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I was reading over the holidays and fell upon this. It is part of some research I am doing on how much we can rely on the testimony of older people, especially now in Kenya as there is a rush to have them put down on paper, and film their recounting of the events of the pre and post independence years before they die.

I am also thinking of this along the lines of how far back ought we to go with efforts to bring justice and closure to the victims of past rights violations.

From New Scientist, Why your mind tells tall tales

Many older people gradually develop amnesia about recent happenings while retaining a wealth of detail from their younger days. They may make up stories to cover their embarrassment about the blanks, and generally they know their memory is foggy. The kind of storytelling my grandmother did after a series of strokes is a little different. Neurologists call it confabulation. It isn't fibbing, as there is no intent to deceive and people seem to believe what they are saying. Until fairly recently it was seen simply as a neurological deficiency - a sign of something gone wrong. Now, however, it has become apparent that healthy people confabulate too.

Confabulation is clearly far more than a result of a deficit in our memory, says William Hirstein, a neurologist and philosopher at Elmhurst College in Chicago and author of a book on the subject entitled Brain Fiction (MIT Press, 2005). Children and many adults confabulate when pressed to talk about something they have no knowledge of, and people do it during and after hypnosis. This raises doubts about the accuracy of witness testimony (see "The unreliable witness"). In fact, we may all confabulate routinely as we try to rationalise decisions or justify opinions. Why do you love me? Why did you buy that outfit? Why did you choose that career? At the extreme, some experts argue that we can never be sure about what is actually real and so must confabulate all the time to try to make sense of the world around us.

There's always been the awareness that interested parties will have special need to create a favourable picture of the past, and that selective recollections will dominate the accounts of for example Mau Mau veterans, victims of the Wagalla massacres, Luos lamenting post-independence marginalisation, Kalenjin accounts of the settlement of the Rift Valley or say the memoirs/ autobiographies of the post-independence political leadership.

Working out the factual truth (as separate from legends, rumours converted into fact, myths and outright fabrications that have over time become truths) and convicting on the basis of these memories, especially among the really traumatised can, in the absence of contemporaneous journalistic and or scholarly reports be very hard work, and it is likely the commissions will be faced even from the same side, with more than one recollection of the same event.

What for example was the sequence of events leading up to the massacre at Russia Hospital in Kisumu in 1969? Was the attack by the presidential bodyguard provoked? Was their reaction punitive or merely intended to protect the president and make a getaway possible? What was the nature of the exchange between President Kenyatta and Jaramogi Oginga Odinga? Were the murders of children true, or were these intended to create lasting sympathies?

This of course does not account for scholarly or journalistic bias, see for example the cognitive dissonance in at once lamenting both the loss of Tom Mboya as pernicious to our post-independence prospects and the descent into a one party dictatorship - which was the work of Mboya's gifted hands.

 

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