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.

In 1964, Joseph Murumbi drafted a set of provisional regulations for Kenyan archives. Not yet a year underway and Kenya’s recently formed, independent Cabinet decided to reestablish the Archives Service “to put the control of government archives on a proper basis.”Footnote ¹ The regulations, which would serve as official reference until the passage of an archives bill by parliament, laid out clear rules for archival staff and accommodation, the functions of the archives service, the definition of records, a concept for records management (including disposal and transfer to archives), requisition of files, and access to records. At the time, Murumbi held the office of Kenya’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. After participating in writing Kenya’s first constitution, he turned his attention to matters concerning his ministry, such as establishing embassies and high commissions. He also championed establishing a national archives service as an early cause for his government. In January 1965, Vice President A. Oginga Odinga circulated a revised version of Murumbi’s draft to government officials stationed in the newly independent republic. It was the most comprehensive guidance pertaining to governmental archives in Kenya to date. It demonstrated both the political will to improve the inherited structures left over by the colonial administration and the importance that Murumbi and his peers ascribed to a centralized archives service amid the political project of nation-building.Footnote ²

Aware of the massive removal, destruction, and weeding of secret records and burdened by the over-stuffed and poorly organized offices of their colonial predecessors, a group of Kenya’s first independent politicians conceived of a national archives service as a way to demonstrate superior methods of recordkeeping, and thus governance. Those who established the Kenya National Archives did not therefore see their work as severing with the colonial past but rather improving upon preexisting structures and methods of governance. Independent administrators concerned with the Kenya National Archives favorably equated the proper preservation of the past with good governance and appropriated the institutional framework of an archives service in the political language of nation-building. The institution enabled politicians to at once advocate continuity between the colonial and independent governments as well as to claim unique mastery in both administration and history-writing. From its onset, administrators imagined the Kenya National Archives not only as a foundational service to the independent country and its future, but also as a means to negotiate unresolved issues resulting from the colonial past. The matter of removed records was one such issue. Among its many tasks, the Kenya National Archives (KNA) and its Chief Archivist were empowered to “take such steps as may be necessary to acquire and have returned to Kenya any public records of historical value to Kenya which may have been exported before [1965].”Footnote ³

This chapter analyzes the co-construction of the Kenyan nation and its national archives in its first decade, 1963–73. In doing so, the chapter examines how the Kenya National Archives (KNA) both arose out of and generated processes of Africanization. Rather than “decolonization,” “Africanization” was the popular term used at the time to describe the transition from colonial domination to independence. While the ideas and expectations of Africanization varied across the continent, in Kenya it largely referred to replacing European officials with African ones. Thus, it was a hybrid form of change that to some extent maintained colonial institutions, categories, and norms while also busting the European monopoly on political and economic control. Looking at Africanization through the KNA and conversely examining the KNA through Africanization is a productive way to understand the concurrent emergence of a new state and its national archives. In the first place, this chapter shows how Kenya’s new government, namely Joseph Murumbi, appropriated funds and personnel provided by the UK government in order to establish an ongoing archival service. It follows to analyze how the KNA’s development facilitated centralization in a diverse land wherein competing visions for the political future persisted. Next, this chapter shows how the KNA became a resource to independent historical scholarship, which for the first time enabled African Kenyans to conduct archival research in their own capital. Lastly, this chapter looks at the financial costs, compromises, and international conflicts at work in KNA with specific reference to the Syracuse Microfilm Project. While the next chapter will more explicitly focus on the KNA’s attempts to identify and retrieve the “migrated archives,” it is essential to clarify that there was widespread awareness of the removal and destruction of administrative documents by the British colonial government among KNA’s founders. In fact, Murumbi implied that the absence of certain controversial records, especially those related to the Emergency, was a positive precondition for establishing a National Archive.

Archival Preservation: Coda to Empire or Prelude to Independence?

On January 24, 1963, Margery Perham wrote to Mr. Greig of the UK’s Department of Technical Co-operation (DTC) on the matter of acquiring resource to support the preservation of important Kenyan documents. Perham explained, “the urgent need is clearly for a first-rate camera and an archivist or at least a man knowledgeable about colonial records and willing to have some training in their treatment and photography.”Footnote ⁴ What, according to Perham and her correspondents, made this an urgent need? As Robin Wainwright, who at the time was overseeing the collation, disposal, and preservation of Kenya’s records from the districts and provinces to the secretariat in Nairobi, explained to Perham, “I do want to see the work starting before Internal Self-Government.” Alternatively, Wainwright suggested, “if it starts in the first month after Internal Self-Government when everything is topsy-turvy might be just as good cover!”Footnote ⁵ Wainwright made clear their interest in maintaining control over the preservation of the colonial administration’s files, including their microfilming, without either cooperating with or informing the incoming Kenyan government. Wainwright’s letter to Perham was dated April 27, a month before the final pre-independence general elections that would lead to KANU’s first provisional government.Footnote ⁶ The momentum of internal self-government outpaced the collation and microfilming of the colonial administration’s documents.

Around early June 1963, as Jomo Kenyatta took office as Kenya’s first Prime Minister, Derek Charman met with Mr. Greig in order to discuss his temporary appointment as an archivist to Kenya.Footnote ⁷ Acquainted with Patrick Renison, former governor of Kenya, and Richard Cashmore, Charman had worked as an archivist of Ipswich and East Suffolk since 1950, with a brief secondment in 1954–55 to Nigeria to advise the formation of the Nigerian National Archives. In 1963, the Department of Technical Co-operation was interested in hiring Charman to “examine, collate, sort, index, protect and preserve the records of historical interest” held in the archives of Kenya’s central government.Footnote ⁸ Specifically, the DTC was interested in microfilming these records for UK use and viewed Charman’s role as overseeing a once and for all project rather than establishing a permanent archival service in Kenya.Footnote ⁹ After his first contact with the DTC, Charman wrote to Mr. Greig that he viewed “microfilming [as] only a subsidiary technique in the work of preserving records,” and he would wish that his “primary concern in Kenya [would] be the selection of records for permanent preservation, and the introduction of a system of archive keeping to that end.”Footnote ¹⁰ Charman proceeded to report to his supervisor, Cecil Lightfoot, at the County of East Suffolk’s Clerk’s Department, to discuss the secondment. Lightfoot also took immediate issue with the Department of Technical Co-operation’s conception of Charman’s potential role. Lightfoot wrote to his friend Patrick Renison that it was unclear “whether [Charman] was going to be required to do any more than microfilm the records without regard to what we thought would be a much more effective exercise, namely to set up a permanent and continuing organization for the preservation of the records.” He concluded his letter by saying unless the departing colonial administration cooperated with the incoming government on the matter, “everybody’s time will have been wasted.”Footnote ¹¹ Renison forwarded the letter to Deputy Governor, Griffith-Jones, for comments, including his own opinion that “the misgivings which [Lightfoot] expresses in his letter are justified in the constitutional circumstances.”Footnote ¹² This back-and-forth facilitated a debate on what would be the purpose of, and whose interests would be regarded in the preservation of colonial files in Kenya. While for a brief period it was British colonial authorities and “experts” who debated among themselves, this swiftly changed upon Africanization.

