Laragh Larsen

Laragh Larsen has a PhD in historical geography from Trinity College Dublin, and wrote her doctoral thesis on Nairobi’s symbolic landscape (Shaping the Symbolic Landscape: Public Monuments in Nairobi, 1899-1992). Her research interests focus on landscape, memory and identity in eastern Africa. More recently these have also broadened to include environmental history and she is currently a Research Fellow in the Department of Geography, Trinity College Dublin, investigating the historical and socioeconomic dimensions of environmental change and disease transmission in eastern Africa.

Power, politics and public monuments in Nairobi, Kenya

For the Kenyan novelist, playwright and essayist, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, power through cultural subjugation was the principal tool of colonialism. The monuments of Nairobi can be read as a history of cultural artefacts used by the coloniser to dominate and subjugate the colonised.

By Laragh Larsen

/ 18 Apr 2013