In downtown Nairobi stands Nyayo House, an unremarkable office tower built in the 1980s during the repressive regime of Daniel Arap Moi. But below ground, the architecture changes character: half-deconstructed torture chambers can still be encountered there, enduring political changes, linking past and present. For those who went through the Nyayo House Torture Chambers in the 1990s, the precarious space stands as a cry for neglected justice, prompting over twenty years of citizen activism calling for the transformation of the site into a memorial. Across sub-Saharan Africa, there are similar stories of frustrated citizen-led groups working to develop ways to pursue memorialisation and justice beyond official (in)action. In Nairobi, one path being pursued is the development of a virtual memorial through which the Nyayo House Torture Chambers can be preserved and made accessible for the general public. Treating heritage as an ongoing process, virtual memorials offer a unique opportunity for the iterative creation of memory-based solidarity networks that transcend geographies and histories to link together memorial efforts, strengthen citizen capabilities, and thus fulfil the fundamental purpose of memorials: to provoke open discourse around past injustices and future justices. This paper uses Nyayo House as a case for exploring (1) the opportunities that digital memorial practices offer in enabling collaborative peacebuilding, and (2) the challenges they face in transposing the affective, bodily dimensions of memorial experiences into a nonphysical form. Ultimately, this paper proposes virtual memorials as an emerging avenue for collective co-memorialisation and architectural heritage-making in the 21st century.
Currently pursuing a PhD in Architecture at the University of Cambridge, Nicholas has won awards for teaching, design, and research, and has notably published his work on memory and architecture in the Journal of Architecture and Architecture and Culture. His global background and longstanding interest in development ground his work in an urgent need to address sustainable thinking in its cultural, aesthetic, and political dimensions, and treating architecture as a mode of engaging with justice in its material forms.