On June 9, 1948, a dozen delegates, mainly from North America and Europe, gathered at Hotel Majestic in Paris to decide upon a global archival order.Footnote ¹ The Paris of the 16th arrondissement, where the hotel was located, was one decorated with nineteenth-century wealth and high society grandeur, where empire, aristocracy, and political power converged. In view of the Arc de Triomphe, the hotel sat on Avenue Kléber in the center of Georges-Eugène Hausmann’s renovated Paris. Hausmann’s development was an expensive and expansive undertaking that enlisted tens of thousands of workers, expropriated old buildings, demolished neighborhoods, destroyed ancient sites, and resulted in the triumphant, imperial Parisian aesthetic that has since served as an international template for urban design.Footnote ² Napoleon III had the goal of overtaking London to make Paris the premier financial center of the world where the spoils of his empire could be deposited. Critics have suggested that Napoleon and Hausmann’s use of boulevards were intended to ease the French army’s mobility in order to prevent and suppress popular uprisings, such as the 1871 Paris Commune.Footnote ³ The spatial design thus aspired to control, survey, and bar the public’s entry into Paris’s imperial center.

Constructed in 1908 by architect Armand Sibien, Hotel Majestic was not open long until it was repurposed. During the German occupation of France in the Second World War, the hotel served as the headquarters for the German military high command and its propaganda battalion. Just a few years before the archival congress, Nazi officials had roamed the same halls drafting speeches, refining censorship strategies, and organizing the deportation of Parisian Jews.Footnote ⁴ After the war, the building became the first UNESCO headquarters. Founded in 1945 as a League of Nations’ offspring, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) aimed at promoting world peace through international cooperation in education, the sciences, and culture. Its constitution summarized, “since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.”Footnote ⁵ Shortly after chartering international organizations in the fields of museums and libraries, UNESCO agreed to establish an international organization on archives. Looking at who sat behind the hotel’s façade of wealth and power during the inaugural meeting of the International Council on Archives (ICA) and who was outside its Beaux-Arts styled walls shows a selective exclusiveness characteristic of postwar internationalism. However, a look at what was happening outside its walls helps to explain the evolving function of the ICA as an instrument for sovereignty disputes upon the fall of European empires.

Several exclusions rendered the ICA’s internationalism suspicious. For example, a report on the congress stated that no one from Spain, Germany, or Japan would be invited to the council, “in order to secure the cooperation of southeastern European member nations.”Footnote ⁶ This cooperation was perceived as crucial to UK and US governments, which wished to prevent the spread of Soviet influence in Europe and worldwide. Furthermore, because the ICA required a national affiliation for full membership, it barred participation of anyone from the colonial, or non-sovereign, world. Thus, the ICA, like other international organizations at the time, oriented itself at recovering from fascism, restoring (western) European cultural and political dignity, and making room for US geopolitical ascendance.Footnote ⁷ In other words, it calibrated a “new balance of hegemonic relations.”Footnote ⁸ However, as historian Glenda Sluga points out about UNESCO more widely, while the ICA’s alleged cosmopolitan purpose condemned the “master race theories of Nazism and the ‘scourge of war,’” it was nonetheless couched in late-nineteenth-century notions of empire that acceded to the subordination of colonial peoples in imperial world ordering.Footnote ⁹ In this way, the ICA’s inaugural meeting reflected the broader political process of reconfiguring global hegemony through universalizing discourses in the aftermath of the Second World War, which rested on the elision of empire.

The elision of empire and the struggles against it was constructed not only through exclusions, such as of non-sovereign colonies from international organizations, but through strategic withdrawals. As the French and British empires fell, colonial governments across the globe scrambled to remove certain administrative records from soon-to-be independent states and to lock them up in inaccessible troves in London and Paris. This was especially the case in colonies besieged by “small wars” leading up to political independence, where the contradictions between Europe’s recent commitment to human rights and French-British military activities in colonial wars were most stark.Footnote ¹⁰ French and British officers removed records unevenly across different colonies according to the pre-independence context. Historian Vincent Hiribarren argues that colonial secrecy through record removal was more regularly practiced by European states that were regarded as “democracies” in the age of empire, such as Britain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, and that concealing evidence of imperial rule was an attempt to deal with the contradiction laid out above.Footnote ¹¹ It fits, then, that the former colonies that transitioned to self-government out of the wreckage of these wars, spearheaded the movement to return removed records.Footnote ¹² Representatives of Algeria and Kenya, once admitted to the ICA following political independence, made regular use of the organization’s resources in order to prioritize the issue of removed colonial archives, referred to since 1972 as “migrated archives.” By following the ICA’s main conferences from the 1950s to 1970s, this chapter analyzes the developments in international archival politics in the second half of the twentieth century in order to trace the ways in which anticolonial sovereignty struggles persisted beyond independence. The ICA staged debates between archivists representing former colonies and metropolitan states wherein the term “migrated archives” emerged in order to raise the questions of colonial archives custody and restitution.

Despite persistent pressure from former colonies to restore relevant archives removed or held by former colonizing countries, the ICA has failed to conclusively mediate or resolve the issue of colonial archival custody. This failure is due to the fact that the organization’s architects represented the very same governments that held these contested records. Furthermore, the ICA adopted a “development” framework to shape engagement between former colonial and colonizing countries, which positioned former colonial powers as voluntary patrons-in-the-present rather than addressing the historical construction of archival inequality that colonial rule produced. Finally, by maintaining sovereignty as the logic determining archival custody, the ICA established a discourse that preserved imperial claims to colonial archives. Taken together, this demonstrates the challenges of overcoming the impunity of former colonial governments, which has been strengthened by their control and regulation over the evidence of empire. While archival scholars have often observed how archives mirror the societies that they document, less attention has been paid to how postcolonial archival politics have constituted the societies they reflect.Footnote ¹³ In the case of colonial archival disputes, metropolitan custody maintains imperial advantage wherein control and access to these records is regulated by bordering processes that dispossess formerly colonized peoples and governments of important legal and historical documents.Footnote ¹⁴ However, metropolitan custody has not gone unchallenged. Since admission into the ICA, former colonies have made regular and ceaseless use of its resources and structures in struggles for restitution.

