Al-Amin Kimathi — “Babu”

Al-Amin Kimathi is one of Kenya’s most recognised Muslim human rights defenders. As executive coordinator of the Muslim Human Rights Forum, he spent years documenting and challenging the counter-terrorism practices that saw Kenyan Muslims disappear across borders through extraordinary rendition, and he stood with families who had nobody else to represent them.

In September 2010 he travelled to Uganda to advise suspects he believed had been illegally transferred there after the Kampala World Cup bombings. He was arrested and held for a year. In September 2011 a Ugandan court dropped the terrorism charges against him for lack of evidence, a decision welcomed internationally as the vindication of a human rights defender. He has always maintained the case was retaliation for his defence of rendition victims.

That year in detention did not end his work; it widened it. Babu turned toward the ground itself — the forests, caves, rivers and coastal settlements where Kenya’s liberation history and Indigenous knowledge still live, and where environmental collapse now threatens both. He became an environmentalist and heritage advocate, walking heritage sites with elders, researchers, youth and forest communities.

Utu Heritage grew out of that convergence. It is his argument, made institutional: that historical justice, ecological justice and economic justice are one struggle, and that the communities holding the memory must be the ones holding the power to protect it.