The consequences of Apathy: How Nyayo House becomes an actor for intergenerational solidarity amid the absence of state justice in Kenya

Abstract

In the basement of Nyayo House, a government office tower in downtown Nairobi, hide abandoned torture chambers, built during the Moi Era to imprison political dissidents and enforce his authoritarian regime. Despite decades of memorial advocacy since the end of the Moi Era in 2002, these former torture chambers remain derelict and the recommendations of the Kenyan Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation Commission (2008–2013) to memorialise the site continue to go unrealised. In 2024, youth-led protests against the current government erupted across Kenya, facing extreme state violence that echoed the ‘dark days’ of the Moi Era. From this, it is clear that transitional justice has been ineffective in Kenya; continuities between past and present injustices dominate the political landscape and manifest in both the youth calls for justice and the government’s response. In this context, how might Nyayo House, as a site of violence and memory, function towards justice? This article argues that the absence of official memorialization turns Nyayo House into a discursive symbol for a lack of justice. As such, the site is untethered from its specificity, becoming an ‘unbound symbol’ that mnemonically organises intergenerational and intersectional forms of resistance to state violence today. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s concept of ‘disenclosure’ alongside qualitative interviews with survivors and young social justice advocates, this article proposes that this ‘unbinding’ capacity of an unmemorialised site of atrocity under a regime of ongoing state violence makes it a powerful force for claims for justice beyond a transitional justice paradigm.

Introduction

At the edge of Nairobi’s Central Business District (CBD) rises Nyayo House, a familiar, if somewhat banal sight for Nairobians who go there to have their passports renewed, waiting for hours on an inefficient bureaucracy. Yet below the patient citizens, in a dark basement corner, hide derelict torture chambers. During the oppressive Daniel Arap Moi regime (1978–2002), the 12 subterranean cells held over 200 people over the course of a decade (Citizens for Justice, 2003). Nyayo House was joined by Nyati House – which remains the headquarters of the National Intelligence Service (NIS; formerly Special Branch) – and numerous police stations as a holding and interrogation facility for political dissidents of all ethnicities and social status from across the country. At Nyayo House, a hidden elevator shuttled prisoners between the basement and the interrogation rooms far above them, traversing the functioning government offices that continued to operate business as usual. As both an instrument of former state terror and a functioning office block, Nyayo House occupies multiple positions within the functioning of the Kenyan state over time, and offers a way into the complex relationship between past state violence and present calls for justice (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Nyayo House. Photo by author, 21 November 2023.

Twenty years after the Moi Era, Nyayo House has yet to become an official site of memory. Despite this memorial apathy, in 2008 the Kenyan Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) was established to account for the multiple forms of injustice that permeate Kenya’s post-independence history. The TJRC was initiated in 2002, following the end of the Moi regime, but was only formally established after the devastating 2007/2008 post-election violence, in which inter-ethnic political lines were mobilised by competing political parties to the effect of over 1000 deaths and an estimated half a million people displaced (Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR), 2008). Through the TJRC, this episode of mass violence was put in direct lineage with previous forms of violence, including ‘abductions, disappearances, detentions, torture, sexual violations, murder, extrajudicial killings, illtreatment and expropriation of property’ since 1963 (Kenya Parliament, 2008).

On completion in 2013, the TJRC recommended that the former torture chambers at Nyayo House be turned into a public memorial and museum to ensure that the history of the Moi Era is not forgotten, and to offer ‘symbolic reparations’ to survivors (TJRC, 2013a). In accordance with global practices of transitional justice, transforming the former torture chambers into a memorial would allow for survivors’ voices and stories to finally become part of national history, and to be amplified by the state as a form of historic redress, towards non-recurrence and a strengthened democracy (United Nations, 2020). Over a decade has passed since the TJRC quietly published its Final Report and memorialisation has yet to be implemented by successive governments. Indeed, even accessing the site for this research faced repeated challenges from the NIS, with approval for a group of 20 research participants to visit the site being withdrawn at the last minute. In the ‘security risk’ that a visit to the former torture chambers poses for the NIS, we can read that by leaving the events of the Moi regime untouched, the incumbent governmental regime is protected; clearly the legacies of that violent past remain entangled with the present. Transitional justice in Kenya remains an illusion, performed through the TJRC only in name, used by political elites to reinforce inequalities and shore up their power – a ‘transitional injustice’ under which the conditions of past injustices can continue with minimal structural change (Loyle and Davenport, 2016; Lynch, 2018; Slye, 2018).