The Colonial Conditions of Archival Internationalism

The ICA hosted the first International Congress of Archivists in August 1950. The ICA invited all countries with membership in the United Nations, and representatives from Spain and Western Germany to Paris for a week’s worth of programming. Not all invitees came. For example, Russia and “her allied nations” refrained from attending.Footnote ¹⁵ Neither India nor Israel sent a delegate. The inaugural congress disproportionately represented Western Europe and North America and reflected the global split articulated by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The composition of the congress created an asymmetrical basis for archival internationalism. The following will discuss the impacts of that imbalance on emerging archival norms. While the composition of subsequent congresses changed, mirroring geopolitical developments related to the Cold War and decolonization, the original formation of the ICA and its archival ideals applied narrowly to Euro-America, giving those members advantage over others. This advantage, while challenged in the following decades within the ICA, has not disappeared.

During the inaugural congress, several general themes arose related to the wartime experience of its founding members. The Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives international archival cooperation at the end of the Second World War context fortified four distinct values ascribed to archival control: military, administrative, historiographical, and evidentiary. Archivists such as Hilary Jenkinson and Solon Buck identified current records specifically for their potential uses as sources of intelligence, legal evidence, and administrative aids during foreign rule and for military preparedness. In this formulation, archival control availed sovereignty. Where other scholars have theorized archival sovereignty as taking control of both historical narrative and the historical record, or as the basis for archival claims, the ICA provides a focal point to examine how archival control afforded political sovereignty.Footnote ¹⁶ For example, the control of civic records facilitated the reorganization of bureaucratic administration during foreign occupation.Footnote ¹⁷

Postwar sovereignty struggles lurked behind the ICA’s first congress. These were expressed at a technical level. It was the first international congress of archivists to address problems such as the intentional or incidental destruction of archives during armed conflict, the use of microphotography to further preserve paper records in a potentially more durable medium, the exchange of copies between ICA members, and greater access to archives for scholarly use.Footnote ¹⁸ For example, a US delegate criticized the fifty-year closure period convention observed by most European archives, favoring earlier access.Footnote ¹⁹ This would have implications not only for the exchange of current records between NATO members but also for who would be empowered to interpret the recent past. Despite the universal discourse in which they were discussed, these archival freedoms were selectively conceived of. Moreover, they were driven by the political will of governments increasingly nervous about Soviet influence. The ICA was thus founded between the desire to liberalize archival access in order to facilitate transnational cooperation and governance and the Cold War predilection for defensive secrecy. As decolonization resulted in more and more former colonies represented at the ICA, it became clear that its founding member states were not willing to relinquish authority in determining the beneficiaries of archival exchange, preservation, or access.

In order to better illustrate how the ICA facilitated archival developments related to the problem of colonial records, the following focuses on its early approach to custody and access according to archival internationalism or sovereignty with special attention to the Anglo case. Following the experience in transnational archival cooperation at wartime and observing its potentials, Solon Buck espoused a notion of archival “one worldism,” wherein “the archives of all the nations of the world” constituted “the archives of mankind” that required universal stewardship.Footnote ²⁰ Douglas Cox has recently summarized Buck’s internationalist view as “unmoored from the idea that international law or archival practice necessarily requires that archives belong in the custody of one state.”Footnote ²¹ While this rather favorable interpretation challenges archives as the inalienable property of a single state, it overlooks the paradox wherein national sovereignty was required in order to participate in and reap the benefits of archival internationalism through the ICA.

Peoples living in colonies had no rights or privileges to the archives that had formed as a result of their subjugation. In Kenya, every effort was made to prevent African access to administrative archives. Furthermore, as Buck pronounced his one worldism ideal, the UK government and British colonial administrations were actively suppressing nonofficial record creation in the colonies, for example through the prohibition of vernacular press and the banning of African political associations.Footnote ²² In Kenya, the District Commissioner of Kiambu endorsed the suppression of African perspectives, going as far as to say, “it cannot be in the African public interest to unnecessarily expose their semi-educated ignorance to the corruption of unbridled political agitation which has no regard for truth.”Footnote ²³ Hilary Jenkinson, who had famously described archivists as the defenders of historical truth, offered colonial archives management as a way of mitigating “one of the greatest dangers of Modern Civilisation – the unscrupulous use of Publicity and Propaganda.”Footnote ²⁴ As the ICA formed on the basis of archival internationalism, the British colonial government in Kenya attempted to restrict Africans’ freedom to produce their own documents and the forefather of UK archival theory suggested centralizing colonial archives to counter the “propaganda” of anticolonial thought. Clare Bwye, the only administrative archivist officially appointed by the British colonial government in Kenya, kept a copy of Jenkinson’s memorandum on colonial archives and drew upon it in his formulation of the rules and regulations governing archival administration in Kenya during the mid-1950s.Footnote ²⁵

While Jenkinson encouraged British colonial administrations to consolidate their control over archives, the UK government addressed the issue of archival access domestically in the first legislative update to the Public Records Act since 1898. In contrast to Buck’s archival internationalism, archival practice and law varied considerably across national borders in Europe and elsewhere.Footnote ²⁶ In 1849 England, a Member of Parliament lamented that “the national records of this country [were in a] disgraceful and dangerous state.”Footnote ²⁷ Dispersed and disorganized, England’s archives were endangered. The Public Record Office (PRO) opened its first purpose-built repository in 1856 as the first significant step to centralize both control and storage of the land’s legal records. Its capacities, however, were no match for the boom of document production spurred by the world wars. Hilary Jenkinson, who at the time was the UK’s deputy keeper of the records, suggested a “Limbo” plan in 1944 in order to store quickly accruing records in makeshift spaces, such as deep shelters at London underground stations, before they could be appraised for destruction or preservation.Footnote ²⁸ The Hayes storage facility, where UK intelligence officers would later deposit and secretly store thousands of files from Britain’s colonies nearing independence, developed as a result of Jenkinson’s proposal.

