After over a year of collaboration, we proudly present To Spring From Salted Earth edited by Wanini Kimemiah, as part of the Stedelijk x C& Editorial Fellowship (2023/2024). This publication brings together poetry, essays, visual art, storytelling and sound to explore a profound question: How does it feel to be outside in the natural world?

Kimemiah and eight contributors delve into the deep connections between people, land, and nature, focusing on the Kenyan context and the complex legacies of colonial histories. They highlight the importance of reclaiming our relationships with the living world, starting from personal connections and sacred spaces.

Wanini Kimemiah presents an editorial essay introducing work that reflects on, reconnects to, and imagines new ways of belonging to the natural world.

Part I: What Springs From Salted Earth?

Metaphorically speaking, the people and lands of Africa have experienced a salting of the earth by the colonial project. Salting the earth is mostly spiritual, a curse of the conqueror on the conquered and their future attempts to repair, but on an embodied level, high salinity of soil and water is dangerous to most life. Salination renders water undrinkable, concentrates high volumes of micronutrients in soils which kills plants and is hostile to all but the most resilient bacteria. And yet somehow, from these salted earths, we spring. It is from this that the publication derives its title. In this first half of the editorial essay, I introduce the 8 meditations of the publication, evergreen in the saline soils from which they sprung.

Thinking about loosing the indigenous tongue from the shackles of colonial language, Alex/is Teiye’s “Wingi Wa Miti Si Ni Ma_iti” deftly subsumes english and explores the capacious nature of Kiswahili when it comes to drawing the kinship between their own existence and that of plants. Their essay is an inventive response to the imposition of English-as-a-Lingua-Franca by eating it. To eat a colonial language is to create composite linguistic structures borrowed from the various languages the colonial has (and continues to) displace, stripping it bare and using it as scaffolding to create language that reflects the relationality of its speakers. This is how patois languages, Kiswahili being one of them, are formed. Patois often implies a static portmanteau; however, eaten language is constantly evolving, moving farther away from the colonizing language. Even what remains of the colonial in an eaten language is an artifact; a timestamp of its invasion The eating specifically of english in this essay, shatters the idea of its universality. The opacity created by eating thus turns attention back to the Indigenous. As some might say, if you know, you know, and in the case of this essay, the invitation for those outside of the context is to contend with not knowing.

Jonathan Fraser’s poems also speak to relationships with the land and the living world through the grammar of animacy[1], the space indigenous language allows for kinship with animate world, and the ways we as living beings impress ourselves upon the land. “Where Do Rivers Go” glides over the land, taking note of the back and forth of impressions that life and the land have on each other. In the eyes of the colonial/Anthropocene, these impressions are thought to be unnatural and antagonistic, and indeed often are. Mining, deforestation, damming and other activities in the service of economic gain leave traumatic impressions upon the earth. The Indigenous perspective in this poem, however, offers an alternative way of impressing. The contrapuntal poem, “I know you from somewhere,” converses with journeys through language and how we speak to/about/with our plant kin. How much of knowing is also naming, and when we lose these names, how can we know where we fit into our ecologies?

Speaking to both naming and kinship with our nonhuman neighbours, Cynthia Nyakiro’s “The Secret Apothecary” meditates on the intertwined existence she shares with the plants that live and grow around her. Her visual essay sees the author combine herbalist knowledge of various plant species, the knowledge of which she inherited from her grandfather, and stunning motifs for batik printing inspired by life drawings of them. The artist and her family have formed lifelong kinship with these plants through their medicinal properties. It is no small feat to have been able to pass down this knowledge when the colonial government labelled people with herbalist and other specialist knowledge as “witches” and sentenced them to death[2]. When uncoupled from the antagonism of being labelled “weeds”, illegitimately present on the land, the plants are honoured as lifeforms existing in reciprocity with their human neighbours. Time spent with them allows us to experience the generosity of plants and their eagerness to aid in our wellness. Perhaps, we might reciprocate.

On an odyssey through time and memory, Mwende Ngao’s “Shades of green” observes the rapidly dwindling green spaces in the city, with Uhuru Park as the backdrop of a deep relationship with the land and the realm of plants. The displacement from the opportunity to heal among the plants has been proven to cause disease and increase in violent behaviour[3]. The tender memories of the author’s childhood, where she had kinship and ease in and with the park contrast sharply with the anxiety and feelings of alienation rising in her from being unable to find accessible ways of spending time outside. Nairobi is the seat of colonial power in Kenya and the alienation is seen and felt profoundly in the city, increasingly so over the years as numerous Neoliberal policies[4] came into effect, with day-to-day impacts on ordinary people’s access to the land. This included the introduction of[5] and increases[6] in park fees, felling of trees in the name of progress, building of highrise after highrise over public land commonly used as rest and recreational spaces. These actions continue to widen the rift between people and the opportunity to touch grass. This is by design. The colonial practice of barring Africans from gathering in public green spaces has remained a favoured tool for control, used by successive post-independence Kenyan governments. It is clear that to gather in kinship with other people in these realms of the living world is a radical act. The much-embattled Uhuru Park[7] is a living symbol of what resistance alongside and for the land looks like.