Griffith-Jones’s response reassured Renison that the new administration would look favorably at the establishment of an archival service in Kenya. He wrote,

Their exchange came just weeks after the colony’s final general election before independence, held between May 18 and 26, 1963. The elections resulted in KANU’s victory over KADU, a political triumph for nationalism over regionalism and a relief to Griffith-Jones.Footnote ¹⁴ As David Anderson summarizes, “KANU’s victory in the 1963 elections was thus a victory for nation over region, and for nation over tribe.”Footnote ¹⁵ KANU’s politics were more clearly committed to maintaining the status quo of the colonial administration, a possible sign of easier postcolonial cooperation between an independent Kenya and the UK.

By the end of July 1963, Philip Rogers, colleague of Mr. Greig at the Department of Technical Co-operation, wrote to Perham to confirm that Charman would arrive in Kenya at the beginning of September for one year.Footnote ¹⁶ On September 14, 1963, G. J. Ellerton wrote to Kenya’s Permanent Secretaries, Heads of Department, Civil Secretaries, and Nairobi’s District Commissioner announcing Charman’s secondment in order “to advise the Government of the arrangements which should be made for the proper care and protection of its records, and, subject to the availability of finance, to build up an Archives organization.”Footnote ¹⁷ Ellerton, previously the Permanent Secretary for Defence and architect of the “W” system, now worked out of Kenyatta’s Office of the Prime Minister and addressed a localizing administration. He requested the addressees “to give [Charman] access to your registries and records, and generally to co-operate with him.”Footnote ¹⁸

After the successful negotiation for a wider remit to his secondment than just microfilming, Charman wrote to Perham in late August 1963, just before beginning his work in Kenya. He identified “three specific problems” for his upcoming work: (1) establishing confidence that would enable him “to start the ball rolling,” (2) securing enough money “to provide for the future care and preservation of the original records,” and (3) “overcoming the political and general difficulties in opening the records to research.”Footnote ¹⁹ While his focus would evolve during his time in Kenya, his three-pronged assessment at the onset already marked a significant departure from how the colonial administration conceived of its archives. His first point foregrounded the importance of working together with the new Kenya government, his second prioritized the ability for an ongoing, sustainable archival service that preserved original records in Kenya and not just their duplication for use and storage overseas, and his final point addressed the archive as a public-facing institution that had an obligation to serve the needs of researchers, not just of the administration. In October 1963, J. J. Lowdell, of the outgoing colonial treasury, wrote to the Permanent Secretary of his Ministry that Charman “appears to be under a slight misapprehension as to the purposes of his secondment to this country. There was no intention on the part of the Kenyan Government to set up a more sophisticated Archives organization than already exists, small though it is.”Footnote ²⁰ His approach was decisive in transforming the DTC’s investment in a microfilming project of Kenyan administrative documents for storage in the UK into the establishment of what would become the Kenya National Archives (KNA) with the cooperation of the independent government.

Charman laid out a clear course of action at the beginning of his placement that was not oriented around a microfilm project, which he regarded as “subsidiary” and “premature.” Charman was skeptical of the microfilming mandate not only because he perceived it as a single component of a much broader task, namely establishing a robust archives service, but also because he feared it would adversely affect the new Kenyan government. In late August 1963, he wrote to Margery Perham and identified several related problems. Firstly, he described the financial “burden” of microfilming, which had prompted the Kenya Government to use development funds. He proposed that the Kenya Government provide external institutions microfilmed documents in exchange for “substantial grants,” which could be used for “the maintenance of the original records in Kenya.”Footnote ²¹ In other words, he suggested the sale of microfilm records as a financial transaction wherein institutions such as Perham’s Oxford University would purchase duplicates and therefore relieve the Kenyan Government of the sole monetary responsibility for supplying interested, external parties with copies of the country’s documentary history. Charman thereby proposed the commodification of Kenyan colonial documents.

Charman’s concerns about microfilming Kenya’s colonial documents also included their potential to continue or stoke geopolitical dispute. He argued that if the microfilmed documents were made available to “premature research,” both the microfilming project and future preservation projects in Kenya “may be seriously jeopardized.” He was especially concerned that documents younger than fifty years (those created before 1913) could be used as “evidence for purely political controversies.”Footnote ²² Though Charman did not elaborate further on what “political controversies” might cover, it is fair to assume his awareness of the Emergency. Charman expressed this concern before learning that the British colonial government had removed most secret records. In ignorance, he proposed that a closure period of 30–50 years would allow documents preserved in Kenya to be “neutralized.” He went so far as to suggest that records related to Kenya’s history held by British institutions should obey the same closure period. He wrote to Perham that the access principles he outlined for Kenya should “govern the use of Kenya records both public and private […] also in research institutes such as the one you are setting up in England.”Footnote ²³ In this way, Charman worked as a binational archivist, considering the sensitivity of the colonial past in both Kenya and the UK, an illustration of his dispersed allegiances.

While Charman’s language regarding the possible politicization of Kenyan archives was general, his conviction that original records should remain in Kenya was clear. He advocated “a properly organised Archives Service for the whole of Kenya […], the functions of which should be defined by law, which should have its own Head of Department, and which should be the direct responsibility of a Ministry.”Footnote ²⁴ He argued that in order to “make an effective contribution to the establishment of [such a] service,” he would first need to recruit and train “a suitable nucleus of staff,” contact government departments, and make short-term improvements to the current accommodation for staff and records, to design a development plan, and to assist with drafting legislation.Footnote ²⁵ In other words, Charman wanted to establish a national archives service on a legal basis that would continue to develop and function beyond his temporary secondment. He therefore “developed a wider and broader view” of his task, and approached the Prime Minister’s Office to advocate “re-establishing the 1956 Archives Service, but this time on a proper and professional basis.”Footnote ²⁶ In November 1963, one month before the UK government passed the Kenya Independence Act, ministers of the incoming Kenyan government met with the outgoing colonial governor to discuss the matter of setting up a national archives service. In this meeting, participants agreed that “an African should be appointed immediately to work alongside [Charman], so that the former could gain rapid experience to continue development of the service when the latter left.”Footnote ²⁷ The new Kenyan government proceeded to cooperate with Charman to create a postcolonial national archive in Nairobi.

