Memory Is Political
Who decides what is remembered—and what is forgotten?
This is not merely a historical question but an ontological one. It reveals how power configures the very conditions of being: who is rendered visible, whose voice is archived, and whose suffering is deemed worthy of recognition.
To be remembered is to be given life beyond death, it is to have one’s existence acknowledged and honoured. But memory is not neutral—it’s a site of power where histories are written, rewritten, or erased.
Paramount Chief Kandeh Sorie Kakanday III with a photograph of his ancestor, Almamy Suri Kakandeh taken by NW Thomas in 1914, Somaia, Northern Province, Sierra Leone. Photograph: Paul Basu
Pa Amadu Kamara with NW Thomas’s photograph of his grandfather, Satimaka Memneh, taken in 1914, Mamaka, Northern Province, Sierra Leone. Photograph: Paul Basu
Dominant culture rewards forgetting because forgetting preserves innocence. It protects the legitimacy of existing systems by obscuring the foundations of violence on which they were built.
To remember the full truth would be to destabilise the narratives that uphold whiteness, coloniality, and patriarchy. Amnesia, then, is a political strategy—a mechanism of denial, avoidance, and control. It benefits those who inherit the spoils of conquest, and who fear the reckoning that memory demands.
Kikuyu men suspected of belonging to the Mau-Mau movement are interrogated by a police inspector. 1952. (Photo by Eric Harlow/Daily Mirror/Mirrorpix via Getty Images)
Mrs. Martin Johnson (Osa Johnson) 1923 demonstrating cosmetics to KiKuyu women.
To see through the Black gaze is to confront the apparatus of forgetting. It is to render visible the lives and knowledges that empire sought to erase. The Black gaze is not merely the inverse of the white gaze—it is a reclamation of vision itself. It is a radical reclamation of both sight and story, and a form of critical witnessing.
To see through the Black gaze is to remember in ways that rupture the colonial archive. It is not just about what is seen, but how—and who is doing the seeing. It is a commitment to truth, no matter how unsettling.