In order to deal with the bulk problem in the UK, an official committee formed in 1952 to decide how archival appraisal should proceed. The committee was tasked with resolving a dilemma. On the one hand, the proliferation of documents undoubtedly occurred as a result of historically significant processes that deserved careful consideration in determining their long-term preservation. On the other, the costs of storing the quantity of records exceeded what the government was willing to spend. The committee’s work resulted in the 1958 Public Records Act (PRA), which outlined guidelines and enumerated responsibilities for selecting public records for long-term preservation and destroying the rest. The act also codified the first statutory, general public right of access to public records after a fifty-year closure period.

The act updated what was regarded as a public record. Previously, public records were narrowly defined as legal records. The act expanded this to include

This broad description of public records fortified their status as monarchical property while conceding public access. Further, the vague geographic scope, “in the UK or elsewhere,” did little to clarify the custodial status of colonial archives. While the PRA’s definition of a public record was sweeping, who constituted “the public” that now had access to such documents was even more unclear. The act came into legal effect in January 1959, just as decolonization from the British Empire accelerated across the African continent. As Calder Walton aptly emphasizes, “the British government never formulated an overall plan for how to relinquish control over its colonies.”Footnote ³⁰ The subsequent co-evolution of racialized immigration law and the suppression of colonial archives in Jenkinson’s “limbos” functioned to restrict the “public” addressed by the PRA as the coming sections show.

At the time of the ICA’s founding, its leaders represented the United States, France, and the UK and their empires. When these delegates discussed a commitment to freer access to and exchange of their respective archives, they did so in a vaguely inclusive rhetoric that was promptly challenged by newly independent, sovereign states. As former British colonies transitioned into self-government and later independence, new national archival institutions emerged as a hallmark of legitimate statehood. Archivists from the formerly colonized world joined the ICA in significant numbers and soon after raised the issue of colonial archival custody. None of the founding member-states reacted cooperatively, revealing the limitations of Buck’s ideal of universal archival stewardship.

Decolonization and “Developing” National Archives

The fourth International Congress of Archivists took place at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm in August 1960. In his congressional report, US archivist Ernst Posner estimated that 450 archivists attended, largely from Sweden, France, and Germany.Footnote ³¹ However, Posner reported that it was Lloyd Chike Gwam, Nigeria’s federal archivist, who was the “center of attention” on account of “the new role of Africa in world affairs.”Footnote ³² Six months after British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s “Wind of Change” speech, Posner no doubt was referring to the rapid emergence of independent African states and their consequent self-representation in international organizations such as the ICA. While Posner agnostically referred to the “role of Africa,” the ICA responded to new African (and Asian) states by focusing on how Euro-American expertise could “develop” African archives instead of how the newly sovereign African states might shape archival internationalism. Paradoxically, the incorporation of newly independent states within the ICA at once engrained a “development” or assistance-based frame that asserted a hierarchical binary between “developing” and “developed” countries and also provided former colonies with resource and platforms to appropriate for other means.

At the time of the congress, Nigeria was just a month shy of constitutional independence from British rule, although significant legislative shifts toward self-government had already occurred. In 1954, the same year that the colony became the autonomous Federation of Nigeria, Dr. Kenneth Onwuka Dike helped to found Nigeria’s Public Record Office.Footnote ³³ Dike, who was the first African to complete training as an historian in a Western institution, was unsatisfied with the disorganization of British recordkeeping in its colonial offices.Footnote ³⁴ Consequently, he conducted a two-year survey of public records in Nigeria starting in 1951.Footnote ³⁵ The survey resulted in the establishment of the Nigerian Record Office, which was legally grounded as the National Archives of Nigeria in 1957 with Dike as its first director. The federal government allotted £51,000 to archival development between 1955 and 1960, and in January 1959, the first permanent block of the National Archives of Nigeria officially opened.Footnote ³⁶ Gwam, who would succeed Dike as Director, reported that the construction of the purpose-built archive, the first of its kind in sub-Saharan Africa, involved consultation from professionals in the United States, Britain, and Southern Rhodesia. However, Gwam pointed out the limitations of their advice,

While the construction of the National Archives of Nigeria marked both a symbolic and a literal break with the colonial past nationally, it was also heralded as “something of a model” by the UK government, which had an interest in preserving historical records in former colonies.Footnote ³⁸ However, Gwam emphasized that the architects of Nigeria’s archives would not be foreign, a point which chimed more broadly with, what Samaila Suleiman calls, the “functional value attached to history as the ideological instrument of decolonization and nation-building.”Footnote ³⁹

While the independent government of Nigeria was certainly a pioneer on the African continent in developing a national archives service, it was not unique in its efforts to make use of history institutions in the political project of nation-building. Future director of the Kenya National Archives, Musila Musembi, explained,

States recently independent from colonial rule faced the challenge of establishing unprecedented “national” communities and archives offered an institutional pathway to forming provenance for new nations. As Alistair Tough has observed of their proliferation in postcolonial Africa, “National archives seem to have been regarded as being like national airlines and sports stadia – something that all independent states ought to have.”Footnote ⁴¹ This idea was not only a homegrown notion. The European tradition of archives, as expressed by the ICA, held that “in order to attain its institutional ends an organized society needs to preserve the documents it has produced for its own information.”Footnote ⁴² In other words, the ICA maintained national archives as a standard for a well-functioning and modern state.