Charman spent his first months contacting and meeting with the ministries and government departments that would go on to form the basis of the independent administration in order to assess their “bulk of back records.”Footnote ²⁸ Charman surveyed six ministries, the regional administration of the Coast Province in Mombasa, Kilifi District Offices, and the Fort Jesus Museum.Footnote ²⁹ He estimated that the registries he had contacted held “upwards of a quarter of a million files, of which at least one-third are due for review and disposal, whilst the remainder [would] be due for review during the next 5-7 years.” In addition, he noted the “arrears of 60,000 files already despatched” to Nairobi that had “yet to be dealt with.”Footnote ³⁰ Throughout his survey, officials commonly complained that there was a lack of storage space in their registries. He described one of the Ministry of Local Government’s two storage rooms as being “literally knee-deep in papers.”Footnote ³¹ The new, independent Kenyan government was thus weighed down by the remnants of the old colonial administration. Charman argued that an archives service would “greatly improve [the Kenya government’s] efficiency and relieve their offices of the overcrowding.”Footnote ³² As a result of his survey and his resolve to support the creation of a Kenya Archives Service, Charman wrote to the Prime Minister’s Office advocating the “passage into law of appropriate legislation.” Charman argued that legislation was necessary to safeguard “satisfactory long-term arrangements for the conservation of archives,” and he attributed the lack of a “sound legal footing” to the “virtual extinction” of the colonial government’s archives service.Footnote ³³

Charman not only disparaged the former colonial government’s lack of archival legislation but also viewed the passage of such a law in Kenya as a way to improve upon the UK’s own Public Records Act. In his proposal to the Prime Minister’s Office, Charman recommended blending aspects of the Nigerian Public Archives Ordinance of 1957, which he had assisted in drafting, and the UK Public Records Act of 1958. He argued that these “two pieces of legislation are amongst the latest in the field, and hence, are the most appropriate models to follow.” However, he highlighted “the problem of public access to documents in the custody of the Archives Service” as a point in which the Kenyan government could improve upon the UK model. He wrote that it would be “desirable […] to depart somewhat from United Kingdom practice, where the 50-year rule is generally in force, but where numerous ‘ad hoc’ exceptions are made, often, it must be admitted, on a somewhat arbitrary basis.”Footnote ³⁴ Charman’s consideration of public access to Kenya’s archives indicated a liberal departure from the colonial archival approach that had kept administrative archives out of public view as a rule.

Previously during the colonial administration, researchers negotiated access to contemporary administrative documents on an ad hoc basis with the administration. Charman, however, wished to formally regulate archival access. To balance the contradiction between a government’s desire to control sensitive information about its activities and a research public’s interest in analyzing the work of government, Charman advocated regulating access by establishing a research registry that would “act as a clearing house for information for researchers and Government alike” and determining access restrictions on the basis of a fifty- or thirty-year rule.Footnote ³⁵ Charman recommended that Kenya adopt the fifty-year rule in the case of “papers classified as ‘secret’” in order to grant “maximum privilege” to papers in which a civil servant might “let his hair down.” Charman explained this further,

In other words, Charman argued that a long closure period would enable administrators to communicate without fear of repercussions from an external audience and therefore better conduct the work of government. While he might have suggested such a rule with the new government in mind, if implemented, it would have prohibited public access to colonial documents dated 1914 and later. In other words, it would have helped to keep the colonial administration’s secrets.

Charman’s suggestion worked its way through the new Kenyan government until it landed before Joseph Murumbi. Murumbi responded,

Two months after Charman’s arrival to Nairobi, Malcolm MacDonald informed Kenyatta’s Cabinet that the colonial administration had removed “certain documents” from Kenya for transfer to London. MacDonald, Kenya’s final colonial Governor, specified that the removed documents related to “communications between Her Majesty’s Government and the Governor,” and that it was “general practice for the Administration of dependent territories to withdraw, shortly before Independence, certain documents considered to be the property of H. M. Government, which it was not possible to hand over to the successor government.”Footnote ³⁸ Thus awareness of both document destruction and removal was widespread among Kenya’s emergent political class. Murumbi’s note quoted above illustrates his position on the matter. On the one hand, Murumbi argued quite clearly that the new Kenyan government was not responsible for protecting the secrets of the colonial administration. On the other, he referred to secrets that would be “unsafe” for the public in Kenya to know about, implying a positive effect of their removal from Kenya. Murumbi and Charman met in April 1964 to discuss the question of archival access, which was related to how freely people in Kenya were to learn, think, and write about the political past.

Murumbi and Charman’s meeting was crucial in determining the eventual access framework for the 1965 Public Archives and Documentation Service Act. From the onset of his secondment, Charman viewed a Public Archives Act as an essential component to setting up an ongoing archival service in Kenya. During their April meeting, Murumbi once again emphasized that he did not consider the independent Kenyan government to be “responsible for past records, and that the application of a 50 or a 30-year rule [would be] too limiting from the research point of view.”Footnote ³⁹ Charman clarified that the existence of such a rule would not “foreclose access by students to late material” but would rather reduce the number of requests to ministries for contemporary records and therefore free them to better conduct their normal activities. Further, Charman pointed out that “in spite of the ‘weeding’ of files carried out by the Colonial Government before it left,” there were still many personal files, criminal records, and so on of African, European, and Asian individuals alike that should be, he argued, subject to protective rules of access. Lastly, Charman suggested that a closure period would increase the likelihood that government ministries would trust the archives with their files and not “casually destroy” them as to avoid premature accessibility.Footnote ⁴⁰ The 1965 Public Archives Act and its inclusion of a thirty-year rule reflected a compromise between their two positions. Several years later, Charman speculated that “the example of the East African archives influenced the British Government, at least to some extent, in its […] decision to relax the old 50-year rule for its own archives,” which it did two years after Kenya in 1967.Footnote ⁴¹

Charman and Murumbi’s discussion on an access policy hinged on several key archival issues that were linked to broader political questions of the day. On the practical side of things, the mess of paperwork left behind by colonial administrators hampered the work of Kenya’s new politicians and civil servants, creating an obstacle to Africanization. In order to discourage immediate destruction of records, both colonial and those that would be produced by independent administrators, Charman endorsed a closure period that might incentivize retaining documents, which could otherwise face destruction for the practical purposes of bulk-reduction or to serve more sinister ends. Furthermore, the question of protecting personal data through a closure period was highly relevant in the context of loyalists and rebels alike seeking work within the new political administration.Footnote ⁴² Charman framed strategic recordkeeping as a means to navigate these challenges in the creation of the independent Kenyan state. Where Charman wished to standardize archival practice, Murumbi differentiated between the records of the previous administration and renounced responsibility for their regulation. In this way, the origins of Kenya’s National Archive facilitated at once a break with the colonial past and the foundation for the future of independent Kenyan history.

Africanization and the Kenya National Archives

The new Kenyan government’s interests in developing a national archives service were manifold. Early political discussions of the KNA emphasized how such a service would enable not only the continuation but also the improvement of key functions of Kenya’s administration during the transition of independence. Imagining a national archive allowed its advocates to redefine the colonial past, refer to a national, Kenyan polity in the present, and gesture to a future in which the Kenyan government of today would unite the Kenyan peoples in a better, more just government than in the colonial era. William Ochieng’ asserts that Africanization “was one of the most emotive political slogans in the tumult before independence and Kenyatta’s promise to the people,” wherein independence would result in the replacement of foreign domination with African control of Kenya’s political, economic, and cultural spheres.Footnote ⁴³ The following examines Africanization and KNA from the level of archive-staffing, state-building, and history-writing.

