Re-membering Kenya: Building Library Infrastructures as Decolonial Practice

Abstract

Introduction ‘What are you going to do with the lion's head?’ I, Angela Okune (AO) asked Syokau Mutonga (SM), teasingly but genuinely curious. I was referring to a stuffed lion's head which seemed to have become somewhat of an infamous McMillan Library mascot among those who visited. The lion's head (Figure 13.1 on the next page) caught my eye during my first visit to the McMillan Library in February 2019; left atop a dusty table outside the second-floor Africana library, it looked as if someone had tossed it there years ago and had not bothered to move it since. The clear lack of regard for it – as if the librarians and library staff didn't know what to do with it – was perhaps what struck me as much as the very materiality of a decaying lion's head just laid out for anyone to touch. But a few weeks later, when I returned on a sleepy Saturday with my four-year-old son in tow, having enticed him to come with me by telling him he would get to see a real lion's head at the library, it wasn't there. It had been moved. Needless to say, my son was mad at me for making false promises. But the removal of the lion's head from public view also flagged for me its paradox. The lion's head was illustrative of a double bind that the staff at McMillan Library, not to mention others working on reviving and establishing libraries in diverse postcolonial and settler-colonial sites around the world, are grappling with – what to remember and what to forget in attempts to decolonise. What to do with the massive ivory tusks of some poor elephant who happened to be living at the wrong period of time, when Kenya was a colonial site of hunting expeditions for White foreigners, like Sir William Northrup McMillan (Box 13.1)? What to do with a decaying lion's head? These charismatic items are a strange delight for tourists to the library – Kenyans and non-Kenyans alike – although for regular library users they are quickly normalised as part of the Library's environment. Such artefacts give the Library ‘character’ and are material reminders of Kenya's colonial and imperial past and present.

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