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Reckoning with Britain’s Colonial Past: The Mau Mau Detention Camps and Dedan Kimathi
By Lauren Brown @LaurenBroon Britain has a complicated colonial history. Sadly, thousands of descendants from former colonial territories, still face the legacies of Britain’s hegemony. This is true for the Kikuyu, Embu and Neru people of Kenya. During the Mau Mau rebellion of 1952-1964, the British colonial government placed some 80,000 people from these ethnic…
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9. The Victoria Falls hotel trolley
By Nicole Sithole This hand-propelled trolley system ran on interconnected rail tracks that skirt the iconic Victoria Falls Hotel in Zimbabwe. Since their debut in 1920, a substantial number of black African men pushed and pulled approximately two million white guests to various scenic points around the Victoria Falls. Plaques displayed under the preserved trolleys,…
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13. The Story of a Worldly Southeast Asian Female Informant
By Jess Winstanley John Anderson’s Mission to the East Coast of Sumatra in 1823 reports his voyage to the Pacific commissioned by the British East India Company. Sent out with economic and political briefings, Anderson was not expected to make any commentary on the people he encountered on his travels. However, grounded in the racialised…
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23: A Ship’s Light
By Rebecca Goldsmith Earlier this summer, a freighter from Australia pulled into Southampton in the UK. Its load included a container filled with the contents of my grandparent’s home in the seaside village of Port Fairy (its traditional owners are the Eastern Maar people) in Southern Australia. This shipment brought with it an old brass…
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Intervention and Reflection – Black Atlantic at the Fitzwilliam Museum
by Tomas Brown In 1816, Richard Fitzwilliam bequeaths £100,000, his library, and art collection to the University of Cambridge, accumulated through the wealth of his slave trading grandfather. This money supports the Fitzwilliam Museum to this day.[1] Later in the nineteenth century, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology is constructed around categories such as ‘social…
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