These continuities are clear in the ongoing protests that, at the writing of this article in mid-2024, are shaking the country. These protests, which are dubbed the Gen Z Protests and encompass a diverse range of citizen concerns, began in opposition to proposed tax increases on basic goods, which would push the millions who live hand-to-mouth into further poverty, in the name of balancing the national debt. The protests evolved rapidly into an intersectional movement that calls on members of the government to implement the rights, dignity, and rule of law enshrined in Kenya’s new constitution – and end the state predation, systemic poverty, police impunity, and more that the urban majority faces daily. Marching under the slogan of #RutoMustGo, the protests have faced extreme violence from the police: teargas, water cannons and even live ammunition were used in response. President Ruto, who was a youth leader under Moi during the brutal 1990s, appears intent on a ‘return to the dark days’ of Moi (KNCHR, 2024a). After 2 weeks, the official death toll exceeded 40, with further undocumented massacres being uncovered in informal areas of Nairobi and other cities across the country (Kenyan Human Rights Commission (KHRC), 2024a). The death toll creeps up each week; by December 2024, 82 people have disappeared and evidence of torture is emerging (KNCHR, 2024a). Despite the TJRC and a new constitution in 2010, the Kenyan state continues to violate its citizens in much the same ways as previous regimes, demonstrating that the governmental goodwill which underlies transitional justice is lacking, making that model of justice inadequate for capturing the intergenerational politics that link Nyayo House with the Gen Z Protests today (Loyle and Davenport, 2016).

In such a context of transitional injustice, where continuities across major atrocities remain constant despite an extensive TJRC, how might the relationship between sites of atrocity and justice be reconfigured? The symbolically reparative function of the site remains out of reach until the state acts to acknowledge their atrocities against their citizens. Without state action, then, does the site cease to affect justice? What kind of justice is most relevant to sites of atrocity, and what forms of political action might the non-memorialisation of Nyayo House generate? These are the questions that drive this article, and which have emerged from a qualitative study grounded on 48 in-depth, open-ended qualitative interviews with survivors of Nyayo House, young participants in the Gen Z Protests, and members of social justice centres located across informal settlements in Nairobi. These interviews were undertaken between June and August 2024, in Nairobi – a period corresponding with the Gen Z protests – and were focused on the relationship between justice, memorialisation and Nyayo House.

Despite the state’s apathy towards memorialisation, and the ongoing restrictions in accessing the site, Nyayo House remains a powerful site of memory that, I argue, contributes to claims for justice as they emerge through the ongoing youth protests. This overarching argument is pursued through two sub-arguments, which guide the structure of the article.

The first sub-argument follows how justice is defined by Kenyan youth and survivors of Nyayo House to propose that justice needs to be understood as a process of what postcolonial scholar Achille Mbembe calls ‘disenclosure’ (Mbembe, 2021). Justice, here, is configured as a process of intersectional and intergenerational solidarity-formation, where siloed abuses cannot be confronted today without holistically defining them in relation to past injustices. This understanding of justice is embodied in the wide participation of youth from across the city in the protests, and the mnemonic mobilisation of past struggles for justice to strengthen claims for justice in the present moment of political change (Branch and Mampilly, 2015).

The second sub-argument, explored in part 2 of this article, draws on the extensive literature on memorial sites to demonstrate that Nyayo House operates primarily as a narrative encounter that enables new connections between past injustices and present conditions. As a memorial site that remains marginalised by the state, its narrative remains ‘unclaimed’ except by direct survivors. With survivors at the helm, their past struggle against the Moi regime and the ongoing injustice they face through state inaction becomes the primary voice of Nyayo House. The unclaimed status of the site also opens it up for use within current anti-government struggles, which frame the current Ruto government as an inheritor of nyayoism – the political philosophy of Moi. The ongoing status of survivors’ injustices are drawn into the Gen Z Protests by the lack of memorialisation of Nyayo House. Survivors’ ‘unfinished revolution’ is manifest in the symbolic negation inadvertently produced by state neglect (wa Kĩnyattĩ, 2014). This neglect has the unintended effect of ‘unbinding’ the site from its temporal limits within the Moi Era, allowing for it to be used against the state in the present.

Bringing the site and justice together, the final section argues that it is this symbolic unbinding of Nyayo House that makes it a potent force in enabling solidarity-formation across communities and across time. In short, state inaction to memorialise Nyayo House has opened it up for discursive use in contemporary political action by Kenyan youth towards justice. Despite the ongoing injustice that state inaction perpetrates against survivors of Nyayo House, this article argues that today, the site is nonetheless a powerful force that enhances a wider collective struggle for justice in Kenya.

Part 1: extra-state solidarity as justice

Gen Z protests

Back then we were like those guys calling themselves the Gen Z. Let them take the mantle. (W. Boore, Nyayo House survivor, 9 August 2024, personal communication)

It’s pretty much the same script from Nyayo House with the torture techniques, the abductions for no reason. (E., Gen Z protestor, 17 July 2024, personal communication)

On 25 June 2024, thousands of young Kenyans peacefully protested the signing of the 2024 Finance Bill by Parliament. Filling the streets of the CBD, the jubilant crowd sung resistance songs from previous political protests and called for their voices to be heard by the people who sat in Parliament deciding on tax increases on bread, sanitary towels, oil, mobile banking, matatu fares and more. The Bill was passed by Parliament, awaiting a final approval by President Ruto. The crowd outside shifted from their peaceful demonstration to a show of public strength; the Parliament was stormed and a part of it set on fire.