The creation of postcolonial national archives was more international an endeavor than Gwam’s assertion implied. In fact, Dike himself had been joined by Derek Charman, an English county archivist, in December 1954 to assist with Nigeria’s nascent archives.Footnote ⁴³ Charman had been seconded from his work as archivist at Ipswich and East Suffolk, a position for which Hilary Jenkinson had interviewed him, for six months to help establish the national archives service.Footnote ⁴⁴ While both Dike and Charman had studied history, neither held a professional degree in archives, which had only recently been instituted at a few universities in the UK. Charman offered over a few years’ worth of experience working in English public archives, which he drew upon to train new staff at Nigeria’s archive. Dike arranged for Charman to tour the country to better understand the diverse land and peoples for whom they were establishing an archive.Footnote ⁴⁵ This relationship and experience developed Charman’s understanding of postcolonial archives, such that he grew to appreciate the importance of independent governmental purchase in the establishment and maintenance of national archives in order for them to continue beyond periods of foreign assistance. He would later draw upon this experience in his efforts to help set up a national archive in Kenya ten years later (Chapter 6). Charman’s work in Africa caused him to focus more on “modern” records, in contrast to Hilary Jenkinson’s emphasis on the ancient. In fact, Charman referred to his time in Kenya as a “turning point” that resulted in his commitment to developing local archives in England in order to prevent official censorship and senseless record destruction by upgrading records management practices.Footnote ⁴⁶ When Charman returned to Africa in the early 1960s to work in Kenya, the UK Department of Technical Co-operation funded his post, a nomenclature representative of the ICA’s approach to Euro-African archival engagement.

The ICA responded to the introduction of more and more African and Asian representatives into the congress through the “development” paradigm.Footnote ⁴⁷ European empires had used the term “development” after the Second World War to try to improve the reputation of colonial rule through welfare programs.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the postcolonial period, it came to refer to a kind of trickle-down economics wherein wealthy nations offered “gifts” to newly independent states largely in Africa and Asia to support “modernization.”Footnote ⁴⁹ These “gifts” could include finance, resource, training, or expertise. According to its own institutional history, starting in 1960 the ICA delivered “programmes to enable developing countries to develop their own archives along with creating relevant ICA branches.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In 1966, the ICA resolved “to give the highest priority to technical assistance for archives in developing countries.”Footnote ⁵¹ This included providing “basic professional training,” “opportunity for advanced training for present archives personnel,” and “to establish and help to equip archival services, etc.”Footnote ⁵² In order to attract “developing” countries to the ICA, it created regional branches, such as the regional branch for Southeast Asia in 1968 and the East and Central African branch in 1969. Fulfilling these big development promises required new means. The ICA had operated with a tight budget in its early years, relying on menial member dues and some support from UNESCO, but by appealing to funders on the basis of offering “development” to former colonies, it significantly increased its capacities to spend. For example, in 1968, the Rockefeller Foundation awarded the ICA $15,000, an amount that exceeded the ICA’s annual budget, for a “preliminary study of the archival situation in the independent countries of tropical Africa.”Footnote ⁵³ Rockefeller paid the amount out to the ICA’s headquarters in Paris. Thus, a focus on African “development” resulted in small financial gain and significant resource control for Europe. In 1965, Kwame Nkrumah argued that such economics were neocolonial and argued against “the financial power of the developed countries being used in such a way as to impoverish the less developed.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Director of India’s National Archives, Shitla Prasad, went one step further in reference to the “migrated archives,” arguing that the rhetoric of “development” not only disadvantaged former colonies in the present but concealed how imperial powers, through extraction and exploitation, had led to an impoverishment in the past, which had not disappeared with political independence.

Among its shortcomings, the ICA’s “development” paradigm did not attribute the archival problems facing recently independent governments to the preceding colonial administrations. Many people working in postcolonial archives, at least in the former British Empire, were aware of the practices of document destruction that preceded decolonization. For example, a 1967 report on the National Archives of Singapore complained that the colonial ordinance that established a central repository awarded “the authority for destruction or preservation of records and archives […] in administrative officers and not in the archivist,” which the rapporteur claimed was “internationally considered unacceptable.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Further, upon his arrival in Nairobi, Charman complained that the British colonial government “owes the archives a substantial sum of money for the appalling hash that [they were] responsible for making of it.”Footnote ⁵⁶ He went on to report that while a national archives project had the support of Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta, the UK government withheld funds for “all new projects,” leaving scant resource for its development.Footnote ⁵⁷ In comparison to the “development” model which framed material redistribution as a matter of benevolent philanthropy, Charman expressed another opinion: the colonial administration owed the independent government for the mess they had made. However, the ICA maintained a binary framing between “donor” and “developing” countries and subsidized fellowships for archivists from developing countries to receive training abroad and missions by experts from developed countries to advise or do studies in developing countries.Footnote ⁵⁸ While this followed an imperial center-periphery model for the transfer of “expertise” on the basis of philanthropic goodwill, newly independent countries appropriated the ICA’s “development” structures and formats to contest the very premise of its founding: who should own, control, and access the documents of the recent past?