Shortly after his meeting with Murumbi, Charman began a correspondence with Webungo B. Akatsa regarding plans for the archive service. By 1964, Akatsa already had over twenty years of experience in regional and national Kenyan politics. After graduating from Makerere University, Akatsa returned to Western Kenya in order to work toward linguistic unity among the Abbaluhya in the early 1940s.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the later years of the colonial administration, he worked in the treasury. After independence, Akatsa worked within government at the Ministry of Natural Resources and as Assistant Director of Personnel.Footnote ⁴⁵ Akatsa coordinated the second half of Charman’s original twelve-month secondment and a facilitated a six-month extension to his contract in order to see to the training of a replacement staff. As early as April 1964, Akatsa communicated to Charman that “The Government would like to see an African Archivist appointed as soon as possible.”Footnote ⁴⁶ To that end, the government was willing to allocate funds for a small staff.

The Kenyan government had been attempting to recruit an African archivist, to no avail, since March. On March 19, 1964, Mr. Crichton, the Director of Personnel, contacted the Ministry of Education and Mr. Koinange, the Kenya Students’ adviser in London, to search for suitable candidates. Crichton wrote, “I do not need to point out to you that the Prime Minister has expressed great interest in the establishment of the Government Archives and the importance, therefore, of getting the right man.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Crichton and Koinange’s pursuit did not yield a candidate. Charman, who was more concerned with the professional qualification of candidates than with anything else, suggested that Akatsa consider “applications from Asians as well as from Africans.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Akatsa responded that “only when we have failed” to recruit African archivists should they look for “others.” He concluded that “this is in accordance with the policy of Africanization.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Charman’s emphasis on qualification was rather ironic, as he himself did not have an educational degree in archives or records management. While qualifying courses for aspiring professional archivists had been available in England since the late 1940s, Elizabeth Shepherd’s scholarship demonstrates how “a systematic approach to records selection in [England’s] central government was [only] introduced during the 1960s.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In other words, Charman and Akatsa’s search for a qualified African archivist for Kenya’s National Archives coincided with the emergence of the “records management” profession at large.

Crichton forwarded his March 1964 letter to Solomon Adagalla, Kenya’s Student Adviser in the United States, based in New York. He requested Adagalla’s “comment upon any Kenya Africans doing appropriate work in any of the American schools.”Footnote ⁵¹ By late 1964, Nathan W. Fedha joined Kenya’s Archives Service, which had been formally installed as a section of government in the office of the vice president. Nathan Fedha was in his late twenties when he began his training alongside Charman. Originally from North Nyanza, where his brother was Chief of North Kabras, Fedha relocated to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for college. He graduated in June 1963 with a BA in British and American History from Wisconsin State College through the Kennedy Airlift scheme, with financial support from the Africa-America Institute.Footnote ⁵² The airlift program, created by Kenyan nationalist Tom Mboya, ran from 1959 to 1963 and sought to bring Kenyan students to the United States for college and university education and return to Kenya to work within public administration, an illustration of the international dynamics of Africanization and the far-reaching influence of the United States in the process.Footnote ⁵³ Before completing his degree in Wisconsin, Fedha expressed an interest in either teaching or joining Kenya’s administration as a district officer. Instead, he returned to become Kenya’s first Chief Archivist just as the airlift program ended and independence began.

Fedha was joined by A. H. Kamau in the role of assistant archivist, and together they trained under Charman during the last months of his secondment. Charman’s previous experience in Nigeria, where he worked with Kenneth Onwuka Dike in the late 1950s to establish Nigeria’s Public Record Office, informed his approach to training Fedha and Kamau. Dike had emphasized to Charman the importance of developing a regional overview of former colonies-turned-states through independence and arranged for Charman to tour Nigeria in order to better appreciate its social, cultural, and political diversity. Charman thus arranged a training program for Fedha and Kamau in which they toured Kenya, from district and provincial offices in Mombasa to Kisumu, as well as other Africa-based archives in Lusaka, Kampala and Dar es Salam before heading to the United Kingdom for six months of further training.Footnote ⁵⁴ Their archival tour of Kenya also provided Fedha, Kamau, and Charman the opportunity to discuss “what steps had been taken by the Cabinet to re-establish the Archives Service in the country.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Additionally, they demonstrated to provincial and district officers how to list and pack records in transmitter boxes “before sending them to Nairobi for centralization.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Their tour therefore aimed to impress upon district and provincial officers that Nairobi was to be the country’s archival center, which was of political significance as the new Kenya government was still trying to establish a centralized political body against pulls toward regional authority.Footnote ⁵⁷ Eventually, the 1965 Archives Act struck a compromise wherein Nairobi would house the country’s archival records created before June 1, 1963, when Kenya officially attained internal self-rule, whereafter the records of provinces and districts would remain under the jurisdiction of regional governments.Footnote ⁵⁸

Centralizing the country’s records in Nairobi was not the only way in which the new Kenyan government made use of its archival service in the political project of nation-building. In 1964, Joseph Murumbi wrote and distributed among officers of the new government a circular announcing the archives service. He wrote, “a decision has now been taken by the Cabinet to re-establish the Archives Service” and proceeded to enumerate “measures for the management of government archives,” which would “supersede those laid down” by the colonial government.Footnote ⁵⁹ Among these measures was the installation of a Chief Archivist, the continued use of the basement of the Central Government Offices, and the clarification of proper disposal of government records, including their destruction and transfer to Nairobi. Cooperation from records officers within ministries and officials in district and provincial offices across the country would be necessary in order to develop the kind of archives service that Murumbi described. By introducing records officers across all government offices in the country who were responsible for ongoing cooperation between administrative offices and the central government archives, the KNA thus aided in the creation of an early state order.

In order to develop purchase of the new government in the Kenya National Archives, permanent secretary in the office of the vice president, J. M. Ojal, addressed all permanent secretaries, heads of department, and provincial commissioners explaining the institution’s value. Ojal wrote,

Thus, Ojal framed the development of an archives service as a fundamental aspect of Kenya’s political transition to independence, which would at once prevent any significant rupture in the functions of government as well as facilitate their progressive improvements. He illustrated this with the importance he ascribed to the reestablishment of Kenya’s archives service.

By pointing to both colonial negligence and destruction of their administrative records, Ojal tried to enlist Kenya’s new leaders and civil servants to become better recordkeepers than their British predecessors. Of the colonial government’s archival approach, he wrote, “in the past the importance of the proper preservation of public records has never been fully appreciated, […] there has been much indiscriminate destruction of valuable material,” and that many of the records left behind by the British “are frequently in a disorderly state.” Good recordkeeping, Ojal argued, was “of utmost value to future historians and administrators.”Footnote ⁶¹ Throughout 1965–67, Fedha corresponded with ministries and departments firstly to identify record officers and secondly to get an impression of how many documents each held that might warrant transfer to the National Archives.Footnote ⁶² By mid-July 1967, Fedha reported that “most Ministries have by now appointed these Departmental Records Officers,” and he listed nineteen such officers who were responsible for liaising between their offices and the National Archives in order to secure for posterity the documentary evidence of their work.Footnote ⁶³

The Kenya National Archives was concerned with both imagining and forming the nation it aspired to document. Whereas Fedha’s recruitment of Record Officers focused on inter-ministerial co-operation within government, the KNA also wished to advertise itself to the public and, in doing so, create a united Kenyan polity out of its audience. This underlay much of KNA’s development in its second decade. For example, the Development Plan 1974/78 proposed a new “Display and Museum section.” Archival staff member Miss B. M. Khasenye explained that the section would “have the task of placing before the general public selected documents that have commemorative interest, demonstrating the traditions and philosophy of our nation, of serving in any way to dramatize phases and events of the history of the Nation.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Khasenye suggested the “importance of the Kenyatta Day” as one such event. The example of Kenyatta Day and the way in which Kenyatta constructed a vague and unifying notion of the past reveal one aspect of KNA as an instrument of nation-building.

