The legacies of the past are always our present, and the histories that we are not able to confront continue to play out. This is certainly true in Kenya, where the unfinished business of the Mau Mau war and the injustices of British colonial rule endure.

In Our Land, Our Freedom, Kenyan directors Meena Nanji and Zippy Kimundu follow Evelyn Wanjugu Kimathi as she traces the legacies of her family’s history and confronts the current political injustices that spring from Kenya’s painful colonial past. Filmed over almost a decade, the documentary follows Wanjugu, daughter of famed Kenyan independence fighters Dedan and Mukami Kimathi, as she searches for the remains of her father, who was executed by the British colonial administration in 1957—six years before Kenya gained independence. At its best, Our Land, Our Freedom is a deeply moving portrait of one woman’s tireless struggle to honor the legacy of her father.

As the film’s title suggests, land is central to the narration of this story and to the history of the Mau Mau. Without a doubt, this question is echoed in Kenya’s sociopolitical present. As Wanjugu Kimathi puts it in the film: “To us, land is a matter of life and death.” Certainly, land was central to the Mau Mau campaign for independence, whose slogan ithaka na wiathi translates as “land and freedom,” or more conceptually as “self-mastery through land.” To the Kikuyu people, who made up the vast majority of the Mau Mau movement, land was the way of life; the organizing principle that connected members of the community to each other and to the ancestors. And through all the changes of the last six decades, land alienation is still the central issue that galvanizes Mau Mau veterans.

In the film, Wanjugu visits Kieni, a former colonial village where families were forcibly moved by the colonial regime in the 1950s, as part of the brutal British counterinsurgency efforts. Unable to gain title deeds or to buy land in the post-independence resettlement programs, these families have been living in Kieni as squatters for almost seventy years. They are certainly not the only ones; the patchy post-independence land resettlement programs did find land for tens of thousands, but left many waiting. And even those who did receive land were often unsatisfied with their lot. As a consequence, land poverty was, depressingly, both a cause and a result of the Mau Mau war, since veterans like those at Kieni have been left in the same villagized and alienated manner that caused them to take up arms in the first place. Meanwhile, the political class in Kenya owns vast amounts of land and wealth and sees calls for redistribution as a threat.

Our Land, Our Freedom makes an important link between the plight of Mau Mau veterans in places like Kieni and other struggles for land justice, in particular the Kakuzi land case. Wanjugu’s attempts to “link struggles” with communities in Murang’a evicted by the British-owned Kakuzi company highlights the broader question of squatters and land alienation in Kenya, and its roots in colonialism. Ongoing struggles to get justice for human rights violations and the related historical theft of land speak to the reality that the Mau Mau plight is one of a constellation of historical injustices that persist in contemporary Kenya.

In the same month that Our Land, Our Freedom was released, another Kenyan film, The Battle for Laikipia, premiered. This film documents the ongoing tension between white settler ranchers and Samburu pastoralists in Laikipia County. In both films the message is clear: Political independence and justice are not the same thing, and many communities in Kenya are still suffering from the legacies of colonial land grabbing and violence; historical injustices continue to reemerge from their shallow graves, but find little support from Kenya’s political class.

Our Land, Our Freedom’s protagonist, Wanjugu Kimathi, will not be deterred by the political disregard of these justice movements. In 2017, she registered the Dedan Kimathi Foundation, essentially a veterans organization that functions as a land buying co-operative, mobilizing landless people to purchase land collectively. The foundation is a powerful representation both of  Kimathi’s strength as an organizer and of the power of community organizing to effect material change in the face of political dismissal. By 2018, the Dedan Kimathi Foundation had a resettlement site in Rumuruti, and Wanjugu makes the prudent point that in uniting and resettling these veterans, she has done what four political regimes have failed to do. However, this project is incomplete and shrouded in questions about how the funds have been used, complicating an otherwise neat narrative of a popular hero righting the wrongs of the colonial past. The Dedan Kimathi Foundation has evolved into an environmental organization, with a focus on planting trees.

Midway through the film, Wanjugu finally visits Kamiti Maximum Security Prison to search for Dedan Kimathi’s burial site. Accompanied by a former detainee at Kamiti who thinks he might be able to find the grave using a hand-drawn map, Wanjugu finds that her hope turns to frustration as they end up walking in circles. It would be almost farcical if it wasn’t so tragic, and it directly parallels Mukami and Wanjugu’s visit in 2003 with the same mission in mind. On this occasion, they went with eleven people who showed them twelve different spots, none of which yielded the precious remains of their kin. It is evident here that the search for Dedan Kimathi’s remains is of deep personal significance to the Kimathi family, and has taken on wider political life. However, perhaps it is not just about the literal remains; it is about honoring the legacy of Kenya’s struggle and the immense personal and political costs that Mau Mau fighters have borne.