The East and Central African Archives branch of the ICA (ECARBICA) held its inaugural conference in June 1969 at the Ismail Rahimtulla Trust Library Building in Nairobi. It was a political and ceremonious affair. Kenya’s Committee of the Public Archives Advisory Council arranged a press conference prior to the conference to discuss and publicize the work of the archives, under the theme “The Making of History – The Archives.” Kenya’s Chief Archivist, Nathan Fedha, who had attended the ICA’s 1968 congress in Spain, arranged for press and television coverage of the opening and reception at the home of Jeremiah Nyagah, the Minister for Natural Resources. In attendance were head archivists from Kenya, Zambia, Malawi, Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda, and Tanzania.Footnote ⁵⁹ The ICA sent Jeffrey Ede, Deputy Keeper at the UK Public Record Office, as its representative.

Prior to the conference, Fedha and Ede had been in contact regarding the purchase of microfilm copies of East African records held by the UK Public Record Office.Footnote ⁶⁰ Awareness in Kenya of the destruction and removal of documents by the outgoing Colonial Administration was widespread. For example, in 1969 Kenya’s Parliament clarified that it was “true that many useful and historical documents were destroyed,” and that there was “no way of replacing [them] other than trying to obtain copies of them or their microfilms from London which would all be done at cost.”Footnote ⁶¹ To diplomatically redress these archival gaps, Kenya’s treasury allocated 5,000 Kenyan shillings to the National Archives for the purchase of historical records in 1969–70.Footnote ⁶² The Kenya National Archives spent half of this amount to obtain 490 microfilm reels featuring Kenya records held at the UK Public Record Office covering the period 1905–30.Footnote ⁶³ However, the records held by the UK PRO did not include those removed at independence, which were in secret storage. Instead, the UK PRO was charging the Kenya Government money to view what were, in principle, freely accessible records. As more and more countries revised their Public Records Acts, including the UK, to reduce closure periods from fifty to thirty years, these microfilm fees contradicted the ICA’s commitment to freer access to archives.Footnote ⁶⁴

While the ICA’s growth across Africa facilitated the expansion of Euro-American influence in the training and standardization of archivists and archives, it also provided resources and a platform for archivists from newly independent lands to collectively address issues they shared, such as the location and ownership of colonial archives. For example, ECARBICA’s inaugural conference allowed Africa-based archivists to become acquainted and discuss issues of common concern, such as filling gaps in their collections. Since British colonial administrations had corresponded across colonial boundaries, for example, distributing annual reports and ordinances, there was the possibility for archives of one country to furnish another with missing records.Footnote ⁶⁵ Through the ICA, Kenya and other former British colonies made the question of colonial archive custody a political problem receiving international attention. Twenty years after colonial administrations of the same lands coordinated record removal, united by the shared circumstance of colonial archival extraction, archivists of Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya corresponded and cooperated on the matter of restitution. Future director of the Kenya National Archives, David Maina Kagombe summarized,

Kagombe distinguished the “developing” and “developed” countries not on the basis of inherent neediness, for either training or capital, but on the displacement and extraction of resource. Kagombe referred to Europe and the United States not as benevolent providers of technical assistance but as the custodians and gatekeepers of records essential to reconstruct the recent colonial past and thus help form postcolonial nations. However, the paradigmatic opposition between “developed” or “donor” and “developing” countries did not easily lend itself to explain and solve the historical problem of colonial archives creation, removal, and future custody. In 1972, a new term emerged within the ICA that referred to the transnational and entangled character of colonial documents in questioning their rightful custody: the “migrated archives.”

Who Will Own the Colonial Past? The “Migrated Archives” Problem

The ICA’s seventh congress took place in Moscow in August 1972. Delegates gathered in the Hall of Columns of Trade Union House near Red Square and the Kremlin. With more than 1,000 participants from more than 60 countries, it was the largest such congress to date.Footnote ⁶⁷ The setting amplified the Soviet rhetoric that “true archives are possible only when all records are ‘the property of the people’.”Footnote ⁶⁸ In contrast, the fourth plenary session focused on technical assistance for archival development and brought postcolonial archival sovereignty struggles between the UK and former colonies into clearer view. Jeffrey Ede, the UK’s Keeper of Public Records, and Shitla Prasad, Director of India’s National Archives, co-led the session. The year of the congress coincided with the publication of Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Rodney, a Guyanese intellectual and activist, pushed forward the analysis of Third World underdevelopment by explaining it as a result of imperial and corporate exploitation. His work redirected focus from how Third World countries were lacking to how colonial and corporate forces exploited Third World land, labor, and resource resulting in western wealth. While neither Ede nor Prasad referred to Rodney, their session on technical assistance hinged on opposing interpretations of archival underdevelopment. Ede argued that archival underdevelopment in the Third World was caused by a “typical lack of understanding of the value of archives” in “developing countries” by “their leadership, governmental and academic alike.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Whereas Prasad emphasized that “the colonial past was partly responsible for archival deficiencies in the developing world” and that the “developed nations had a moral obligation to furnish aid in an unpatronizing manner on a basis of mutual respect.”Footnote ⁷⁰

The ICA provided a forum wherein Ede and Prasad momentarily debated as equals. According to his congressional report, Rieger summarized that Ede and Prasad agreed on several points. Both held that “archival underdevelopment [was] the rule in the third world,” that this underdevelopment posed administrative, socio-economic, and intellectual problems at the national level, and that technical assistance had been inadequate and “often unsuccessful.”Footnote ⁷¹ On all else they disagreed. For example, Ede suggested sending “long-term resident archival experts in the world’s principal developing regions” in order to overcome archival “ignorance” in developing countries.Footnote ⁷² Drawing on a long-standing civilizational discourse, Ede thus recommended something like archival missionaries. Prasad’s position rather mirrored Third World self-determination.Footnote ⁷³ He advocated the use of “experts and consultants from archivally-advanced developing countries in preference to those from developed countries” whose perspective was more relevant due to “similar political, cultural, and psychological environments.” Moreover, he “looked forward to the day when […] developing countries would solve their own problems of archival development by pooling their resources and expertise and using them cooperatively for their mutual benefit.”Footnote ⁷⁴ However, the question of the custody of archival sources pertaining to former colonies and held by former colonial metropoles was the crux of their disagreement.