Pondering the ways in which the realms of indigenous cosmology are at odds with the colonial, Wairimu Muriithi’s zine “Abnormal Load Notice” takes a speculative approach to what the sale of 8 Kilifi baobab trees to a Georgian billionaire meant for the spirits that made a home within the trees, the people left behind who have had deep, intergenerational relationships with the baobabs, and the trees themselves. Most if not all indigenous African spiritualities of communities in Kenya are rooted in an animist practice,[8] where one considered everything with which they existed alongside as having its own sovereignty, and therefore was due a respect and care. The thought that one could look at a baobab (a sacred tree in addition to being a source of sustenance and a keystone species), in all its towering ancient glory, and imagine himself owner of said trees, is absurd. But it is also a perfect exemplification of colonial spiritual ideology; that colonial selfhood supersedes the sovereignty of all that falls outside of its narrow bounds. It is no surprise that the very first tool used in the establishment of colonial dominion was to send Christian missionaries[9] to destroy this spiritual connection and label it “demonic.”[10] Alienation from indigeneity is a kind of spiritual onslaught. An active spiritual practice centered on interconnectedness presents a problem to colonial ways of being that see all life and abundance as expendable resources only useful in the pursuit of individual wealth and glory. To sever this connection is also to disconnect people from their indigeneity. We remain saddled with an oppressive church preaching the same tired, anti-Indigenous rhetoric[11] as they did at the advent of their domination, even as colonial powers and actors have moved on to spiritual dominion by economic means.

V for 5 leads us through a prayer for reclamation in “Help Us Our Land”. She, as a Black African woman, relates this journey towards self with references to sightings of the rare melanistic leopard that was said to be extinct. The Indigenous African does not and cannot exist. If they exist, then they can return to the land, which spells doom for the colonial project. Much like the black leopard, the colonial project imagines us (and wishes for us to be) extinct. We wear mass produced clothes, speak English, eat cheeseburgers, watch American movies, and should aspire to travel westward. 5’s essay confronts this disappearance, why it happened, and the shedding of the layers of false skins necessary to reveal once more the self that remained rooted to the land. Her essay follows in the traditions of creating rituals of return, which were an important technology of repair in many communities. For example, in contemporary colonial times (1950s), Mau Mau fighters[12] participated in cleansing rituals[13] that were part of their re-integration into society. Taking up arms for the freedom struggle like they did changed something in them, broke them, rendered them soiled by the violence. To be able to move on – and move back into community – they had to find ways to leave what was no longer necessary and pick up the parts of themselves they had left behind.

The rituals of return also take centre stage in Fataba Kakulatombo’s “If Nature Has It”. With a poignant sonic background, sampling the sound of insects, birds, water and melodies from Cheptongilo[14], a Kipsigis folk song sung by mothers for their lost daughters, Kakulatombo’s essay speaks to lostness and lost kin. The essay traverses through memories and dreams of the many places across the world they have called home, anchored to this rapidly shifting landscape by the sonic piece. Music, song and movement have been key in reparative rituals found in the author’s community as well as in communities across Kenya. The body, after all, is the vehicle that carries us through our existence.

In Sandra Nekh’s photo-essay “Scars”, she draws parallels between plant roots, tree bark, stones, animal paws and other phenomena of the living world and the scars on the bodies of various people to whom she is connected. In her theorising, we reflect on each other in unexpected ways, and the appearance of scars are a kind of convergence of form that confirm that we belong to each other. There is no better example of the interconnectedness that exists between the land and all who call it home than in the ways our embodied experiences reflect, converge and rely on one another.

Wanini Kimemiah, Roadside Herbiary, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

