from Part I - Struggle to Conceal
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2025
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.
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