This was not an angry, disorganised mob, but a swelling collective statement that the deaf government had pushed a young population on the edge of survival to its limits and given little material back. The Finance Bill was quickly withdrawn, but the protests had by then changed focus; calls of ‘Ruto must go’ now galvanised the youth movement (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

A concrete planter in the CBD with the slogan of the movement. Photo by author, 19 July 2024.

The form of these Gen Z Protests marks a new moment in Kenyan history. They are composed of largely youth from across classes, who face a variety of injustices, from corrupt police extorting money to extrajudicial killings and forced displacement. Ethnicity is not a mobilising factor – a significant point considering how integral ethnicity has been to political violence in the past (TJRC, 2013b). They are also ‘leaderless’, mobilised not by a charismatic leader or a single issue, but through social media and WhatsApp groups. Contrary to the state image of these protesters as ‘goons’, they are peaceful: ‘they will not come to protest with stones, they will not burn any cars, they just come with their bottle of water, a phone, and a flag’ (T., Gen Z protestor, 25 July 2024, personal communication). Each Tuesday and Thursday, citizens come from across the city to the CBD to protest. The rest of the week, it is business as usual, with nothing but spray-paint remaining.

The state’s response has been far from legal or commensurate. The police murdered 39 people after 2 weeks of protests (KNCHR, 2024b), with eyewitnesses in informal settlements such as Mukuru and Githurai claiming that further massacres have been perpetrated by the police. The bodies remain half-buried beneath the garbage hills. These brutalising responses to democratic protest resonate eerily with the oppressive Moi Era, when journalists, lawyers, activists, students and Members of Parliament who spoke against the capitalist state system disappeared into the prisons, torture facilities, and courtrooms of the state. Disappearances are continuing past the formal end of the protests on 8 August 2024, and rumours of torture are re-emerging. A social memory of Moi’s regime of fear occupy the subsurface of the Gen Z Protests: ‘What Moi did to those people is what Ruto is doing to us right now [. . .] abducting us, killing us’ (R., Gen Z protestor, 25 July 2024, personal communication).

Opposing coloniality: intersectionality and intergenerationality

In interviews with youth mobilisers across some of Nairobi’s poorest areas, it is clear that the call of ‘Ruto Must Go’ has emerged in response to the well-acknowledged reality that those in power refuse to act lawfully, refuse to implement the iron-clad rights enshrined in Kenya’s new constitution, and continue the long legacy of state violence that weaves colonial and postcolonial regimes together across the last century. For one grassroots social justice advocate, the government ‘is run by theft, by plunder, by corruption [. . .] they have their own interests, which are not the interests of the masses’ (M., Gen Z protestor, 25 July 2024, personal communication). Under such a government, ‘the question of justice is inherited across generations’ since it is yet to be resolved through official mechanisms such as the TJRC (M., Gen Z protestor, 25 July 2024, personal communication).

The brutal response by the Ruto regime to the Gen Z Protests clearly demonstrates that injustices of the Moi era continue to resonate. Despite Article 28 of the Constitution, which states that ‘every person has inherent dignity and the right to have that dignity respected and protected’ (National Council for Law Reporting, 2010), the Kenyan government remains intent on enacting what Mignolo and Walsh (2018) have called a state of ‘coloniality’, or the continuation of the compartmentalising and exploitative structures of the colony beyond political independence. Coloniality, here, describes the world living in the aftermath of imperial domination, and still struggling with its legacies, which have transformed in face and operation but remain in part continuous.

These continued colonial structures can be seen clearly in the intergenerational resonances between successive anti-government protests stretching from the anti-colonial Mau Mau movement in the 1950s, through the ‘Second Liberation’ in the 1990s that pushed Moi to introduce multipartyism, to the current Gen Z protests (Branch and Mampilly, 2015). President Ruto is seen by both survivors of Nyayo House and the current Gen Z activists interviewed as a student of Moi, and the current protests are commonly viewed as an extension of the anti-Moi struggle. Under the catch-all guise of sedition and national security, the victims of state violence under Moi were brutalised for promoting socialist ideals, gender equality against patriarchal systems, land redistribution, and for opposing systemic poverty, police impunity, forced displacements, and restrictions on democratic free speech – anything perceived to threaten Moi’s centralised and highly personalised mode of governance (Adar Korwa and Munyae Isaac, 2001). By imprisoning activists working on these multiple agendas, the state inadvertently revealed and deepened the links between these movements, which become unified in opposition to an oppressive government serving a capitalist system of labour exploitation reliant on the originary violence committed by imperial occupation, land expropriation, and the establishment of a judiciary that favours the wealthy. These same issues continue to animate discussions on justice today, featuring in every interview I ran with both young participants in the protests and with survivors of Nyayo House.