Since independence, Kenyatta Day has been celebrated on October 20, the date of the arrest of the Kapenguria Six. While scholars have demonstrated that Kenyatta was not a leader of Mau Mau, the ambiguity of Kenyatta’s relation to Mau Mau has persisted in both memory and politics.Footnote ⁶⁵ Kenyatta perpetuated this ambiguity by deflating historical detail out of the description of the colonial past and instead broadly referring to it as the basis for the strength of the nation and of his own presidency. For example, in his final Kenyatta Day address in 1977, Kenyatta began,

Kenyatta laid claim to the past in an attempt to consolidate political support and, as Bethwell Ogot summarizes, to “reconcile the loyalists and the rebels.”Footnote ⁶⁷ He at once referred to the past as a bedrock for the Kenyan nation but discouraged detailed and complex historical analysis that might ignite unresolved political questions such as the rightful distribution of land. Kenyatta’s nationalism rested on the vagueness of the past, especially of his position to Mau Mau.Footnote ⁶⁸ The function of this vagueness was to produce a positive message of national unity, the essence of harambee, while concealing Kenyatta’s powerful control over the selective distribution of funds and land resources.Footnote ⁶⁹ By historicizing Kenyatta Day, the proposed Display and Museum Exhibition section of KNA embraced reinforcing the symbolic value of the past. Khasenye explained that KNA’s archivists would be responsible for “selecting those exhibits which are supposed to serve two major purposes, namely the drawing of interest of the archives and the general Public and conveyance of significant historical lessons to those who come around.”Footnote ⁷⁰ While Khasenye acknowledged KNA’s role in “the whole drama of Nation building,” it also provided a unique space and set of resources for people in Kenya to conduct research and lay their own claims regarding the nation’s past, present, and future.

Ojal’s plea to Kenya’s new government in 1965 to take seriously the work of good recordkeeping included the creation of a Kenyan school of history. He claimed that “without contemporary records our history itself is a thing of gaps and myths.” Ojal explained further, that the records in government’s care would form the basis of how Kenyan “history will be written and taught in our schools and universities.”Footnote ⁷¹ In doing so, he aimed to instill within Kenya’s new officials an ethic of care toward their records by emphasizing their importance to creating national history. At the time of Ojal’s appeal, African scholars were pursuing the Africanization of history. Historian Esperanza Brizuela-García describes this project as having two objectives: (1) To eradicate the “prejudices and limitations imposed by traditional colonial and European history” from African history. (2) To locate the people and institutions related to the writing of African history in Africa, especially in order to attend to the “everyday problems” of Africa-based societies.Footnote ⁷² In an overview of the Africanization of history, Kenyan historian Atieno-Odhiambo reflected that “the nationalist movement was in part a challenge to [the] notion of Africans as people without history.”Footnote ⁷³ As a part of the attempts to “recover and reclaim [African] histories in consonance with the attainment of political independence,” both African and “liberal external” scholars turned to alternative sources to the written word, such as archaeology and oral history.Footnote ⁷⁴ Historian Thomas Spear explains this was because African written sources were “meager” and “seen as biased European accounts.”Footnote ⁷⁵ However, the early use and function of Kenya’s National Archives shows how archival research was significant for the country’s first generation of professional African historians.

During the colonial period, Kenya’s archives were closed to public use. However, individual researchers could negotiate access with government officers but access by Africans was prohibited. In 1963, the year when sovereignty shifted from British to Kenyan control, the Central Government Library counted only five visitors to the archival search-room. In 1964, this number jumped to thirteen, when seven British, five US-American, and one Indian visitor were logged. In 1965, the number jumped once again to thirty-five visitors and included, for the first time, eleven Kenyans. Among the visitors counted as Kenyan was Godfrey Muriuki, who spent twelve months visiting the search-room conducting research on colonial rule in central Kenya for his PhD thesis at the University of London on “A History of the Kikuyu to 1904.” In 1967, of forty recorded visitors, eighteen were listed as Kenyans and included William Ochieng’ who spent twelve months researching Chiefdom of Yimbo of Central Nyanza. The next year, of thirty-five visitors, eleven were counted as Kenyan and included among them E. S. Atieno-Odhiambo, who spent a year researching independent schools in the Northern Province.Footnote ⁷⁶ While the work of these three scholars did not claim to either completely dispel historical myths or fill all gaps in Kenya’s historical record as Ojal professed, they represent a powerful intervention in Africa’s historiography that assisted in institutionalizing history within Africa and supplanting a colonialist view of the continent.Footnote ⁷⁷ Furthermore, these scholars, among others, have contributed to pluralizing and contesting Kenya’s past beyond the “political history of nationalism […] rendered by those who won the political struggle.”Footnote ⁷⁸ By 1974, Fedha boasted that KNA had become “the largest and most important centre for research on various subjects of eastern African studies.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Indeed, from 1964 to 1973 visits to the Government Library grew by over 200 percent despite what Fedha described as a “number of resource limitations.”Footnote ⁸⁰

The Costs of Preservation

Charman and Akatsa, with the advocacy of and support from Murumbi, had succeeded in impressing upon Kenyatta’s cabinet the import of establishing a government archives service, but the question of its financing remained open. While Derek Charman was adamant that he should focus on establishing an ongoing archival service in Kenya rather than simply making copies of documents for storage and use in the UK, he exploited UK and US interest in microfilming as a way to obtain funds for the establishment of KNA. In April 1964, Charman wrote to Perham in order to provide an update on the microfilm project and more generally on the institutionalization of Kenya’s national archives. He made mention of a “copy of the first section of the microfilm programme,” which he had forwarded to both her and Bernard Cheeseman and swiftly went on to discuss his success in obtaining an “agreement to a small [archival] establishment of eight” staff members. He lamented, “unfortunately the Kenya Government have no money […] but I have been having some moderate success in America through Syracuse University and the Library of Congress.” Charman expected “an advance of up to $3,000 on a much larger contribution towards the support of the microfilming programme,” money that he would then use “to recruit staff.” He detailed that the United States would provide as much as $20,000 “for a negative copy” of Kenya’s microfilmed records “from which interested Universities can obtain copies.” In his letter to Perham, Charman envisioned microfilming as a revenue generating process that might maintain and grow the future Kenya National Archives. He hoped “that the sale of copies will produce something for the Kenya Government Archives.” Indeed it did, but not quite as Charman expected.Footnote ⁸¹

