Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa

Of Houses and Death

Since 2011 Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa has been researching the cultural legacies of British colonialism in East Africa. Of particular interest to her have been the “mnemonic technologies” that were introduced to the region during the colonial period (e.g. the museum, the book, the governmental archive), as well as unsuccessful/unrealized utopian projects of European Settlement in “empty” East Africa: the “Freeland Colony” (founded by Austrian Theodor Hertzka and Welshman Alfred Wallace in the 1890s), and the British proposal, in 1903, to create the State of Israel on the banks of Lake Victoria. Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa continued this research in Büchsenhausen, as well as working on a fictive account – based on a true story – of what happened to 7,000 Polish and Ukrainians during the Second World War. Deported in 1941 from a Siberian gulag, via Teheran and colonial India, to what was then the Protectorate of Uganda, they lived there without any contact with the indigenous population until 1952.