Many of those imprisoned at Nyayo House were part of the socialist and anti-authoritarian Mwakenya movement. Despite playing a pivotal role in forcing the Moi regime to accept multipartyism, the Mwakenya movement is known today as an ‘unfinished revolution’, and its history is not taught in government educational curricula (wa Kĩnyattĩ, 2014). While the reasons for Kenya’s shift to multipartyism are multiple, and include a stagnating economy, deteriorating ethnic tensions, the failure of Moi’s neo-patrimonial configuration of Kenya’s political economy, and the suspension of international aid, nation-wide public protests staged by the Mwakenya are well understood to be key forces in this change (Throup, 2020; wa Maina, 1992). The protests, which began on Saba Saba Day (7 July 1990), were violently suppressed at first as Moi ‘promised he would ‘crush like rats’ anyone who showed up at a planned pro-democracy rally’ (wa Maina, 1992: 124). Despite this, protests and rallies continued, gathering public support and garnering international pressure until in November 1991, Moi announced that the formation of opposition parties would be allowed. The struggle for democracy was brutal but productive; in repressing the memory of the MwaKenya, current regimes can minimise how powerful mass mobilisation can be in changing how the government operates.

Like the Mwakenya, the Gen Z Protests today are composed of multiple efforts to achieve justice. Loosely unified against the Ruto government, this is a diverse movement that cannot be reduced to any single issue or identity: it is intersectional. This intersectional structure mirrors the organisation of grassroots social justice efforts that have been emerging from within the most impoverished communities in Nairobi – communities that have, since colonial times, faced the harshest discrimination and most direct forms of state oppression (Park, 2020; Pfingst and Kimari, 2021). The Mathare Social Justice Centre, which is largest of the groups, is joined by the Githurai Social Justice Centre, the Dandora Transformation League and the Mukuru Social Justice Centre, to name only a few. These organisations, which are loosely aligned as the Social Justice Centres Working Group, are composed of multiple campaigns that seek to address specific issues as a collective, pooling resources to push cases and petitions through the lethargic legal system (Mathare Social Justice Centre, 2024; Social Justice Centres Working Group, 2024). The intersectional political character of these Social Justice Centres has proved to be powerful in mobilising collective resistance to extrajudicial killings, evictions and state violence. It is no surprise that the Gen Z Protests share this intersectionality, given how politically active the Social Justice Centres are in promoting holistic visions of justice and holding the government to account for their injustices.

In addition to their work across issues and across ethnicities – the latter of which has been a dominant identitarian structure for political violence in Kenya (TJRC, 2013b) – these Social Justice Centres also perform intergenerational memory work by holding dialogues with survivors of multiple forms of violence, planting memorial trees at sites of state violence and speaking widely about the abuses they face. Several members have joined survivors of Nyayo House on their memorial visits to the former torture chambers over the years, and on the wall of the Mathare Social Justice Centre are painted Milan Kundera’s words: ‘the struggles of people against power. . . is the struggle of memory against forgetting’. The nine youth members I interviewed each spoke to the links between the anti-colonial Mau Mau movement, the Mwakenya movement, and the Gen Z Protests. ‘The same things that affected them, are the same things that are affecting [Kenyan youth]’ today; it is one ongoing, intergenerational struggle (N., Gen Z protestor, 25 July 2024, personal communication). In fact, the final day of the 2024 Gen Z Protests was named Nane Nane (8th day of the 8th month) in direct lineage with the anti-Moi Saba Saba (7th day of the 7th month) protests. By invoking the social memory of that famous day, current struggles for justice are performed as an intergenerational extension of struggle against the dark days of Moi’s nyayo era, discursively continuing Saba Saba as a moment of liberation.

Justice as disenclosure

In Kenya today, this intersectionality and intergenerationality are explicitly connected to decolonisation; Kenya is, after all, a postcolony (Ajulu, 2021). Here, the ‘postcolony’ needs to be understood as an extension of colonialism, as a space where the structures set in place under the British regime continue despite Kenya’s political independence in 1963 (Mbembe, 2021). These structures have a very particular character: they have variously been called compartmentalising, borderising, atomising, sedentarising, enclosing and brutalising (Arendt, 1976; Fanon, 2004; Mbembe, 2019, 2024)

One survivor of Nyayo House echoed this theoretical description of postcolonial structures when describing his experience of torture: ‘the whole thing frustrates the individual. The victim is cut off from the rest of the society. So he ends up suffering both physically and psychologically’ (K. Manje, 12 August 2024, personal communication). For Achille Mbembe, ‘disenclosure’ offers a way to resist victims’ ‘borderisation’, which he defines as the production of impasses which ‘deny the very idea of a shared humanity, of a planet, the only one we have, that we share together, and to which we are linked by the ephemerality of our common condition’ (Mbembe, 2019: 99). Borderising structures ‘frustrate the individual’ by compartmentalising our shared world, sustaining impasses between people and prohibiting people from altering the ways in which they relate to each other. Colonialism plunges ‘human beings into a never-ending process of brutalization’, refusing a shared humanity (Mbembe, 2001: 14). In Kenya, these brutalising structures persist in successive regimes’ abuses of power, culture of impunity, the direct mobilisation of ethnic divisions to enact mass violence and the specific deployment of bodily violence as a regime of terror (Cheeseman et al., 2020). Injustices in Kenya continue through these legacies of violence, resonating across time as victims are forcibly confined into identities by state and inter-ethnic violence: survivor, victim, perpetrator, bystander, insurgent; ‘one of them’, ‘one of us’. These forced, brutalising identities are unequivocal, setting up borders that produce caricatures out of complex, dynamic people; victims are ‘cut off from the rest of society’.