Since August 15, 1947, the day of partition and sovereignty, the governments of India and Pakistan claimed ownership of the India Office and its contents held by Britain. The claim extended to the office’s furniture and artwork as well as to the India Office Library and Records (IOLR). As reported by the India Office Library and Records Director, B. C. Bloomfield, the ownership of the India Office records “was left unsettled on the independence of India and Pakistan because the problem was too difficult and time too short.”Footnote ⁷⁵ So it came to pass that though the India Office was abolished in 1947, the UK Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations obtained control over the India Office Library and Records in the same year.Footnote ⁷⁶ The India Office Records consisted of the archives of the East India Company, the Board of Control, and later the India Office. The origins of the records mirror the geography of the administration that created them: some were created in London, the imperial metropole of Britain’s empire, others were created in unified India and others still were created in a variety of Asian, African, and European lands due to the nature of imperial entanglements. In other words, they were co-constructed by imperial administrators, local interlocutors, mobile merchants, and a multitude of other forces involved in the creation, shaping, and end of the British Empire. Despite their far-reaching relevancy, the UK government kept the India Office Records within the India Office Library and not the Public Record Office “unlike other British official records.”Footnote ⁷⁷ This subverted the law as established by the Public Records Act 1958 and deregulated the right of access as a result. Archival access was instead awarded at the discretion of the India Office Library’s director. It was therefore the library’s director who fielded the requests by India and Pakistan, and later Bangladesh for the return and/or unrestricted exchange of the IOLR. These disputes were ongoing at the time of the 1972 ICA congress and formed the background to Ede and Prasad’s exchange.

In their debate on the custody of archival sources pertaining to colonial rule, Prasad introduced and defined the term “migrated archives.” For Prasad, the “migrated archives” consisted of “both records removed from the colonies and placed in metropolitan custody and those created and always maintained in metropolitan countries in connection with the administration of their colonies.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Such a definition covered the entirety of the IOLR. Prasad suggested that in order to solve the “migrated archives” conflict, former colonizing nations give, at no cost, the originals of such materials to “the developing nations concerned” and retain microfilm copies in metropolitan archives.Footnote ⁷⁹ Where it would not be possible to supply original copies, Prasad conceded that metropolitan archives could provide microfilm copies for no charge. Ede rejected all of Prasad’s suggestions, even the latter, arguing that there were “often practical obstacles in the way of their sale or exchange,” and microfilm copies could not be provided as “free gifts.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Thus, the ICA’s development framework, which a-historically described former colonies as “developing” countries and former colonial powers as “donors,” shaped how Ede evaded Prasad’s demands for the “migrated archives.” Ede mirrored this discourse by referring to the transfer of colonial documents as a “free gift” rather than the restoration of records relevant to the political, economic, and social past, present and futures of lands and peoples in the process of forming sovereign states. As a result of the panel, the ICA resolved to take “concrete action […] to supply to developing countries microfilm copies of archival materials relating to their respective national histories in metropolitan custody, and that an international commission should be created to adjudicate claims in this connection.”Footnote ⁸¹ The following traces how former colonies, the ICA, and Euro-America proceeded on the issue of the “migrated archives.”

Former Colonies’ Approach to the “Migrated Archives”

After the 1972 ICA congress, former colonies’ demands, led by India, Algeria, and Kenya, for the restoration of the “migrated archives” grew and facilitated the diplomatic continuation of sovereignty struggles between former colony and colonizer.Footnote ⁸² Heritage politics provided space to lay claims in otherwise favorable or sensitive bilateral relations. For example, as historian Poppy Cullen has demonstrated, postcolonial Kenya–UK political relations, as sustained by the UK government and Kenyan political elites, were based on a mutually advantageous partnership.Footnote ⁸³ Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first prime minister and later president, held great influence over how Britain allocated resource to the former colony, and this influence was maintained by cooperation. However, Kenyatta’s cabinet gave early support to attempts to retrieve the “migrated archives,” partly to symbolically recover full sovereignty by recouping documentation of the administration that he inherited and his own personal records that had been seized during colonial rule (Chapter 7). Archival scholars Douglas Cox and Erik Ketelaar have emphasized that “fighting for displaced archives often is a substitute for fighting over the historical events that gave rise to the displacement.”Footnote ⁸⁴ However, in the case of decolonization, archival disputes were not just proxy conflicts.

