History as Inheritance

History is never neutral.

It is not simply a record of what happened, but a ledger of what survived telling and, more tellingly, of what did not.

For many African writers, history arrives not as abundance but as inheritance: fragmented, distorted, and often deliberately silenced.

To write historical fiction in this context is not merely to recreate the past, but to reckon with its absences and to decide, carefully, what must be carried forward.

The Silences We Inherit

I encountered these silences early.

As a student of history, I performed well within the structures presented to me, mastering timelines, treaties, and imperial milestones.

Yet even then, something felt incomplete.

Kenyan resistance was often compressed into late-stage revolts or sanitized summaries, while figures who complicated colonial logic — especially women — were reduced to margins.

Mekatilili wa Menza appeared, if at all, as a curiosity rather than a catalyst.

Her age, her spiritual authority, and her refusal to conform to colonial categories rendered her inconvenient to both colonial archives and postcolonial syllabi.

That absence lingered.

Long before I became a novelist, it taught me a quiet lesson: history is shaped as much by omission as by record.

What is left out is rarely accidental.

African Historical Fiction and the Archive Problem

When I later turned to fiction, I discovered that African historical writers inherit a distinct dilemma.

Our archives are sparse, uneven, and frequently hostile to the very people we seek to recover.

Colonial documents speak loudly, but often dishonestly.

Oral histories preserve truth, but in fragments shaped by memory, symbolism, and survival rather than chronology.

Between these sources lies a narrow path.

To walk it requires invention without betrayal.

Imagination without distortion.

This is the creative tightrope African historical fiction must walk: to honor truth without pretending to possess it fully.

Fiction as a Secondary Archive

In this context, fiction becomes a secondary archive; not a replacement for history, but a companion to it.

The task is not to fabricate victories the past does not grant, but to reconstruct interior lives, moral reasoning, and cultural logics that official records either misunderstood or erased.

It is an act of ethical reconstruction.

I am far from alone in this lineage.

In The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o does not merely dramatize a colonial courtroom; he dismantles it.

By stripping away the spectacle of imperial justice, Ngũgĩ restores Kimathi’s humanity, conviction, and political clarity — elements colonial history worked hard to obscure.

The play functions as a counter-archive, asserting that resistance was neither madness nor criminality, but a reasoned response to dispossession.

Similarly, Homegoing embraces fragmentation as form.

Yaa Gyasi acknowledges that no single narrative can recover what slavery and colonialism shattered. Instead, memory travels through generations, bodies, and consequences.

The novel accepts loss without surrendering meaning, a lesson vital to any writer confronting historical rupture.

Writing Mekatilili Without Owning Her

Echoes of Valor emerges from this tradition.

Writing Mekatilili wa Menza demanded an acceptance of uncertainty.

Oral histories conflate her with Mepoho; colonial records mention her sparingly, often in a dismissive manner.

Rather than treating this as a problem to be solved, I approached it as a truth to be respected.

Oral memory does not always preserve individuals as isolated figures; it preserves meaning, symbolism, and collective resonance.

Conflation, in this sense, is not error but insight.

This guided my creative restraint.

I did not invent outcomes history denies, nor grant Mekatilili victories she did not live to see.

Instead, I focused on formation: how resistance is learned, internalized, and sustained.

Characters like the young Mnyazi and Friar Mark exist not to overwrite history, but to illuminate the moral ecosystems in which it unfolded. Invention, here, is accountable, bounded by plausibility, and guided by respect.

Inheritance, Not Ownership

This is why I return to the idea of inheritance.

African historical fiction does not claim ownership of the past.

It accepts stewardship of memory.

We inherit silences, wounds, and unfinished conversations, and we decide what to do with them.

To write responsibly is not to speak louder than history, but to listen more carefully to what it struggled to say.

Conclusion: Writing Against Forgetting

In Kenya, where colonial narratives still echo through institutions and education, this work feels especially urgent.

Silence is not absence; it is pressure.

And pressure, left unexamined, distorts.

Echoes of Valor is one attempt among many: a refusal to let Kenyan memory be dictated solely by imperial record-keepers or sanitized summaries.

It does not seek to correct history, but to converse with it.

What we write now becomes what others inherit later.

If history must be inherited, then let it be inherited with honesty, humility, and the courage to imagine against forgetting.