final night of the recently concluded Nairobi Film Festival, the hearts of people present were wrung in one direction and twisted in the other. At Prestige Cinema, a monumental cinematic event took place on the 27th of October 2024: the premiere of Meena Nanji and Zippy Kimundu’s Our Land Our Freedom, a documentary eight years in the making, which follows Wanjungu Kimathi as she attempts to finish a fight that her father, the great Dedan Kimathi, started over fifty years ago.
This is a documentary that looks directly into the face of history and tries to reconcile the present situation with all that has come before; and therein lies the heart of the film—the lack of reconciliation and justice. We follow Wanjungu Kimathi from our first meeting with her at her desk in Wilson Airport. She says a lot of people who fought with her father come to her because after her father died, they’ve had nobody else to turn to. The Mau Mau, as the colonial British branded them, fought valiantly for this country’s freedom yet now, post-independence, find themselves landless; it all seems quite wrong.
I spoke to Meena Nanji, one of the co-directors of the film, to get a better understanding of how this whole project came about. She first thought seriously about this subject in 2012 when she came across Carolyn Elkins’ book Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. “I was really taken aback by how much violence was used and seen as necessary to maintain the region.”
She was then put in contact with Zippy, and together they were able to convince Wanjungu to let them film her story and share it with the world. “They’d been trying to get this story out for so long that when we pitched this to them they were so game.” The documentary also features Mukami Kimathi, “The Wasp,” who is Dedan Kimathi’s widow. She was an old and stately woman, having fought so well many years ago. She passed away at the age of 96 in 2023. She wanted the remains of her late husband, remains which were either taken away to England as some perverse form of trophy, or lost forever, to be returned to her, “So that we may bury him like a King!” she says in the documentary. Their search at the Kamiti grounds never yielded any of the lost remains.
Another theme is the desperate and constantly frustrated hope of Mau Mau survivors and their descendants to finally get access to land. It is doubly frustrating for a legendary group of activists who literally fought for the freedom of this country to have not been rewarded in some way for it. This is part of a larger overarching issue on land in Kenya, historical land injustices baked into the very fragment of the constitution. They were, after all, The Land and Freedom Movement. There is a scene in the film where the veterans visited the National Land Commision, and were at one point given three minutes to leave the Commission premises.
This documentary brings to mind other titles in the Nairobi Film Festival lineup that dealt with similar issues. The closest to home is The Battle For Laikipia, which also deals with the unfinished yarn of post-colonial life in Kenya. That film focuses on the unequal distribution of land between white settlers and indigenous pastoralists in the county of Laikipia. From Tanzania, The Empty Grave also has a similar theme, showing how families of the Maji Maji rebellion attempted to use DNA technology to trace the skulls of their ancestors which were taken away by the Germans, in their case. Films like these prove to the people who fought so hard for the liberation of this continent that their efforts and blood did not spill in vain, that while they may have won crucial rounds of the battle, there will always be others to fight the rest.
I asked Meena whether documentary filmmakers have a responsibility to the subjects of their films, and whether it is their place to follow up on the issues, “There is a responsibility to the characters in the film. While we are filmmakers and not experts in this field, we do have a certain obligation to our principles.” They made sure some actual Mau Mau fighters attended the premiere and watched the film. The film has been screening at Unseen Nairobi Cinema for some time now, as well, creating crucial awareness on this topic. Meena tells me, sometime in 2019 or 2020, there was a legislation in the British parliament which would address reparations, as it were, to former colonies. That bill was suddenly dropped and never picked up again, but with films like these, hey, maybe they’ll be a resurgence in morality. Recently, the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer did discuss the possibility of reparations for slavery at the Commonwealth Heads of Conference in Samoa. He did stress, however, that reparations did not mean a transfer of funds, and will be provided in some other way which remains to be seen.
This is a film, and a work of art. Though telling a true story it is not an academic study. You will learn a lot from it, including a deeply personal side which influenced so much of Kenyan history. You will get a full picture, including how Mau Mau veterans sued the British Government and got a settlement (though not any admission of legal liability), including the Mau Mau memorial at Freedom Corner.
Meena’s next project, which she hopes to finish in much less time than it took to make Our Land
Our Freedom, will be an essay-type documentary about her family’s migration from India to Kenya. A more personal film for her. Zippy, on the other hand, already has about two other documentaries in the pipeline with one slated for release very soon.
