In the wake of the boycott, the British govenment strengthened the warrant chief system, gathered intelligence on these communities to reorganize them into discrete, governable units. Reorganization was carried out in the context of interwar colonial development policy, which sought to increase the efficiency and productivity of the colonies. The British government coerced Africans across their colonies to engage in waged labor, in order to pay taxes and contribute to local development initiatives. In the Niger Delta, ethnic competition was used as a mechanism by which colonial development was distributed. Paramount chieftaincy increased a community’s ability to access colonial resources, contributing to a proliferation of new chieftaincy titles in competition for these resources. The case of the Olu title among the Itsekiri people is exemplary of these developments.

Chapter 1 analyzes the recordkeeping practices established in Kenya during the Emergency through the reorganization of colonial intelligence services. This chapter explores the connection between the British paranoia against Mau Mau fighters in particular and Kikuyu-speaking peoples in general and the administration’s anxious obsession with recordkeeping and the maintenance of Emergency secrets. Following a discussion of key terms and contexts, such as the colonial concept of information management and the Emergency period, this chapter situates the “migrated archives” in the colonial politics of concealment.