This conference provides scholars, in the global North and South alike, an opportunity, to reflect, once more, on Kenya’s colonial history. It is also a welcome window for the academy to take stock of recent scholarship on the ‘meanings’ of this declaration then and now: literally, the present of the past! Equally, the emergency period creates room for discursive notions mainly on the didactic Mau Mau historiography to open up vistas for novel research.