Charman expressed the same hope for revenue generation via microfilm sales to the Kenyan government. In January 1964, Charman met with Mr. Gilboys of the treasury and presented microfilming as “a unique opportunity of raising capital for the development of an Archives Service.”Footnote ⁸² Several months later in June 1964, W. B. Akatsa repeated this message to the Permanent Secretary in Kenyatta’s office in an appeal for an extension to Charman’s contract. Akatsa reported that Charman had identified three types of records to microfilm,

1. 1. Provincial and District quarterly reports,

2. 2. Political record books of Provinces and Districts and,

3. 3. Miscellaneous early records of diaries, history, and subject files.Footnote ⁸³

According to Akatsa, Charman had already “carried out a fairly extensive programme of microfilming,” including about “one quarter” of the Provincial and District quarterly reports. Akatsa explained that,

Akatsa appealed to the potential for a microfilm program to promote further foreign investment in Kenya’s archives. Around the time that Akatsa wrote, Charman estimated that the government archives required £11,500 immediately.Footnote ⁸⁵ The Director of Personnel and Treasury had agreed to create eight posts to support “a nucleus of an Archives organization,” including a chief and two assistant archivists, a photographer, secretary, clerk and two “subordinate staff.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Cashmore explained to Perham that Kenya’s treasury had committed to fund “five of these posts as from the 1st of July” 1964, leaving three posts requiring financial support.Footnote ⁸⁷ Moreover, Charman suggested that money brought in through the sale of microfilm go “towards the erection of proper archives buildings.”Footnote ⁸⁸ At that point, Kenya’s nascent national archives service was located in the basement of the Central Government Building, which was understood as a temporary storage location until there were sufficient funds to “build a properly equipped large repository.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Arranging funds for the development and maintenance of a government archive service was situated more generally in a reconfiguration of Kenya’s postcolonial economy.

Following Kenya’s independence, the economic question loomed large. Historian William R. Ochieng’ has argued that in order to reverse the “export-orientated nature of Kenya’s economy,” wherein Britain had enjoyed both product and profit produced by Kenyan labor during the colonial period, Kenyatta’s government was “to formulate policies which would ensure that the citizens of Kenya had the greatest share of subsequent development.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Relying on Sessional Paper No. 10 of 1965, which enumerated the economic strategies to be implemented soon after independence was achieved, Ochieng’ has shown that despite gesturing to African socialism, foreign investors and multinational corporations have played a significant financial role in Kenya’s economic development since the early years of independence.Footnote ⁹¹ So it was in the case of Kenya’s national archives.

In a financial proposal Charman shared with Kenya’s treasury, he forecast £6,728 required for the first year of the archives service, £13,895 in its second, £14,185 during its third, and £11,295 in its fourth.Footnote ⁹² The variation was due to initial, onetime investments Charman proposed to go toward equipment and training. The figures excluded costs associated with relocating the archives to more appropriate accommodation. With the support of Kenyatta’s Cabinet, Charman reached out to several US- and UK-based funding sources, including the Historical Evaluation and Research Organization, the United States Agency for International Development, and Syracuse University’s Program of Eastern African Studies.Footnote ⁹³ The latter forwarded the appeal to the African Studies Association’s (ASA) Libraries-Archives Committee.

In 1963, the Ford Foundation awarded the ASA $90,000 to support research into Africa-related archives held in private and institutional hands in the United States and to cooperate with Oxford’s Colonial Records Project.Footnote ⁹⁴ The ASA’s Library and Archives Committee accounted for a significant amount of the association’s general activities, which included compiling bibliographic volumes, microfilming programs, assisting with oral history interviewing and audio preservation, and supporting the capacities of librarians and archivists based in Africa. Committee member Conrad Reining “visited the main documentation centers in Africa on an exploratory mission concerned with the problems of securing documentation.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Reining had done a DPhil in social anthropology at Oxford University before military service in North Africa during the Second World War. He then worked as a field researcher for the Sudanese government from 1952 to 1955 before returning to the United States, where he went on to work as the head of the African section at the Library of Congress.Footnote ⁹⁶ His tour of documentation centers included a visit to Nairobi in July 1963, where he met with the undersecretary of the governor’s office to discuss the preservation of Kenya’s historical records.Footnote ⁹⁷ Reining’s visit came shortly after a stay at Oxford where he met with Perham, whose concerns about the future of Kenyan archives he passed along to the governor’s office. During the meeting, Reining raised the possibility of making “a small financial contribution” to the preservation of Kenya’s records.Footnote ⁹⁸

Under pressure to secure finances for Kenya’s archival future, Charman wrote to Fred G. Burke of Syracuse University’s East Africa Studies Program in August 1964 regarding their application for funds from the Ford Foundation.Footnote ⁹⁹ Burke had previously approached the ASA for financial assistance in order to complete the microfilming project and Conrad Reining had recommended the ASA do so. Following Reining’s recommendation, the ASA stipulated upon providing Syracuse with “a master negative of [the] microfilms” that Kenya surrender “any rights to royalties for copies which would be duplicated” thereby jeopardizing the possibility for the Kenyan government to raise capital from microfilm sales to fund its archival service.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Charman rejected the terms and in doing so also stated that he “could not possibly recommend the Kenya Government to release the original negative, as this would mean that they would lose all control over the distribution of copies from it.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Although the need for funds was serious, Charman identified these conditions as too unfavorable to consider. The funding pursuit plateaued. While Charman, Akatsa, and Murumbi had succeeded in forming an initial archival staff, including Charman’s successor Nathan Fedha, the Syracuse–Kenya microfilming partnership was not resolved by the time Charman’s post expired in February 1965.

Shortly after Fedha took over as Kenya’s Chief Archivist, he wrote to Burke in order to resume discussions regarding microfilm and funds. Burke visited Nairobi in 1965 and, with the support of his colleague Carol Fisher, came to an agreement for a microfilm project with Kenya’s Minister for Economic Planning and Development, Tom Mboya.Footnote ¹⁰² The agreement held that Kenya “would release only a positive copy, but not a negative, to Syracuse.”Footnote ¹⁰³ This condition was in order to prevent what Charman had cautioned as a threat to Kenya’s control over the distribution of its archives and subsequent loss of potential funds raised through their sale. Fedha emphasized that Syracuse would be “the only depository of all our archival material in the United States.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ On December 23, 1965, the National Science Foundation approved a grant for $24,700 to microfilm some of Kenya’s archival holdings. Shortly after the release of funds, Syracuse changed its position on the question of a negative copy and re-filmed the copies it had procured from Kenya in order to have a second negative in their custody, a violation of the original terms of agreement, but purportedly a decision made “with numerous Kenyan officials at different levels of government.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In order to allow Syracuse to create a new negative copy, Kenyan officials stipulated that the university produce positive copies with “the approval of the Kenya National Archives.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The microfilms were therefore framed as the property of Syracuse but under the nominal authority of KNA. Such an arrangement was not legally tenable.

