State of Emergency is a collaborative documentary project developed over a decade with Mau Mau war veterans and Kenyans who survived colonial atrocities. Since the British colonial administration systematically destroyed or hid thousands of documents related to the 1950s uprising, Pinckers and his collaborators created “imagined records” through in-person reenactments. The book interweaves these staged demonstrations with fragmentary archives, photographs of symbolic remnants, and survivor testimonies to rebuild a history of resistance and repression that was nearly erased from the official record.
