Are You Calling Me A Dog?

In 1963 Kenya achieved independence from Britain after a long struggle for liberation. The decade-long conflict known as the Mau Mau Rebellion, led by members of the Kikuyu people, was the most prolonged and violent anti-colonial warfare in the British Kenya colony. The Mau Mau resistance laid the groundwork for Kenya’s decolonization.

"Are You Calling Me A Dog?" reimagines the history of the Mau Mau Rebellion against British colonialism in Kenya. Using film and digital landscape and portrait photography this series recreates scenes from the conflict in British Kenya. It focuses on Mau Mau rituals of initiation and surrender, as well as British symbols and infrastructures of oppression, to expose the dehumanization of colonialism.

The series is guided by available historical sources like military and oral histories. It also draws on the places and people of contemporary Kenya – visits to sites of the Mau Mau resistance, interviews with former Mau Mau fighters, conversations with Kenyan domestic workers – for its visual language. Historical sites of Mau Mau rebellion and surviving Mau Mau fighters, but also Nairobi domestic spaces and laborers, become the protagonists in conjuring a set of questions about power and freedom for both past and future generations of Kenyans.