Where Mbembe’s borderisation helps reveal the resonances between multiple forms of violence, disenclosure works to resist not just a single injustice but the fixing structures through which multiple, interconnected injustices persist. The disentanglement of intersectional connections across distinct forms of violence is precisely a colonial endeavour that seeks to break solidarities. A regime characterised by coloniality does not want femicide and forced displacements to be linked; for ecological violence and police impunity to be seen as one act; for anti-Moi protests to be linked with the Gen Z movement; for the dark days of the 1980s to be seen in current abductions. Weaving these cross-injustice links opposes coloniality by unmooring individual violations from their distinct mnemonic ports. Such a practice requires an openness to each other that finds common ground; it is a practice of mnemonic disenclosure.

We return now to the question of what justice means in this context of coloniality, where the present state stands opposed to transitioning away from the predation of previous regimes. Returning to Nyayo House survivor Kamonye Manje, ‘justice is inbuilt in whatever you do [. . .] justice is something that cuts across society. Justice is not a monopoly of the courts or the judiciary. It’s not the monopoly of parliament’ (K. Manje, 12 August 2024, personal communication). Following his words, justice needs to be understood as a practice of solidarity-formation that enhances the social and political links between those who face seemingly divergent forms of injustice: justice as disenclosure. While the state must always be called on to change, as the new constitution binds it to do and as current protests agitate for, relying on state structures will hinder efforts to achieve justice since those processes are predisposed towards segmentation and isolation of violations. Indeed, ‘transitional justice’ has already happened through the TJRC – yet it has remained ineffective, even reinforcing inequalities as political elites can mobilise the fact of the TJRC to entrench their power (Lynch, 2018).

There are three options to approach justice: (1) state (in)justice can be directly opposed, and justice then only approached after the augmentation of state structures; (2) state justice mechanisms can be accepted, and justice implemented within those terms; or (3) non-state actors can mobilise on their own, attempting to claim justice without the state’s direct involvement. Refusing to accept that their lives are wholly defined by the legal structures of an oppressive government, the social justice centres are choosing to act outside of governmental processes by using cross-violation solidarities to produce widespread community strength that has not only successfully prevented local police brutality and helped implement the constitutionally enshrined rights of the urban poor, but is also producing new social bonds that ensure no one is isolated in their struggle.

By practicing justice beyond state frameworks, current injustices appear to be more easily linked to past ones. Not only are there horizontal solidarities across groups and persons who face injustices today, but intergenerational solidarities are emerging too. The Mwakenya movement is indeed an ‘unfinished revolution’ and continues in the Gen Z Protests today. Social justice advocates working with the Social Justice Centres are all very aware of Kenya’s history of violence, and consciously position their struggles today as continuations of past struggles. Coloniality aims to compartmentalise different movements that oppose it – both across the present and across time (Mbembe, 2021: 53). This is clear in the government’s use of the TJRC to form a temporal break between past and present regimes. That performance can be read here as part of a colonial logic of temporal borderisation that is opposed by temporal disenclosure, or a reworking of normative structures of how the past is understood to persist in the present. This brings us to memory.

The yawning gaps in the official history of Kenya coalesce around the immense violations perpetrated by the postcolonial state. By failing to allow access or create a memorial at Nyayo House, where the realities of the Moi regime could be affectively and symbolically registered by any Kenyan subject, the state attempts to maintain a control over how people remember that violent past and the present. This is a form of colonial temporal hegemony that delimits the kinds of temporal relations that are permitted (Valkenburg, 2022). By ignoring the calls of traumatised survivors, and maintaining hegemony over national memory, the state can place survivors outside of time; their stories unmoored from the ongoing context of political violence within which they sit. Current victims of injustice can therefore be cut off from their own history, and the borderising violence performed under Moi can be structurally reproduced.

Disenclosure, then, must encompass more than the formation of solidarities across injustices in the present. It must also seek to relocate time as a site of action; the relationship that people have with the past must be wrested from (post)colonial control if the future is to be reclaimed (Mbembe and Sarr, 2023). Sites of atrocity, which are always also sites of memory, offer a way into this temporal disenclosure. By defining justice in Kenya today through disenclosure, the role that the former torture chambers at Nyayo House plays in claims for justice beyond a transitional paradigm can be more clearly attended to.

Part 2: unbinding narratives

Nyayo House is one of many sites around the world where atrocities have been committed and through which the memory of those atrocities are sustained. While many such sites have been turned into memorials – variously figured as ‘sites of conscious’ and ‘sites of reckoning’ – many more remain unmemorialised (Burnet and Zaretsky, 2023; Lloyd and Steele, 2022). More precisely, they remain unmemorialised by the perpetrators of atrocity, which in most cases is the prevailing governmental regime. Nonetheless, sites of atrocity always ground memory work as they consistently feature in survivors’ efforts to have their voices heard. Across the world, these ‘difficult’ heritage sites (MacDonald, 2009) serve as symbolic, narrational and embodied anchors for mnemonic performances that seek to ensure that the past remains alive and can produce not only historical awareness but also a direct resistance to resonating afterlives of the atrocities.