Behind the symbolism of the “migrated archives” lay unresolved, pertinent issues related to independence. As historian Rakesh Ankit has pointed out, India and Pakistan’s claims for the IOLR grew out of social, political, and economic concerns. For example, the governments from both countries expressed early interest in retrieving commercial patents held in the IOLR in order to achieve economic sovereignty. During British rule in India, patent law evolved to provide monopoly privileges for British patentees in order “to collect royalties for their use of their patented inventions in India or to protect their investment by preventing local competition.”Footnote ⁸⁵ After independence, petitioning the restoration of the IOLR was partly in order to bring such patents under Indian and/or Pakistani custody.Footnote ⁸⁶

As the discourse surrounding the “migrated archives” proliferated so too did the meanings attributed to the phrase. The variety of meanings ascribed to the “migrated archives” reveals different ideological positions and retrieval strategies. In Kenya, the third director of the national archives, David Maina Kagombe, defined them as, “the documents which were taken from the then colonised countries to various metropolitan centres in Europe.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Where Prasad had emphasized that all documents pertaining to the colonial past constituted the “migrated archives,” Kagombe’s emphasis was on all those removed from colonies and taken to Europe. The latter definition included not only the records taken through “Operation Legacy” but also by private individuals, corporations, missions, and so on such as Oxford University’s “Operation Rescue” project. Demands to restore the “migrated archives,” were situated in broader claims to postcolonial cultural sovereignty and the discourses surrounding them evolved analytically. For example, the 1973 conference of Non-Aligned Countries, convened in Algiers, resulted in the Declaration on the Preservation and Development of National Cultures that stressed “the need to reaffirm national cultural identity and eliminate the harmful consequences of the colonial era.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Sri Lanka’s government pursued this resolve in 1976 by adapting two resolutions to restore “works of art and manuscripts to the countries from which they have been looted.” Rhetorical differences that framed dislocated records as having been either “looted” or “removed” danced around the issue of archives as the inalienable property of a sovereign power.

The International Council on Archives’ Approach to the “Migrated Archives”

In the same year as the ICA congress during which Prasad coined the “migrated archives,” the ICA commissioned a draft international law on archives. Written by Salvatore Carbone and Raoul Guêze, the text clearly lays out the ICA/UNESCO conception of archives as national patrimony. For example, Article 197 explained, “Archives and documents belonging to the services of government administrations shall be inalienable State property and may not be removed from their appointed place of deposit except as specified in the relevant laws.”Footnote ⁸⁹ It thus normalized (1) national archives as the state’s “inalienable property” and (2) that administrative documents should not be removed from their designated repository. While the latter might have favored former colonies in “migrated archives” custody disputes, the former established a framework incompatible with the mutable boundaries of empire where multiple physical spaces were entangled in the administration of colonial territories. Further, the draft naturalized the relationship between national territory and a national archive. For example, it stipulated that,

The concluding sentence was explicitly designed to support former colonies to obtain “by means of microfilm” copies of documents relevant to the colonial past, whether they were removed upon decolonization or accumulated in metropoles through the course of imperial administration. The ICA thus proposed duplication as a mechanism to overcome the multi-territorial relevance of colonial archives. However, by establishing that archives are “important parts of the cultural heritage of nations,” a few problems arose.Footnote ⁹¹ For example, by framing decolonization as state succession, the ICA paradigm presupposed colonial administrations were “predecessor states” and therefore legitimized the sovereignty of imperial powers. Subsequently, this made room for former empires to claim their own sovereignty and undermined the ICA’s commitment to restoring colonial archives to newly independent states (Chapter 7).

Over the course of a decade (1972–83), the ICA, UNESCO, the UN, and the International Law Commission (ILC) provided forums and resources for ongoing international discussion and action on the issue of the “migrated archives.” In 1975, the ICA held a conference on the “planning of archival development in the Third World” in Dakar that declared,

The ICA did pursue such a study. In June 1976, executive secretary Charles Kecskeméti distributed a survey to ascertain “those countries whose documentary heritage should be reconstituted by means of archival transfers.”Footnote ⁹³ While the survey yielded only partial results, due to governments such as the UK who did not provide complete answers, it did establish a general understanding of the global scale of colonial archival disputes.Footnote ⁹⁴

By establishing state archives as national patrimony, the ICA and other international organizations provided clear rhetorical devices through which Third World archives and governments could establish claims. For example, UNESCO’s 18th general conference, held in Paris, invited its member states “to give favourable consideration to the possibility of transferring documents from archives constituted within the territory of other countries or relating to their history.” UNESCO framed this request as relevant to the “great number of Member States” that had been “under foreign domination, administration and occupation.”Footnote ⁹⁵ UNESCO’s phrasing incorporated both those documents created in former colonies, now countries, and removed elsewhere and those created elsewhere but pertaining to former colonies. The resolution concluded by stating that transfers should be resolved “within the framework of bilateral agreements.” The following UNESCO general conference took place in Nairobi and provided Kenya’s delegate the opportunity to respond to the resolutions previously passed. With regard to the issue of the “migrated archives,” the Kenyan representative stated,

The delegate deployed the cultural sovereignty rhetoric that permeated UNESCO’s conceptualization of a country’s right to its history and heritage. However, the concluding sentence challenged the UNESCO to go beyond suggesting bilateral agreements and actually participate in acquiring the “migrated archives” on behalf of the Third World. Despite this appeal, the ICA maintain that it played a “professional, non-governmental” role and that it was the duty of nations involved to negotiate their own agreements.Footnote ⁹⁷

In addition to the ICA’s activities, there were a number of other motions of support for restitution enumerated by UNESCO, the United Nations, and the International Law Commission.Footnote ⁹⁸ Despite articulating emphatic support for Third World countries obtaining copies or originals of colonial documents held outside their national borders, the ICA and UNESCO did little beyond conducting surveys, facilitating dialogue, and passing resolutions to encourage bilateral agreements. Ultimately, these international organizations acknowledged the authority of the countries against whom archival claims were being made and left the resolution of document-disputes up to the states involved. UNESCO was confident that “given goodwill among all parties concerned satisfactory solutions can be found in all cases.”Footnote ⁹⁹ In doing so, the ICA left open room for former colonizing states to reestablish colonial archives as their inalienable property through reference to their own imperial sovereignty.

