ABSTRACT
In the heart of Nairobi is a memorial to the African dead of the First World War (Figure 6:1). Three figures – a carrier (porter) and two askaris (soldiers) – stand on a plinth with an inscription that reads, in part, ‘If you fight for your country, even if you die, your sons will remember your name’. The names of the dead are unrecorded, however, and their graves are unmarked. Similar memorials, with varying designs, but the same inscription, were erected in Mombasa and Dar-es-Salaam (Imperial War Graves Commission 1930–31). Together, these memorials express the conventional gratitude of the colonizers for the sacrifices of the colonized, and convey much the same sentiments about the war that were to be found in the metropole, albeit in a manner appropriate to the racial context (Winter 1995; King 1998). 1