While this can happen in multiple ways depending on the specific context at hand, there are consistent approaches to sites of memory that have emerged over the last century of memory studies. In a well-known paper, Astrid Erll (2011) suggested that waves of memory studies have moved from Maurice Halbwachs (1992 [1952]) seminal argument that memory is socially mediated (Olick et al., 2011) to an emphasis on lieux de memoire (Nora, 1996) and the Assmanns’ (2008) concept of ‘cultural memory’. Extending performative accounts of memory, such as Paul Connerton’s (1989) ‘social memory’, the first decade of the twenty-first century then witnessed a shift towards ‘transcultural memory’, in which ‘memory is first and foremost not bound to the frame of a place, a region, a social group, a religious community, or a nation, but truly transcultural, continually moving across and beyond such territorial and social borders’ (Erll, 2011). For Michael Rothberg (2009, 2019), memory must be understood as ‘multidirectional’, in that it is always implicated in multiple geographies, spaces and times; memory is not as culturally specific as the Assmanns argued for in the 1990s. Memory, and its correlate, identity, is always hybridised, borrowing across apparently distinct cultures and experiences. This transcultural turn unsettles the temporal boundaries of memory, with Marianne Hirsch’s (2008) ‘postmemory’ foregrounding that memory travels across generations. Such intergenerational transmission frequently deals with embodiment, or how lived, sensorial, bodily performances of memory conserve and produce the past in the present. Many of the studies on embodiment share a concern with ‘haunted’ sites that are encountered sensorially, and which alter ‘the experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present, and the future’ (Gordon, 2008: xvi). Such attention to the uncanny spectral requires a focus on other-than-human agencies, opening to what has become a ‘fourth wave’ in memory studies: ideas of the deep time of ecological memory and a turn to non-anthropocentric theory (Olick et al., 2023; Golańska, 2023).

Throughout this diverse and ever-expanding (Viejo-Rose, 2015) field of memory studies run case studies on sites of memory, inclusive of sites of atrocity like Nyayo House. Depending on the theoretical framework being used, sites are usually approached through a combination of their symbolic, narrational, or embodied dimensions to understand how they relate to social and political life – the space of justice. Survivors of Nyayo House speak about all three dimensions of the site, with particular attention paid to the fact that visiting the site in person is needed for the violence they suffered to be emotionally connected to the present (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

The Nyayo House torture chambers. Photo by author, 7 August 2024.

Emotions are powerful forces that can be mobilised for and against violence, as we see clearly in the rise of populist demagogues across history. For political philosopher Martha Nussbaum, we are more ‘easily able to conceive a strong attachment [to principles of justice] if these high principles are connected to a particular set of perceptions, memories, and symbols that have deep roots in the personality and in people’s sense of their own history’ (Nussbaum, 2013: 10). By physically encountering a site of atrocity, we can form affective, embodied relations with the events that happened at the site, which place that violence ‘within our circle of concern, creating a sense of ‘our’ life in which these people and events matter as parts of our ‘us’, our own flourishing’ (Nussbaum, 2013: 11). The emotions produced through physical immersion in the site enable the formation of an emotional connection with the past, affectively restructuring our temporalities, pulling the past into the present. This temporal restructuring requires a ‘loosening’ of existing temporalities, allowing for less fixed ideas of how the present came to be, and more open senses of who might be part of our circle of concern. In short, what I described in the previous section as disenclosure.

Yet today, there are significant ‘bureaucratic hurdles deliberately put in place to make it impossible for [survivors] to visit’ Nyayo House (R. Kinuthia, survivor, 14 August 2024, personal communication). To go into the basement requires permission from the NIS, once known as Special Branch, who ran the torture chambers under Moi. At the last minute, the NIS denied a visit for the research at hand, leaving a large group of us waiting outside the building. With the Gen Z Protests promising to escalate around the time of this denial, it follows that the site is implicitly understood by the NIS as capable of contributing to this swelling anti-government sentiment.

Without access to the former torture chambers, the efficacy of the site cannot be approached through its physical qualities (Figure 4). This raises the question of how the site might operate to impact justice, beyond an embodied approach? In 13 semi-structured interviews with young non-survivors who have not visited the former torture chambers, it is clear that the site operates primarily as a symbolic and narrational anchor. Nyayo House exists as a metonym for the Moi regime, accessed primarily through intergenerational stories, as ‘representational space’ in Henri Lefebvre’s sense of the term (Lefebvre, 1991: 36). Representational space is the lived space produced through the concatenation of discourses and points of embodied contact for those narratives. As a representational space, Nyayo House is produced through its narration, coming into being as grandparents tell their Gen Z relatives about the Moi Era and as Kenyans wait for passport renewals in the floors above the former torture chambers. This particular representational space has a ‘negated’ memorial character which, as will become clear, enables new relations between the past and future, potentially enhancing justice-as-disenclosure.

