Our Land, Our Freedom, is the seminal documentary of the year on post-colonial Kenya, and its relationship to those who fought for it. In other words, this is a movie that will move you, anger you, and potentially even radicalize you – as is the case with any movie about Kenya’s fraught history. This is your official trigger warning (this review’s summarized version is on sinemafocus.com).
Directed by Meena Nanji and Zippy Kimundu, with the assistance of production companies, Twende Pictures (USA), Afrofilms International (KEN), and Muiraquitã Filmes (PT), the producers, and subjects, take us through a journey we have unfortunately seen too many times before.
I’m going to continue the fight my parents begun. Freedom for Kimathi. Land for his comrades.
Our Land, Our Freedom was the closing film for NBO Film Fest this year, and continues to show this month at Unseen Nairobi. The film fest made an extremely bold choice with its bookend films, probably intentionally picking them thematically, to really underline themes that have been on everyone’s minds this year: themes of freedom, justice, land, and protest. The film fest read the room, and gave the room fuel.
When watching the two films – The Battle For Laikipia, which was the opening film of the festivals, and OLOF, one can almost draw lines of parallels between them (this is your nudge to go see both, wherever you can find them showing). In both documentaries, there is a huge feeling of a David vs Goliath battle for a marginalized community; there is a careful renaming of what is actually going on (the Kenya Land and Freedom Army vs The Mau Mau propaganda; calling the Samburu bandits! instead of age-old nomadic pastoralists); the rampant injustices being meted out on these communities rooted in a violent and violently colonial past; and, for me, watching these two films with fear, terror, and hopelessness choking me the whole time.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. OLOF follows Wanjugu Kimathi, the daughter of Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi, and her almost herculean attempt to get the remaining Mau Mau veterans, and their descendants, what they deserve from the Kenyan government. For those not aware, Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi is one of the most, if not the most, important figure in Kenya’s struggle for liberation against the colonial overseers in the 1950s. It was he who went into the forest and started the Kenya Land And Freedom Army – derogatorily called the Mau Mau by the settlers and the settler administration. He inspired and led a generation of warriors, and quite frankly laid hell at the doorstep of the British, forcing their hand, with his army, to eventually hand over the country (don’t think of the country now, I’m getting to that).
His legacy is a mighty one, but a sad one indeed, when you consider what the Kenya he fought for looks like now; particularly in the case of those who were by his side. The scenes in the movie are harrowing; we are taken to the villages where the remnants of the Mau Mau were flung, after independence when land was parcelled off to the collaborators; we see Dedan Kimathi’s wife, ‘the wasp’ – Wanjugu’s mother, Mukami, in her old age and past her revolution, still asking for the remains of Dedan, hidden from her for decades; we watch the linkages between the Mau Mau and other forms of land illegalities in places like Kakuzi, as it dawns on us that all forms of these oppressions are interlinked.
In the documentary, which focuses on trying to get the Mau Mau who are left resettled, we also get a sneak peek into Wanjugu’s having to deal with a government who is unwilling to deal with the problem at hand, until someone takes it out of their hands, and then they want it back. The fight has changed, but really, is still, unfortunately, the same. It plays out like a horror version of Groundhog Day, with the events of the old merging into the repeated events of the new. The movie begins, you see, with Wanjugu continuing the mission of her mother – to find her father’s remains, poetic in the way she is digging the ground, looking for bones in the skeletal remains of a country’s buried history.
We have many stories to tell. We just don’t tell them.
The stories from the old generals and warriors are riveting and poignant as well, especially when they explain why they left, as one example, their jobs as principals, and simply walked into the forest to join Dedan. We see the memories playing across their faces when they talk about the war songs they would sing, and then how they were found, arrested, beaten, and inhumanely tortured. The brokenness is clear in a way that makes one feel indebted to constantly remind yourself that 1 million Kenyans were put in concentration camps, because the government was so scared of Kimathi. We cannot allow ourselves to forget. Same script; different cast. Same family!
They started beating people to death if they didn’t pay the high taxes. The young people decided to take action.
There are an inordinate number of villains in this story, immediately apparent and self-convicting: the British, for one, the collaborators, and of course, our own fears, and what those fears make us do – or not do. In one scene, someone is trying to convince Wanjugu to keep off the chase, because she is in danger, and the politicians don’t want her becoming more prominent than them. The irony here, obviously, is that Wanjugu doesn’t even want anything to do politics; she just wants people to have the land that is owed them. But because politicians assume that everyone is out for their own hide, and all of it is a popularity contest playing with Kenyan lives, everything is supposedly fair game. To the death, it would seem.
Death will call back those it has buried.
Wanjugu’s mother, Mukami, is a cornerstone of this documentary, frequently cited as Wanjugu’s inspiration to keep pushing for those who she takes it upon herself to protect. Though a calm and mostly quiet voice in the background, her love and stalwartness are brightly visible, as is the rest of Wanjugu’s family, offering her support as they make Tiktok videos and drink tea at their family home.
No one who has breath should call themselves poor.
At some point, Wanjugu says she won’t stop forging forward, and only a bullet will bring her to an end. I noticed that the whole time, she is wearing her Kenya bracelet – something that used to be so trivial, and is now so monumental with the year Kenya has had.
When you hear a person saying they have nothing to lose, fear that person.
The symbolism and on-the-nose modern day relevance in this documentary was overwhelming, and perhaps that is what makes it so emotive. Wanjugu is searching for truth and justice; and it’s what Kenyans are actively searching for this year, in 2024, specifically because of all the protests, murders, corruption, and diabolicalness that has been happening to us, ‘from the ground up.’ Wanjugu shows us what our old freedom fighters look like now, and you can’t help but wonder about the ones who are fighting now? What will this look like in a couple of years? Will children have died for nothing, just like in the 1950s? Is there no honour, no reward, in fighting for your country, even when the war is won? Is anyone who is hailed as a Kenyan hero destined to live in squalor, with no coins to rub together, immediately felled by a medical emergency, as our beloved Conjestina was? Is this all we can do? Is this freedom?
The land that Wanjugu eventually wants the settlers to make their home is in Laikipia, which tidily wraps up these two documentaries for me – but not in the neat bow of retribution that I would have wanted, but more so in the open-endedness of where both stories will take us. There are more questions than answers at the end of this one, but it’s an important movie to see: for history, for learning, and, as Toni Kamau, the creative producer for The Battle for Laikipia, always says, for the point of documentary filmmaking, which is to bear witness to what is happening. In Our Land, Our Freedom, Ruto says that he will ensure that the title deeds for those living in the post(?)colonial villages are distributed, and that Dedan Kimathi has a decent state burial. We saw him say it, and we witness it; now we wait to see if it, and everything else we are warring for, will come to pass.
We were always ready to grab some soil, so that if the white man shot us, we would die holding soil in our fists.