Part II: The lay of the land

To speak about the land and the living world, we must also think about belonging and kinship. Existing within the “Kenyan”[15] context is to, by default, have a tenuous relationship with both. For nearly 150 years, the people living within the borders of this nation state have faced displacement, disenfranchisement, genocide, and epistemicide. Passed from the hands of the British colonial government to their African successors, these acts of violence have manifested in social symptoms such as poverty, violent misogyny, homo/transphobia. Unsurprisingly, the unmooring forces of colonial violence have resulted in weak cultural identities and feelings of alienation. Sometimes, it feels as though the option to be able to belong to these lands and be at ease is out of reach, especially for those belonging to communities[16] rendered[17] marginal[18] in order to define “Kenyan” identity. At the centre of this dis-ease are persistent attacks on the land and the living world. Everything the land holds, so do we who call it home, in our bodies; The grief and the joy, the destruction and the healing, the violations and the agency. The romantic ideal of returning to the land, or to older times, is often offered as a panacea to colonial violence. But when we have been transformed by colonization, a return to an imagined orthodoxy can be troubling and often violent. What is required instead are methodologies of repair that can consider our stolen pasts, present displacements and imagine more harmonious futures. Often these reparative actions are defined as “decolonial” practice or thought. However, during the development of my editorial concept, I realized what I was interested in bringing to the fore was meditations on re-indigenization.[19] The decolonial, though important in disambiguating the origins of present societal dysfunction, still centers the colonial. When imagining more useful methodologies for re-constructing ourselves and our ecological landscapes, and charting more productive ways forward, Potawatomi ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s idea of re-Indigenization, as laid out in Braiding Sweetgrass, is clarifying. What if we refused to make whiteness the centre of our existences either by castigating or capitulating to it? What if we paid more close attention to that which has survived and continues to? What if the repair, the re-Indigenous, is all about turning back our attention to our kinships and communities?

This publication is the culmination of ten months of conversation, consultation and refinement of eight meditations on the relationships we have with the land and the living world. It has been a true joy to follow these tender threads with such thoughtful, creative and attentive artists, writers and a brilliant editorial team. Though some of my core duties as editorial fellow included defining the theme, scope, and quantity of the work to be published, the cadence and visual texture of this publication was something naturally assembled from the contributors’ different approaches to contending with the question of kinship with the land and the living world.

Most of us working as writers and artists within the Kenyan context come into our creative practices outside formal educational institutions, and develop our crafts and intellectual rigor in community and by ourselves. We invent language, style, tools, and even mediums with which to speak about the things that matter to us. Inventiveness remains key to the ways of seeing, the theories of existence if you will, that animate cultural production in Kenya. The hegemonies of colonialism have captured imagination and history to ensure that it is difficult to pinpoint the origin of various oppressive phenomena. How then do we navigate ideological minefields offering antiblack myths to explain away our present miseries– we are intellectually inferior, have no technology, no or “primitive” culture, no art – and wrest back the truth and ourselves from the colonial? The re-indigenous cuts a hole in that which we have been convinced is a fixed reality; the colonial is supreme. We must speak their language, adopt their ideas of humanity and our role in the world as a species, religion, cosmologies, culture, technology, education, pedagogies, ecology- the list is endless.

The work in this journal exemplifies some of the ways we refuse to accept these false realities, even in the face of epistemic erasure that would otherwise have provided strong counterpoints to the colonizer’s claims of superiority. There are still many names of river, hill, plant, animal, insect and stone that we know. There is still language that fits our tongues and our experiences. There are still opportunities for us to take our place in the web of connection that binds all things on earth together. We still form lifelong bonds with the plant kin in the places we both call home. Our bodies still mirror the earth that made us: tree bark to cracked heel, scars to fissures in the earth, notochord[20] to spine. The realms of plants and non-human animals where we as human-animal can touch the divinities of life and remember we are the youngest siblings of the living things, still exist. As surely as the world turns, the Indigenous lives.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the community and kinship that have made this publication and fellowship possible. I would like to thank my mentors Yvette Mutumba and Charl Landvreugd for their invaluable guidance during every stage of this editorial process. I am especially grateful for the agency they allowed me, whose impact has reverberated through my personal life and allowed me to extend the same to the contributors. There is something so powerful and life affirming about saying what you want to do and then being told okay, go and do it, we’ll help you stay on track and keep reminding you what your goals are. Thank you to the editorial team in particular Rose Jepkorir and Masha van Vliet who have been incredibly supportive and helped me manage the thousand and one responsibilities I have had this year. Thank you to the contributors, published and unpublished with whom I have shared this incredible experience with. You are all such fantastic people! Thank you to my family and the friends who have walked with me on this journey! Those who have fed me, helped me soundboard, read my essays, co-worked with me, and a million other supportive gestures. You have kept me sane when things got intense. Thank you to all the thinkers, notably Toni Morrison, Christina Sharpe and Robin Wall Kimmerer, whose inspirational and aspirational work has formed the basis of this publication and my editorial practice. Most of all, I am grateful for the opportunity to begin what I consider reparative ancestral work, and share it with the world. May this work be a portal into more beautiful worlds.

You can find the texts by Cynthia Nyakiro and Mwende Ngao here on C&, and to read all texts edited by Wanini Kimemiah, please visit: stedelijkstudies.com. 

Wanini Kimemiah is a visual artist and writer from Nairobi. Their artistic practice is a research and process-based exploration of the idea of the sensorium. Using a variety of media as sensorial tools that range from painting, collage, lens-based media, textile-based media, and alternative processes in cyanotypes, they cultivate an awareness of the world they inhabit and examine how it functions especially outside of that which human-centric society has deemed unimportant or unremarkable. Their writing practice, through fiction and art writing, builds upon their artistic practice and concerns itself with speculation and inquiry into the material conditions of life. They have served as Visual Arts Editor at Enkare Review.