Figure 4.

The materiality of the former torture chambers. Photo by author, 7 August 2024.

For Nixon Wakesa, a survivor of Nyayo House, ‘what [the Gen Z] are doing has got a lot of bearing on what the government did not do after’ Nyayo House was ‘opened’ (N. Wakesa, survivor, 28 August 2024, personal communication). His words draw our attention to the productivity of non-memorialisation as a heritage strategy: widespread public access and information about Nyayo House ‘will shape the way [the Gen Z] want to agitate’ against current injustices by situating protest and state repression in its historical context (N. Wakesa, 28 August 2024, personal communication). The negating heritage strategy that the government employs through not memorialising Nyayo House must, by extension, support the colonial continuities that it upholds.

Yet, this state heritage strategy has both intended and unintended consequences. The Kenyan government also abdicates its grip on the representational memorial space oriented around Nyayo House. Nyayo House exists as a lack, and this produces two outcomes. First, the story of Nyayo House cannot become a dominant narrative, since its circulation relies on word of mouth, and the hard work of a dwindling group of survivors. This deliberate limitation directly restricts justice for survivors of torture at that site, as they cannot have their pain widely recognised and their struggle given the prominent place in history of Kenyan democracy that it deserves. With state support, survivors’ memory work towards intergenerational solidarities could be greatly enhanced, and both current state repression and the Gen Z protests could be accurately placed in relation to past political actions.

Second, and on a more hopeful note, the story of Nyayo House is also left open for multiple interpretations and uses. The unintended outcome of state apathy, here, is that the site is ‘unbound’ from official narratives that figure the Moi Era as over and done with. In not memorialising the site, society is also not relieved of its burden of remembering; Nyayo House remains an active space of political negotiation of the present by complicating any clear-cut understandings of when the ‘events’ of Nyayo House ended. Its story is clearly ongoing due to the inaction of the government. The temporal boundary of the Moi Era is clearly contested by the ongoing petitions by survivors to allow open access to the former torture chambers (KHRC, 2024b). Without a chokehold on the narrative of Nyayo House, the state allows for this reality to be used to contest hegemonic state temporalities and raise awareness of these temporal continuities. The discursive memorial space of Nyayo House produced by state apathy becomes, inadvertently, a space from which temporal disenclosure can emerge.

Producing Nyayo House

It is clear in interviews that the narrative space is primarily produced through personal stories told about the Moi Era, prompted by banal encounters with the site, and intentional dialogues on justice, usually run by survivors. For young Kenyans, who are the audience that survivors want their stories to be heard by, the narrative space of the site emerges primarily from individuals’ parents and grandparents who tell them of the ‘dark days’ of the Moi Era. Nyayo House, they are told, is where you would be sent if you oppose the government. The banal encounter with immigration offices often prompts everyday citizens to engage in the stories of the site – several of my informants spoke about how, when they were travelling to Nyayo House to have their passports renewed, family members would often tell them of the Moi Era. The physical site, prominent at the edge of the CBD and the expressway, is encountered regularly and necessarily as citizens must visit for official paperwork. Through its unchanging materiality it keeps a marker for the past present (Figure 5). The site is thus a mnemonic anchor for the act of narrating the Moi Era from the present. In doing so, present injustices – specifically the disappearances and murders during the 2024 Gen Z Protests – are invoked to make sense of the site’s ongoing past.

Figure 5.

Nyayo House from Kenyatta Avenue. Photo by author, 25 November 2023.

Yet, without visiting the basement chambers, these stories remain tentative, open for dispute. Just as seeing and visiting the site prompts the production of narrative, going into the basement chambers could bring those stories to life, and, as those who have visited say, make the stories ‘feel real’, affectively entering into our circle of concern while giving irrefutable proof to survivors’ experiences. That possibility remains out of reach without memorialisation.

The site is also produced powerfully through survivor-led memorial dialogues. These dialogues help to spread the story of the site and to vocalise the struggle that survivors still face in having their histories recognised. Despite ready agreement between survivors, social justice advocates, and other young non-survivors that the site should become a memorial, few of the young Kenyans I interviewed were aware of the TJRC recommendations and the wider memorial struggle. Yet, following a dialogue event with survivors, these young non-survivors’ emotional relationship with the site and survivors’ experiences was deeply shifted, with one participant in a memorial dialogue on Nyayo House even saying that, ‘I feel like I have been there’ (K., 3 October 2024, personal communication). By discursively framing memorial dialogues through the Nyayo House, it became clear to non-visitors that current struggles for justice ‘are very interconnected’ (N., 6 November 2024, personal communication) with what survivors went through; survivors and youth enter into a memorial community through the discursive act of speaking together. The injustice of state apathy is transformed through these memorial dialogues, which are anchored on Nyayo House, into a mechanism for solidarity-formation. Through these sociopolitical solidarities, youth concerns with present injustices are linked with the anguish that survivors went through decades ago; they enter into a single community facing injustices of multiple kinds. Survivors’ unfinished revolution becomes the present justice movement.

