Max Pinckers, State of Emergency
Text by Loring Knoblauch
First published in Collector Daily, 8 August, 2024
JTF (just the facts): Self-published in 2024. Flexible hardcover, 30 x 24 cm, 448 pages, with numerous color photographs and rephotographed archival materials. Includes text contributions by Hans Theys, Rose Miyonga, Julius Kimari, Wangui Kimari, and Suhayl Omar and detailed image captions (in Swahili/English). Design by Rudy Latoir, Hans Theys, and the artist.
Comments/Context: It’s often said that history gets written by the victors, and in the case of histories of colonization around the world in the past century or two, it’s generally true that what we know about what has happened in various colonies tends to be dominated by the viewpoint (and record keeping) of the colonizers. And since colonizers come into an existing geography from the outside and impose their own rules and governments, the language they typically use to describe those in the local population that don’t immediately support the new regime is generally that of uprising, rebellion, and revolution. If those locals ultimately use force and violence to fight for their freedoms, this vocabulary escalates, with the locals named as terrorists and enemies of the state, even if they have been met with suppression tactics that range from harsh policing all the way to war crimes, massacres, and genocide. This is a pattern we have seen again and again throughout history, almost regardless of time period, location, and who was on what side.
When the yoke of colonization is eventually thrown off and independence is established (or re-established), the writers of the national history start to change. With the perspectives of the once oppressed peoples now more visible, previously one sided narratives can now be expanded or even reversed. Hidden stories of marginalized leaders and freedom fighters are often rehabilitated and recanonized, with the rebels now seen as patriotic heroes. This process of recalibrating history (and in some cases, pushing for reparations) can be cathartic, but it is often surprisingly difficult, as the documents and other archival materials which were kept by the colonizers generally only tell part of the story (and have in many cases been lost or deliberately destroyed). New histories must be written, which often means going back and trying to painstakingly piece together the past from what can still be remembered or recovered.
In the case of the country we now call Kenya, its colonial history reaches back to the 1880s, when the British established the East Africa Protectorate there. In the following decades, the boundaries of the protectorate slowly expanded and large numbers of white settlers began to arrive. In 1920, the area was reconstituted as the Colony of Kenya, and by the early 1950s, increasing conflicts over land rights, settlements, forced labor provisions, taxation, political representation, and other issues had come to a boiling point. An organized armed rebellion ensued between 1952 and 1960, called the Mau Mau uprising, and although the revolt was ultimately suppressed by the British and its local loyalists, Kenya soon achieved independence in 1963.
The hefty photobook volume State of Emergency, recently self-published by the Belgian photographer Max Pinckers, wades into the conflicted history of the Mau Mau. Pinckers is a contemporary photographer not a historian, but his decade long project to engage with the surviving members of the Mau Mau and to document their stories certainly has methodically researched intentions. In crafting his visual history of the Mau Mau, Pinckers artistically steps aside as much as possible, giving the Mau Mau an opportunity to speak in their own voices. After tracking down the remaining Mau Mau veterans who were still alive and convincing them that he could assist them in telling their stories, his role seems to have become a combination of photographically documenting what he could (in terms of present day people, places, and objects) and searching for visual evidence in archives around the world that he could then also photograph and include as part of the larger narrative. So while State of Emergency has plenty of text, in the form of transcribed interviews, explanatory captions, essays, rephotographed text documents, and the like, at its core, it is a history built from photographs, and those images often give visibility to memories and moments that were never captured anywhere else. In this way, we might even think of State of Emergency as a “new” collaborative history, one that is distinctly separate from but additive to the existing historical scholarship on the Mau Mau.
As we have seen before in other historical documentary projects, Pinckers has unearthed plenty of original photographs from various archives (in Britain, Europe, and even the Kenyan national museums and archives) and used re-photographed versions of these images and documents as a framework for explaining the history as it was recorded at the time. In this case, many of the archival pictures and papers were destroyed by the British before independence, or remain sequestered away in secret files, so the story Pinckers is attempting to lay out, particularly in terms of the specific atrocities inflicted by the British on the Mau Mau and other Kenyans, is inherently incomplete. That said, he’s tenaciously recovered enough visual evidence to provide a rich narrative context for his own investigations.
