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Spear of a Nation

In her ongoing series ‘Spear of a Nation’, Kenyan-born Cynthia MaiWa Sitei explores the photographic archive of Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1902-1973). In 1936, this British social anthropologist toured the territory of the Luo tribe in Kenya, taking more than 300 photographs of Luo people dressed in European attire. He described the people in Western clothing as “dignified”, “well-dressed”, “clever and educated” and “civilised” and those in traditional Luo clothing (to him ‘costume’) as “primitive”, “uncivilised” and “possessed by spirits”.

Cynthia MaiWa Sitei responds to this body of work from 1936 with her own fieldwork expedition in Wales, in which she uses reverse psychology and plays with the notion of time to explore colonial legacies and the effects that change of clothing and language have on her people’s identity. The technical flaws and aesthetics in her images are a way to respond to Evans-Pritchard’s collection of images, rather than reproducing them. MaiWa Sitei’s photographs explore questions like: what would it look like if we Kenyans had colonized the West, especially the United Kingdom?

With ‘Spear of a Nation’, MaiWa Sitei critically reflects on her own culture, the colonial legacy of Evans-Pritchard’s work and contemporary choices in self-presentation. In doing so, she asks questions about assimilation and acculturation (adopting the cultural or social characteristics of another group) among Kenyans today, and suggests new approaches to working with archives and historic visual records.

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