[1] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 2013). Pp 91-111.

[2] Katherine Luongo, Witchcraft and Colonial Rule in Kenya, 1900–1955, (2011), 10.1017/CBO9780511997914.

[3] Kondo, M. C., Fluehr, J. M., McKeon, T., & Branas, C. C. (2018). Urban Green Space and Its Impact on Human Health. International journal of environmental research and public health, 15(3), 445. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph15030445

[4] Action Aid “FIFTY YEARS OF FAILURE: The International Monetary Fund, Debt and Austerity in Africa”, 2023 https://actionaid.org/publications/2023/fifty-years-failure-imf-debt-and-austerity-africa

[5] https://www.businessdailyafrica.com/bd/markets/nairobi-arboretum-now-introduces-entry-fees–2128574

[6] https://nairobinews.nation.africa/nairobi-arboreturn-hike-entry-charges/

[7] Wanjira Maathai & Mia McDonald, “Hands off our Uhuru Park, green spaces a matter of life and death”, Daily Nation, October 31 2019
https://www.greenbeltmovement.org/node/910

[8] Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orabotor, Religion and Faith in Africa: Confessions of an Animist. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018.

[9] Tom Cunningham, Missionaries, the State, and Labour in Colonial Kenya c.1909–c.1919: the ‘Gospel of Work’ and the ‘Able-Bodied Male Native’, History Workshop Journal, (2022). 95. 10.1093/hwj/dbac024.

[10] Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orabotor, Religion and Faith in Africa: Confessions of an Animist. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018. Pp. 144.

[11] Gathogo, J.M., ‘Njega wa Gioko and the European missionaries in the colonial Kenya: A theo-historical recollection and reflection’, HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 78(3), 2022, a6790. https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v78i3.6790

[12] Greg Beyer, The Mau Mau Rebellion: Anticolonial Upheaval in Kenya, Jul 10 2023
https://www.thecollector.com/mau-mau-rebellion/

[13] Mickie Mwanzia Koster, “Mau Mau Oath Purification,” in The Power of the Oath: Mau Mau Nationalism in Kenya, 1952–1960 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer Ltd, 2016), 129–50.

[14] “Cheptongilo: A Kipsigis Folk song Performed by Sosit Girls | Tradition Folk Song”, Bit Cultured, 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2iO7tV4T9Q

[15] The nation state of “Kenya” exists as a colonial project. Borders of African countries were drawn up for the sake of economic exploitation by imperial nations between 1884 (The Berlin Conference) and 1913. As such, being “Kenyan” is to be unified by this specific instance of colonialism and does not necessarily reflect a true identity, though various forms of ethnonationalist ideology and classism were introduced to try and force a cohesion in the same way European society created its nation states. Kenya recognizes 43 different ethnic groups, but has well over 50, each with their own languages and cultures. They are not discrete, a lot of overlap exists between neighbouring communities, but they are distinct in their identities.

[16] Khalil Kafe, Displacement of Nubians in Kenya: The Loss of Land, Culture, and Identity, Sep 30 2024, https://medium.com/@nubinmagazine/displacement-of-nubians-in-kenya-the-loss-of-land-culture-and-identity-795a0140390e

[17] Modesta Ndubi, The Makonde: From Statelessness to Citizenship in Kenya, Mar 15 2017 https://www.unhcr.org/ke/10581-stateless-becoming-kenyan-citizens.html

[18] Accord, The Kenyan State’s Fear of Somali Identity, Oct 23 2015 https://www.accord.org.za/conflict-trends/the-kenyan-states-fear-of-somali-identity/

[19] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 2013).

[20] Corallo, D., Trapani, V., & Bonaldo, P. The notochord: structure and functions. Cellular and molecular life sciences: CMLS, 72(16), 2989–3008, 2015, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00018-015-1897-z

The Stedelijk x C& Editorial Fellowship
The Stedelijk x C& Editorial Fellowship program is crafted to support an emerging editor from Kenya, offering the opportunity to develop and present their research or produce a special issue of Stedelijk Studies. The objective is to foster new perspectives within the realm of modern and contemporary art research and criticism, enriching the discourse with a multiplicity of voices and innovative ideas. Texts will additionally be published on contemporaryand.com.

More about Stedelijk Fellowships
The Stedelijk Fellowships are designed to create a nurturing space for editorial and artistic research practices, providing a rare and focused opportunity within the framework of fellowships and residencies. It stands as a commitment to the advancement of these practices, allowing for an in-depth exploration of topics that span across both scholarly and public forums. Read more