In certain instances, however, KNA continued to sell documents on microfilm directly to US-based institutions, which presented a different set of challenges. In March 1974, the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution & Peace wrote requesting five classes of documents from KNA: Provincial and District Annual Reports, Provincial and District Record Books, Provincial and District Handing over Reports, Correspondence, and Intelligence Reports for a total of 118 reels. The Hoover Institute was founded in 1919 by (then) future president of the United States, Herbert Hoover. In the late 1950s, Hoover drafted a statement of purpose for the institute that read,

By 1960, the institute was embedded in what F. Ugboaja Ohaegbulam calls the US “ideological struggle for global hegemony,” which included the fight to control Africa’s economic and political future and specifically to thwart the spread, real or imagined, of communism across the continent.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ While the more liberal Stanford campus has regarded the Institute as “a propaganda base,” its leadership’s ability to successfully solicit financial support from those who stood something to gain from its conservativism resulted in its growth during the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

As a part of its growth, the Hoover Institute sought to enlarge its African collections. Nathan Fedha handled the transaction, wherein each reel cost $21 for a total of $2,478.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Upon receipt of payment from Hoover, KNA shipped the reels by express mail. However, several of the reels were unreadable on account of heat damage and poor photographic quality. The institute returned the reels to KNA and requested replacements. The return generated some back-and-forth correspondence regarding which party should bear the postage costs, during which time Nathan Fedha left his post as Chief Archivist and returned to Mbau Farm, Kitale in order to run for political office.Footnote ¹¹¹ As of 1980 the request for replacements was still unfulfilled and KNA staff feared that the outstanding deal “could create a bad image.”Footnote ¹¹² In addition to the logistical messiness of the transcontinental shipping of microfilm, which requires specific temperature conditions in order to preserve the material integrity of the film, the KNA–Hoover exchange illustrates the challenges of international archival patronage. While the sale and export of microfilm was envisioned to raise funds for KNA to encourage the growth of its institutional capacities, it did not occur at a pace at which KNA could easily keep up with the international sales of microfilm in addition to its other services, partly due to the limited availability of funds. By 1980, KNA no longer held “a negative copy of this microfilm of their records.”Footnote ¹¹³ Whereas, according to a 1997 bibliography detailing African archival resources in the United States, the Syracuse Project resulted in the dispersal of Kenyan microfilms to at least the Center for Research Libraries, Michigan State University, the Hoover Institute, and Loyola College.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Reflecting on what was gained by the Kenya National Archives through its microfilm project with Syracuse University, former KNA director Musila Musembi considered the acquisition of a vehicle, the positive microfilm copies held by KNA, and the microfilm equipment, including cameras, readers, and processors. Especially the latter enabled KNA to establish “a strong Microfilming Section at a time when other archival institutions in East and Central Africa were still struggling to make a start in this area.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ The Kenyan government made use of the political value of microfilm technology as a way to more securely preserve copies of documents such as land titles to bolster governmental control over the redistribution of land and resource. For example, in 1974 the Land Department partnered with KNA to microfilm 1,200,000 title deeds and in a project described as “a priority area for security of titles to land.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ KNA promoted an internal political appreciation of microfilm, explaining that “public records which are absolutely necessary for the continuity of Government activities are microfilmed for security purposes and permanent preservation.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ As Anais Angelo’s research highlights, as early as 1962, the security of land titles was identified by both the outgoing and incoming political administrations as a “national responsibility.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Kenyatta’s administration re-appropriated the equipment brought in through the Syracuse project in order to strengthen his office’s approach to resource allocation.

However, Musembi argues that the “opportunity costs” of the Syracuse agreement were not compensated by these gains. Among these costs, he includes the early release of secret files that were made available to scholars based in the United States before Kenyan-based researchers could view the same records and the disproportionate attention that KNA staff paid to microfilming instead of other activities during the institution’s early, formative years. For example, the project resulted in the creation of extensive finding aids for the microfilmed material before the KNA published comprehensive finding aids of its non-microfilmed collections to better facilitate research in Nairobi. Thus, Musembi argues that KNA staff were more occupied tending to the research needs of scholars based outside of Kenya. Musembi regrets that “Kenyan archivists will for ever continue to remember the Project with great shock and embarrassment.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

In contrast to the records removed by the outgoing British colonial government, the Syracuse microfilm project was a partnership in which Kenya’s inaugural independent political leaders as well as professional archival staff directly participated. The agreement took several years to form, throughout which Kenyan representatives insisted on maintaining a master negative copy in order to retain distributive control, and in a broader sense — archival sovereignty. Fedha and Charman made clear to their partners at Syracuse that they regarded their archives as “a valuable resource.”Footnote ¹²⁰ It was precisely this value which resulted in Syracuse re-filming 157 reels of film that the university received between June 1966 and February 1967 in order to have their own master copy. Archival value can be conceived of in many ways, including administrative, research, legal, cultural, and personal, wherein value is framed through a record or collection’s use that justifies its long-term preservation and associated costs.Footnote ¹²¹ Where the British colonial government had taken records for their perceived historical value to keep in research institutions such as Oxford University, and their potential value in legal or political repercussions during decolonization led to secret storage, Syracuse pursued Kenya’s colonial political records for their research value. This was at a time when US universities were investing in African Studies not only as a matter of course but in the context of exerting postcolonial political influence.Footnote ¹²²

Creating its own negative master microfilm set enabled Syracuse University to supply positive copies to institutions in the United States and to visiting researchers. A review of its early interlibrary loan of the microfilms reported that the Kenyan materials “account for part of the bulk of […] loans at Syracuse,” and that the demand to view them was so high that “the Manuscripts Room at the Syracuse Library […] had to install three new microfilm readers.”Footnote ¹²³ Where Charman and later Fedha had pursued the partnership with Syracuse in order to generate awareness of and financial support for KNA to facilitate its early development and growth, it did little else than to strengthen US holdings on African history and provide KNA with microfilm equipment. That Syracuse altered the proprietary terms of the archival agreement after receiving its first shipments of reels raises the question in how far such an agreement can be mutual or symmetrical in a broader context of financial and/or resource dependence.

Behind the story of the Kenya National Archives’ origins lurk several connected strands of postcolonial political and epistemic power play. Charman’s appointment in 1963 illustrated the UK’s slipping grip on the design and function of postcolonial state institutions, including the allocation and use of funds and other resources. Despite being appointed and funded by the UK government, Charman rejected the UK prescribed remit to his position and instead partnered with the new Kenyan administration and US-based funders and universities in order to institutionalize Kenya’s National Archive. Independent Kenyan political leaders, namely Joseph Murumbi, Webungo B. Akatsa, and J. M. Ojal, directed Charman’s approach to the archive through the lens of Africanization, or the transfer of political, cultural, and economic power from foreign to African hands. For example, top priority was given to the recruitment of an African Kenyan as Chief Archivist to replace Charman after the expiry of his secondment. In the case of the national archives, Africanization was described as not only the transfer but the improvement of political power. In framing the reintroduction of a central archives service, the independent government aimed not only to improve upon the recordkeeping practices of the British colonial government, but in doing so create a more efficient and effective government.