It is not only Kimathi’s remains that are left in unmarked mass graves; in the opening sequence of the film, Wanjugu Kimathi visits a mass grave in Ndeiya, Kiambu County, the site of a colonial detention camp during the Mau Mau war. They dig a few feet below the ground and find a human skull in a shallow mass grave; this is one of scores of  mass grave sites across Kenya, where the bodies of Mau Mau fighters and others killed during the war were unceremoniously buried in large unmarked pits. As Wanjugu takes in the horror and violence represented in this mass grave she says, “I’m seeing as if this is my father, Dedan Kimathi,” before placing the skull back to be reburied in the shallow grave.

What are we to do with the unidentified bodies that lie in these mass graves? For the past sixty years, the Kenyan government has opted out of taking responsibility for what is, undoubtedly, a deeply sensitive question. What the film conveys very clearly is the link between the neglect of these sites and the Kenyan government’s disregard for the plight of Mau Mau veterans: the lack of care for both the living and the dead. However, it falls short of considering how these anonymous human remains might ask us to reflect on the mass victims of violence, and the related perils of hero worship in the case of a popular uprising. Certainly, it was ordinary people who fought and died in the Mau Mau war, and their remains are surely owed the same care and reverence as those of Dedan Kimathi or any other leader of the movement.

The release of the film was politically timely. It was launched in the wake of the Gen Z protests, where a new wave of young Kenyans took to the streets to protest the injustices of the Kenyan political class. With these popular uprisings of 2024, it is clear that 60 years after independence Kenya is still trying to make sense of her past and her future; we are still negotiating what freedom should look like.

There were boos and jeers during the Nairobi premiere of the film when President William Ruto appeared on screen; here he was giving a speech at Mukami Kimathi’s state funeral in 2023. In this scene, Ruto makes still unfulfilled promises to assure title deeds for people squatting in former colonial villages, and to find Dedan Kimathi’s remains and give him a hero’s burial. Even in death, the Kimathi family are eclipsed by the political leaders who would appropriate their grief for their personal political campaigns.

Such public performances clearly do not fool ordinary Kenyans. Instead, they illustrate that politicians understand the importance of this negotiation with the past and feel, at the very least, a duty to pay lip service to it. Our Land, Our Freedom sends a message to that political class who wants to pacify uprisings with empty promises; it demonstrates that Mau Mau veterans will not just quietly fade away and that a new generation will continue the struggle for justice that their parents and grandparents began.

Wanjugu Kimathi insists that hers is not a political project; but how could it not be? The film documents how her activities attract the attention of people in high places and captures her having several dramatic phone calls with a national intelligence agent who warns her to stay out of politics and to leave the matter of Dedan Kimathi’s remains to the government. What’s more, Wanjugu was briefly arrested in 2018, and it is clear that her work is politically dangerous. As though speaking to this, in a voiceover she asks, “Is Kimathi a threat in life and in death?”

Above all, Our Land, Our Freedom is a portrait of Evelyn Wanjugu Kimathi, the woman and the activist. Wanjugu is a complicated figure, and, in some ways, the perfect protagonist for such a complex history. Always elegantly dressed and energetic, she commands the screen with her powerful declarations about justice. Born to Dedan Kimathi’s wife Mukami Kimathi in 1972, 15 years after Dedan Kimathi’s execution in 1957, Wanjugu claims to have no connection to her biological father, and she and her mother see her as the daughter of Dedan. While some have questioned this as a kind of fraud, Evelyn’s spiritual connection to Kimathi appears profound and genuine. “I was born in a freedom fighter’s family,” she narrates. For her, it is this identity, above all else, that drives her.

Some families find ways to move on from pain and grief through activism, and it is touching to see how Evelyn’s work is spurred on by a deep connection to her parents. The film’s biggest strength is in its intimate portrayal of Wanjugu and the Kimathi family: the tender moments between Evelyn and her mother, Mukami, and with her husband and children milking her cows and tending to the crops at her family’s rural home in Kinangop. These scenes show Wanjugu not only as the tireless champion of the downtrodden Mau Mau survivors but also as a loving daughter fighting to uphold her parents’ legacy and build something better for her own children.

The film spans almost a decade, and the narrative arc forms as it is being filmed. This makes for an exciting, though sometimes chaotic, documentary narrative. At times, the film feels as if it’s trying to do too much, and the stretch weakens what is, perhaps, its biggest strength: an intimate portrait rather than a universal one. It might have been a more digestible film had it resisted the urge to incorporate all the threads of Wanjugu’s work. But perhaps this is part of the point Nanji and Kimundu are trying to make; that this is a complex history and a political reality that does not fit neatly into a single narrative. Ultimately, Our Land, Our Freedom is a timely film with a strong message of justice that is hard to ignore.