Armed with the archival images and documents he could find, Pinckers followed many of them to their current locations, making photographs of what is visible today. He shows us sites of mass graves and executions, former works and detention camps (that are now high schools) with holding cells, torture rooms, and doors with peep holes, reconstructed trenches, an executioner’s residence, an ancient tree where messages were left for Mau Mau fighters, the streets of Nairobi where people were rounded up (now a Hilton Hotel), human bones dug up, the tea plantation where Mau Mau leader Dedan Kimathi was shot and arrested, the hospital ward where he was held, and various monuments scattered across the country. These color photographs are straightforward and largely documentary, reminding us of the enduring presence of history, and of places and landscapes that might look ordinary now but that carry their own ghosts and traumas.
The real energy in State of Emergency comes from Pinckers’s interactions with the surviving members of the Mau Mau, men and women who are now in their 80s and 90s. He makes resonant portraits of many of these people, either in their homes or in historical locations, in some cases posed with weapons, behind barbed wire, or exposing various wounds and scars. These are faces and bodies that carry the weight of history with grace and dignity, and Pinckers engages with them with obvious respect, interest, and compassion. Group gatherings bring together handfuls of these veterans, and Pinckers watches as they review booklets of the archival images he has recovered; it seems altogether likely that the pictures were triggers for countless memories and stories, many of which have been captured, transcribed, translated, and interleaved with the imagery.
Then things get more historically unexpected. Pinckers has enlisted these veterans in what we might call “imaginative reenactments” or stagings of certain otherwise undocumented moments in Mau Mau history, which he has then photographed. The elders recreate the secret oathing ceremony (with sheep’s blood at a waterfall), how women placed messages in certain trees to communicate with Mau Mau leaders and waited as scouts, various battles in the woods (some wearing dreadlocked wigs and bearing homemade guns), and how they carried a wounded fighter on their shoulders and rested in caves. Many more of the restagings aren’t battle scenes at all, but instead they “document” interrogations, hands up searches, squatting in detainee groups, forced labor (including building a dam), punishments like carrying a basin of soil overhead, and even the legs up position of forced castration. One image even finds a Mau Mau veteran dressed in the uniform of the Home Guard loyalists, while another recreates a group execution, with bodies grimly scattered in the forest.
These photographs have an eerie time warp reality to them, with the aging veterans acting out sometimes horrific and traumatic scenes from half a century earlier. While we as readers might be able to distance ourselves from the setups we see recreated, the Mau Mau veterans seem entirely in the moment, the memories seemingly still agonizingly fresh. Even at their most simple and amateurish, the restagings feel ominously charged, like history come to life after being long dormant. When intermingled with detailed first hand accounts and interviews, the stories become even more engrossing and hard to deny or discount.
When all of these different kinds of images and historical sources are then layered together in one integrated flow, State of Emergency comes together as a powerful visual statement that actively repositions the Mau Mau narrative. Near the end of the photobook, it becomes clear that the remaining Mau Mau continue to feel misunderstood, under appreciated, and overlooked, and that this book is a thoughtful attempt (with Pinckers’s help) to retake control of their own narrative and to make ongoing arguments for reparations, land grants, and other remunerations from the British government. Whether those advocacy efforts are eventually fruitful is beyond the scope of this book, but as a photobook object, State of Emergency is clearly an innovative attempt to rethink history photographically. There is a more personal activation step here that is different than most photographic histories, and that intimate retelling and re-experiencing of the past draws us into the complexities (and traumas) of that period. In the end, this is a densely engaging photobook that makes an argument for reconsidering a one-sided view of colonial history. In it, the ghosts of the Mau Mau have been reawakened, and given the tools to participate in the crafting of a more inclusive national narrative.
Collector’s POV: Max Pinckers is represented by Gallery Sofie Van de Velde in Antwerp and Tristan Lund in London. His work has little consistent secondary market history at this point, so gallery retail remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.