![]() ![]() “My family didn’t know much about his work because he died so long ago and didn’t leave any records.”īefore the 1970s, when African professionals began studying archaeology as a subject, almost all European archaeologists relied on the knowledge and labor of the locals, but their names and stories were rarely known. “I felt a strong sense of loss,” Davis says. Despite learning lots about Kirkman, Ndurya’s boss, she couldn’t find anything about Ndurya. When her mother told her about Ndurya’s work as a foreman, Davis was surprised and went searching for more information. Courtesy of Sherry Davisīorn and raised in South London to a Jamaican father and Kenyan mother, Davis never knew much about her grandfather, who died in 1988 at the age of 80. The other individuals in this photo are unidentified. Three of those, like this one, show Karisa Ndurya (top left) overseeing the excavations at Fort Jesus in 1959. Ashikoye Okoko came across a box of roughly 500 images of excavations at Gedi and Fort Jesus in the 1940s and 1950s. Both exhibitions were curated by Sherry Davis, a musician, filmmaker, and granddaughter of Ndurya. ![]() A sister exhibition, where the same photographs are featured, is being held at the National Museums of Kenya at Fort Jesus. The exhibit also features contemporary work by young people of African and/or Caribbean heritage, exploring what reclaiming African history means to them. Currently on display at the Horniman Museum in London, “Ode to the Ancestors: Kenyan Archeology” is an exhibition of 28 previously unseen archival photographs commemorating the Kenyan archaeologists and excavators omitted from archaeological archives. But if you were to read through Kirkman’s records on the excavations, you would not encounter Ndurya’s name or those of the Kenyans who labored alongside him.įifty years later, a new exhibition aims to set those records straight. Under the management of Scottish archaeologist James Kirkman, Ndurya supervised teams of Kenyans who excavated the ruins of Gedi, one of the first medieval Swahili settlements on what is now the Kenyan coast, and Fort Jesus on Mombasa Island, the only fort maintained by the Portuguese. For more than 20 years through the 1950s and 1960s, Karisa Ndurya worked as a foreman at some of the first excavations of ancient monuments in East Africa. ![]()
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