Chapter 4 widens the view on those interested in controlling Kenya’s colonial-era documents at the time leading up to and directly following political independence to include British and US-American academics and the formation of area studies. It historicizes the formation of archival collections in Nairobi, Oxford, Syracuse, and London as the result of entangled interests held by Oxford and Syracuse Universities, the British colonial government in Kenya, the Department of Technical Co-operation, and the Colonial Office, namely, its Intelligence and Security Department. By claiming colonial-era documentation as archival rather than as a political record with current relevance for incoming African ministers, these institutions scrambled to collate and control colonial-era documents for different purposes but all through the exclusion of African partners.

In 1966, A. H. Kamau walked through the corridors of the Hayes Repository in west London, guided by Bernard Cheeseman, as a part of a six-month training on archives administration. Kamau, Kenya’s first African assistant archivist, reported on his visit to colleagues in Nairobi explaining that “this repository is known as ‘Limbo’ because the type of records accommodated in it had as yet to have their fate decided.”1 Unbeknownst to Kamau at the time, among the 215 linear miles of records awaiting their fate that surrounded him, were 100 feet of Kenyan records. His escort, Bernard Cheeseman, had arranged the deposit of more than 300 boxes, consisting of documents that mainly dealt with the Emergency and flown in from Nairobi, just three years prior. With a duplicity characteristic of the UK Colonial Office’s Intelligence and Security Department, Cheeseman boldly led Kamau through the stacks lined with locked steel cages of secret Kenyan documents under the guise of teaching best archival practice to the new professional, trusting that his pupil would not know any better which documents lay hidden. Cheeseman’s ease was misguided. Shortly after Kamau’s training, Kenya’s Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Kibinge, wrote to the British High Commission in Nairobi wishing to begin negotiations for the return of these documents.

Chapter 7 frames Kenyan attempts of archival retrieval as a matter of decolonization at the international, bilateral, and national levels. Importantly, it also draws attention to how the concealment of the “migrated archives” affected political activity not only within Kenya but also in England, as a country undergoing its own re-nationalization process at the end of empire. The process of recovering records from the UK provided the Kenyan Government a framework in which to invoke a sovereign and unified Kenyan polity as the rightful home for the “migrated archives,” while dissent over Kenyatta’s centralized authority grew within the country. Meanwhile, British engagement with the “migrated archives” throughout the 1970s and 1980s resulted in the consolidation of postcolonial archival secrecy with other European partners as evident in the voting blocs formed in the 1983 Vienna Convention on the Succession of States in Respect of State Property, Archives and Debts.

Chapter 3 examines the programmatic consolidation, destruction, and removal of sensitive documents in Kenya and East Africa to London as constitutional negotiations were underway as a way to simultaneously curate, in ways favorable to British interests, materials for the writing of colonial history and for the making of a postcolonial political order. It presents recordkeeping as a political project through which the outgoing colonial government in Kenya attempted to strategically furnish the incoming independent government with documents that would facilitate structural continuity during the transition to political independence while at the same time removing those which might jeopardize British interests, at the personal and governmental levels, thereby creating the conditions for impunity.