In January 1981, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Library and Records Department (LRD) prepared a confidential report on the issue of the “migrated archives.” Facing claims from Kenya, Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana, Malta, and the Bahamas for the return of colonial records, the LRD had “no clear Government policy in relation to migrated records” to fall back on.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In search of grounds on which to clarify the UK’s official position in favor of maintaining control over the “migrated archives,” the report’s author recalled the following words from the ICA,

The LRD latched on to this distinction between sovereignty collections and administrative collections in order to legitimize the position that the “migrated archives” were the property of Her/His Majesty’s Government and that the UK government was therefore “unable to release for return to Kenya any of the material of this nature which it holds and would not negotiate.”Footnote ¹⁰² In doing so, the UK government also used the archival sovereignty paradigm, which was established by the ICA/UNESCO and advocated by Third World archivists in the name of restitution. In this case, however, the UK repurposed it to maintain imperial reasoning for postcolonial control of the “migrated archives.”

The UK Approach to the “Migrated Archives”

The UK government understood the “migrated archives” to be those records removed from colonies before and after independence and kept in secret storage at the Curtis Green and the Hayes repositories. Where the ICA generally considered archival disputes between two or more states in conjunction with the term “migrated archives,” India regarded all documents pertaining to colonial affairs to be “migrated archives,” Kenya viewed all documents created in and removed from Kenya as “migrated archives,” the UK understood the “migrated archives” to be those records removed from former colonies that the government either wished to keep secret or didn’t know what to do with. In some cases, as with Kenya, the documents were considered “sensitive” since they dealt with systems of colonial violence, surveillance, abuse of power, informants, intelligence networks, and other information that the UK government deemed undesirable to enter the public sphere. In other cases, such as with Malta, colonial administrators sent files “without any regard to their historical value” to London.Footnote ¹⁰³ Broadly speaking, however, the LRD rapporteur summarized that, records removed and kept in secret storage fell into the following categories:

The above list illustrates the relevancy of the “migrated archives” held in Britain to the political structures inherited by postcolonial states that were selected either at an ad hoc basis or precisely because of their political value. In contrast to cultural objects, such as the Benin bronzes, from the Third World that sit in European private collections, museum exhibitions, and other public displays, the “migrated archives” were not spoils of empire for which the UK invited an audience. On the contrary, they were more like the receipts for the loot, better to keep hidden away so as to obscure the violent and coercive context of imperial grandeur.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office responded to the pressures from both former colonies and international organizations by confidentially reviewing the “migrated archives” situation in the early 1980s. One reviewer, D. J. Fisher, summarized,

Fisher’s comments referred to the existing UK legislation regarding its archives. The Public Records Act of 1958 had been updated in 1967 and had decreased the closure period of public records to thirty years, whereupon the government should review public records for either disposal or deposit at the Public Record Office. Since their arrival in archival limbos at Curtis Green and Hayes Repository, the “migrated archives” had lapsed into violation of the law. The older documents Fisher described were overdue by more than 100 years for review and records from the early 1950s, such as those from the onset of the Emergency in Kenya, were also soon due for assessment. Fisher suggested that if the “migrated archives” were to be considered UK public records that this be redressed immediately and if not, they should be returned. Although the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had claimed the “migrated archives” as property of HMG, it resisted the corresponding requirements of the Public Records Act.

Following the review, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, together with legal advisers, discussed the legitimacy of their control over and suppression of the “migrated archives.” FCO legal adviser, Ian Sinclair, lamented “We are not necessarily on strong ground in resisting calls for the return or reproduction of some of the returned archives […] We are bound to come under continuing pressure on this.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Sinclair was right. The International Law Commission (ILC) had set matters related to State succession as a priority in 1961 following Third World insistence on the legal significance of decolonization. In 1983, led by Mohammed Bedjaoui, an Algerian diplomat and scholar, the ILC brought the question of succession of states in respect of state property, archives, and debts to a United Nations Vienna Convention (Chapter 7). The convention aimed to resolve the ownership of archives in the event of State succession. However, it failed to gain enough support and was largely rejected by Western countries.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The Foreign and Commonwealth Office did not wish to admit to the existence and extent of the “migrated archives” because the practice of record removal was ongoing, because to do so might increase attention in international organizations such as the ICA, UNESCO, or UN, and lastly because it might embarrass other former empires (Chapter 7). All the UK had to do was not accede to the convention and the issue would disappear; this was their advantage as “migrated archives” custodian.

As the next chapters will show, it was not so simple. Eventually, the persistence of a few key individuals working outside either national or international frameworks succeeded in bringing the “migrated archives” out of limbo. However, the legality of their ownership and location remains unresolved. That they sit at present in the UK’s National Archives suggests they are regarded as UK public records, although the UK government has not provided the details of any legal decision.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ To do so would mean arguing for the ongoing validity of imperial sovereignty. The “migrated archives” are indisputably relevant to the UK public, many of whom are descendants of or they themselves imperial administrators, colonial settlers, Commonwealth migrants, civil servants, and so on. They are also vital to the publics and governments of the former colonies. They contain personal records of detained peoples and informants, evidence for possible legal use, record of political history, among other innumerable values. They do not observe the partitioning of sovereignty articulated by independence: former colony, former colonizer. As Mudimbe has described, colonizing structures produced a dichotomizing system and a “great number of current paradigmatic oppositions.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The debate on national archives and colonial documents can join the long list of these oppositions. Not only does the question which the ICA set out to solve, who owns the colonial past, remain unresolvable within the paradigm, but the question itself perpetuates an imperial logic of property: that an archive is something to be singularly owned and stationarily kept. However, the form and functions of national archives were not of interest only to European and former colonial states. As the next chapters set out, Kenyan elites and publics shaped the Kenya National Archives according to varied visions of African nationalism, transnational cooperation, and liberation.