Imagining an Embodied Past

Abstract This chapter begins by describing the salience of ritual and ceremonial dances within Gĩkũyũ political ideas as well as the shifts in colonial ideology in the 1920s. At that time, precolonial memories and dynamics remained living practices. At the same time, the British encouraged administrators to promote “tribal dance” in order to follow the so-called “dual policy” promulgated by the imperial government. The chapter then explores how the Kikuyu Independent Schools Association (KISA); the militant and anti-colonial activities of the Kenya Land Freedom Army, also known as “Mau Mau”; and the nationalist Kenya African National Union (KANU) did at least as much as the colonists to reactivate and reenact iconic aesthetics and sociabilities in the period from the early 1940s until 1962. Gĩkũyũ and colonial ideas about neotraditional dances were in dialogue, spawning novel, if divergent, forms of sociopolitical thought and action. This dialectic drove the physical incarnations of Indigenous pasts through colonial-era historical transitions, making evident the interdependence of politics and performance.