UCLA

This thesis utilizes a theoretical framework rooted in Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology to explore why the unknown whereabouts of Dedan Kimathi’s body commands so much force over political imaginations in 21st century Kenya, and the historical processes which have imbued his corporeal absence with such symbolic and political power. This thesis argues that in life and death the lack of access to Kimathi’s interior identity and physical body has caused perceptions of Kimathi to be defined by his absent presence, turning him into a specter. What makes Kimathi’s spectrality important however, is the presupposed understanding of him as a self-identical symbol of the Mau Mau rebellion’s emancipatory promise, which has caused invocations of his ghost to threaten power-relations from the Rebellion to the present day. Kimathi’s ghost, however, is neither univocal nor self-contained, as multiple versions of it have been conjured into Kenyan society through a diverse range of mythmaking practices spanning colonial psychiatric discourse, theatre, colonial and postcolonial memoirs. Though the features attributed to these versions of Kimathi’s ghosts differ, their heterogeneity is determined by the demands of specific social contexts, and opposed class interests concerning whether the radical injunction of Kimathi’s ghost should be silenced or embraced. This thesis thus highlights a series of contestations between conjurations of Kimathi’s ghost in state-political discourse at the national -political level vs personal-political conjurations of Kimathi’s ghost amongst the local Kikuyu community. More specifically, it argues that attempts to depoliticize the Rebellion through sanitized or pathological constructions of Kimathi’s ghost in governmental discourse have been circumvented in the postcolonial situation through creative acts of mourning, as embodied by the theatre of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. This thesis thus uses his play The Trial of Dedan Kimathi to negotiate how theatrical re-enactments of Kimathi’s final days combined with affective engagements with Dedan Kimathi’s loss amongst the working-class Kikuyu people can allow the connotations attributed to his injunction to be refigured to imagine new futures beyond the capitalist fundamentalist logics and values enshrined within Kenyan class-society.