Woman’s quest to right a historic injustice in Our Land, Our Freedom
Documentary about Kenya and British colonial power in the 1950s is an inspirational eye-opener
Thursday, 13th June 2024 — By Dan Carrier
OUR LAND, OUR FREEDOM
Directed by Meena Nanji and Zippy Kimundu
Certificate: 15
☆☆☆☆☆
“I WAS born in a freedom fighters’ family. My mother was a freedom fighter and my father was the leader of the Kenyan Land and Freedom party.”
So states narrator Wanjugu Kimathi in this eye-opening documentary about Kenya and the British colonial power in the 1950s. Her father Dedan Kimathi was the leader of the Land and Freedom party, a group who wanted to rid Kenya of its imperial overlords and reclaim their land.
When the British began evicting people, and throwing one million Kenyans without trial into concentration camps, the Land and Freedom Party hit back. War started – the rebels known as the Mau Mau to the colonial powers – and the British put it down with such criminal vigour and state violence that it remains a dark stain on our country’s conscience.
Wanjugo grew up with the stories of the freedom fighters. She hears of the heroic but wholly unequal battles, and how collaborators where given preferential treatment afterwards.
She knows her father was shot in 1955. He was captured, tortured and then hanged, his body dumped. Now Wanjugo wants to find her father’s last resting place, and is asked by survivors to take up his work and fight for justice for the elderly generation of Kenyans who lost their land.
This documentary is a reminder of how if a nation commits a crime, subsequent generations still suffer, and subsequent generations of the perpetrators have a responsibility to try to make it right.
Directors Nanji and Kimundu spent seven years with Wanjugu, which gives the story a longevity and a sense of the ongoing pain.
The cast includes the inspirational and brave Mukami, Dedan Kimathi’s widow and Wanjugo’s mother, who was a field marshall in the Mau Mau. She understandably wants closure over her husband’s remains.
As Wanjugu seeks to uncover the past, she finds mass graves and previously unrecorded atrocities the British army carried out. She looks at the British-owned businesses which still occupy what are ancestral lands. And she considers why the current British and Kenyan governments are so reticent about putting right a historic injustice.
