Chapter 2 analyzes the regulation of colonial archives in Kenya as a method of racialized secret-keeping that involved cooperation between the Colonial Office in London and officials based in Kenya. It demonstrates that the regulation of its archives was one of several strategies of the colonial administration to control access to information and intelligence pertaining to the Emergency. The first half of this chapter examines the negotiations between the Colonial Office in London and the British colonial government in Nairobi over how best to deal with managing and securing secret records. The second half proceeds to analyze the only instance in which a “researcher” has ever been granted full and unconditional access to the secret records of the Emergency. In doing so, it argues that the British colonial government was interested not only in barring access to sensitive documents but also in enabling their use in highly controlled settings so that official documents could serve as evidence supporting sympathetic “research,” or propaganda, which vindicated the government at a time of growing critique.

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.