The narrative space of Nyayo House is produced here through both chance encounters with the site – in its function as a government office – and intentional survivor advocacy which necessarily exists because of the non-memorialisation of the site. In both productions of Nyayo House, the present becomes concatenated with the past. This concatenation is integral to justice-as-disenclosure, as the next section makes clear.

Part 3: disenclosing Nyayo House

In resisting the implementation of the TJRC recommendations, the Kenyan state has allowed for Nyayo House to become representative of that very non-implementation. It becomes a signifier for the continuities between past and present; for an extra-state temporality. The site is not a countermemorial, per se, since it does not signify historical contestation. Rather, Nyayo House embodies the omissions that official history produces – omissions that reveal continuities between liberation movements across the temporal thresholds of independence in 1963, the end of the Moi Era in 2002, and the completion of the TJRC in 2013. As a representational space, Nyayo House signifies such continuities in the abstract. Without the ability to physically encounter the specificity of the violence embodied in the torture chambers, the site is left to signify multiple proliferating endurances between past violences and the present world. This opens up multiple forms of past and present violences to be linked to Nyayo House, making it an intergenerational and intersectional space of violence. Its narrative is an open one that can accommodate multiple seemingly disparate atrocities that exceed the specific forms of torture perpetrated at the site, and exceed the temporal boundaries of the Moi Era. This openness opposes borderisation; it enables disenclosure.

Without direct access to the former torture chambers, the specificities of the terror of the Moi Era are not affectively encountered. While such an embodied encounter could be a powerful way to destabilise visitors’ senses of time, and thereby open up for alternate understandings of present realities, the lack of specificity that inaccess forces allows for easy linking of ‘what happened then’ with ‘what is happening now’. Survivors and Gen Z alike spoke of current abductions during the Gen Z Protests as ‘happening at sites like Nyayo House’, with several interviewees fearing that the chambers would be used again. Inaccess, then, appears to enable the reimagination of the site as an active site of terror in the present and future. In the context of ongoing violence, the temporal boundary of ‘former’ torture chambers is destabilised without access. This is a form of temporal disenclosure, which has the effect of framing present calls of ‘Ruto Must Go’ as echoes of the opposition to Moi’s extreme political repression.

Opposition to Moi is well established as a key moment in Kenyan history, and referencing this opposition situates current intersectional protests within a socially legitimated movement. By collapsing the distinctions between the Moi Era and the current regime, the intersectionality of the current Gen Z Protests can be mnemonically reframed as an extension of the pro-democracy movement against Moi; resistance to present injustices can be woven together under the pre-established and accepted banner of pro-democracy advocacy. Intersectional solidarities can be, in this way, anchored by the chambers at Nyayo House, despite the specific form of violence and the specific political regime that they were used under.

It is this symbolic unbinding of Nyayo House that makes it a potent force in enabling political solidarity-formation across communities facing specific injustices and across time. This enabling of solidarity-formation and temporal reorientation is disenclosing; it is thus a form of extra-state justice. Despite the ongoing injustice that state inaction perpetrates against survivors of Nyayo House, the site is nonetheless a powerful force that enhances a wider collective struggle for justice in Kenya.

Conclusion

This article has argued for an expanded understanding of the positive role that sites of atrocity can play in justice, even when those sites go unmemorialised and ignored by the state. In sub-Saharan Africa, sites like Nyayo House abound. As the Kenyan case demonstrates, even where truth commissions have been established, justice is by no means guaranteed, and state predation can continue (Lynch, 2018; Slye, 2018). This is not to succumb to the ‘failed institutions’ paradigm that has been so popular in African Studies for the last few decades, and which problematically figures African governance as a lack (Cheeseman, 2018). Rather, this article has sought to draw attention to how sites of atrocity can still impact upon forms of justice in spite of a government which functions well as a tool for the wealthy to wield their power without accountability. State inaction, here, is treated as a generative act that enables claims for justice, not as a lack.

While the government continues to perform injustices against survivors of Nyayo House through their resistance to memorialisation, this article has explored the potential for the site to exceed state control. Should the government have turned the site into a public memorial and museum, it could have ‘locked in’ the narrative, ‘closed the chapter’ in its history, and potentially weaponised the site to further its claim on the politics of the present. Yet, it also could have publicly claimed responsibility for state crimes, and began the long process of repair and political change that is needed for the government to serve all its citizens. The reparative function of Nyayo House requires the transformation of the site into a public memorial; given that it was the state that violated them, justice for survivors requires official action, even if that limits the multiple meanings that the site can concatenate today. Should the government allow open public access to the site in the future, these reparative functions and meaningful transition away from political violence might come to be.

That future is not here yet. Nonetheless, ‘unbound’ sites of memory like Nyayo House refuse to let the state control justice, history, and the production of solidarities which are integral to decoloniality. Moreover, the ‘unbinding’ force of Nyayo House offers new purchase on the future through disenclosing the past. In doing so, this memorial site can be understood as a force towards new political possibilities for life beyond the postcolonial.