The conception of independent Kenya’s National Archives was also framed within the political project of nation-building. Archival centralization in Nairobi reinforced the political function of the capital in a land of diverse peoples and visions of the political future. By creating a countrywide recordkeeping apparatus, wherein Record Officers liaised between Central Government and offices dispersed across the country, KNA participated in creating the very state it aimed to document. Finally, KNA assisted in the establishment of a Kenyan school of history, both in the country and abroad as African Studies programs in the United States benefited from the availability of microfilm copies of its holdings. Despite a significant limitation of funds and resource, the people behind KNA succeeded in establishing a full-fledged national archive staff that boasted a staff of twenty-five by 1974.Footnote ¹²⁴

The example of the Syracuse Microfilm project points to several complexities of Africanization and the challenges of limited resources. Charman had refused the original microfilming remit proposed by the DTC, which would have been a “once and for all” project to comprehensively extract Kenyan colonial records to the UK, in favor of establishing an ongoing national archival service. To do so, Charman and later Fedha pursued Syracuse’s interest in funding and supporting a microfilm project with the hopes that it would result in financial assistance, both immediately and in the long term, in order to develop KNA. However, after obtaining the microfilms, Syracuse, under pressure from the African Studies Association and the Ford Foundation, re-filmed the documents in order to have its own master copy, which reduced Kenya’s custodial control over its valuable documents.

The want of funds was not the only deficit that KNA was founded on. The staff at KNA, like the inaugural administrators of independent Kenya, were well aware of the absence of many colonial files. As Nathan Fedha summarized,

In Fedha’s framing, the establishment of KNA was in part the direct response to “Operation Legacy” and represented independent Kenya’s integrity in comparison with the recklessness of the colonial government. This was a message repeated by Derek Charman in an article he cowrote in 1967 with Michael Cook, who had served a similar archival secondment in the Republic of Tanzania, for Archives, the journal of the British Records Association. Charman, addressing colleagues in the UK, wrote that the “records of the Administration housed in [Nairobi’s] Secretariat,”

While Charman’s publication failed to scandalize the recordkeeping profession in Britain, KNA’s first Assistant Archivist, A. H. Kamau confronted the issue of Kenyan records stored in England in June 1966 during his UK-based training, when he discussed the matter with J. J. Tawney of Oxford’s Colonial Records Project (Chapter 5).Footnote ¹²⁷

In March 1966, A. H. Kamau had traveled to the UK for a six-month training program in archives administration organized by Derek Charman and paid for by the British Council. After spending two weeks with Charman at the Record Office in Ipswich, East Suffolk, Kamau had attachments at the Colonial Office, Public Record Office, the Commonwealth Institute, and a number of other record offices, including of Northern Ireland and Edinburgh. At several of these offices, Kamau consulted archival catalogues and lists in order to identify documents that he thought should be copied for KNA.Footnote ¹²⁸ In June, Kamau met with Tawney at Oxford. Kamau reported,

Kamau’s tactic conceded the actual deposit of private papers by ex-colonial civil servants to Oxford in exchange for ongoing communication between the two institutions so that KNA would be informed “what records have been acquired” by the university.Footnote ¹²⁹ KNA’s Public Archive Advisory Council had informed Kamau that settlers and former colonial officials might not prefer to donate their records to KNA out of “fear of reprisal.”Footnote ¹³⁰ For his part, Tawney stated that he had a cooperative spirit with “many bodies overseas” and described the records project as “merely one of several” initiatives seeking to preserve colonial documents.Footnote ¹³¹ Tawney and his small team created hand lists of all the documents they acquired and sent them upon request to universities in eastern Africa, which could in turn request photostat copies.Footnote ¹³² Kamau and Tawney’s exchange presented a solution for the geographic fragmentation of related archives: a collaborative transnational network of connected collections. This contrasted Kamau’s experience at the Colonial Office and the decades to follow of custodial negotiation between the Kenyan and UK government over the records removed and stored secretly at Hayes and Curtis Green.

Prior to Kamau’s visit to Oxford, he had been attached to the Colonial Office, where his visit was supervised by none other than Bernard Cheeseman. Cheeseman worked with the Intelligence and Security Department of the Colonial Office as a “librarian,” a rather benign title for the dirty work of suppressing evidence of British colonial rule upon decolonization. He had played a central role in coordinating record removal from various colonies approaching self-government and their deposit at Hayes and Curtis Green. Further, he had intervened with the Oxford Colonial Record Project when he perceived a security threat in the donations. And in March 1966, Cheeseman oversaw three weeks of Kamau’s training, including a visit to the Hayes Repository. Walking through the many corridors of securitized shelving, Kamau came closer to the documents airlifted from his country than any Kenyan archivist has since. Of course, no one pointed this out at the time. Instead, Kamau learned that “this repository is known as ‘limbo’ because the type of records accommodated in it had as yet to have their fate decided.”Footnote ¹³³

The timing of Kamau’s tour corresponded with a refashioning of the archival profession in the English-speaking world. Where previously archivists were trained to care for ancient documents, by the mid-1960s the profession was concerned with contemporary record creation, management, and preservation. Kamau summarized, “An archivist of a modern state is an administrator, he performs visible duties and deals with records of a relatively recent origin. His responsibilities are more to his administration than to history and research.”Footnote ¹³⁴ Kamau described an archivist as a public-facing administrator whose work related to the politics of the day. This notion of an archivist is crucial to understand how the Kenyan Government conceived of its national archives generally and specifically the way it pursued the matter of archival retrieval. It was not only a symbolic gesture of recovering lost heritage but a political process of reinstituting records necessary for the administration of the state. Designed to immerse Kamau in English recordkeeping practices, the training course offered him the opportunity to survey British collections for materials Kamau understood should be accessible in Kenya. Kamau would be the first of several Kenyan archivists to do so.

On November 28, 1973, during a meeting of Kenya’s National Assembly, Member of Parliament Jean-Marie Seroney asked William Odongo Omamo, the Minister for Natural Resources, if he would approach the British Government to return records related to the Nandi War of Resistance (1897–1905) to the Kenya Government Archives.Footnote ¹ Seroney advocated the return of all records relating to the war and singled out those pertaining to the assassination of the Nandi Laibon, Koitalel Samoei, the accounts of Nandi casualties and losses in livestock, and the truce that resulted in Nandi settlement in the former reserves of Tinderet, Seroney’s constituency.Footnote ² The truce had promised Nandi control of the reserve; however, the British colonial government violated it repeatedly with further expropriations to accommodate White settlers.Footnote ³ Upon independence, Seroney advocated Nandi land rights by drawing upon historical discourse, and his 1973 request was part of his ongoing commitment to communal land claims. Omamo responded that there were “very many other records” that were “as valuable” as those to do with the Nandi Resistance. He continued that rather than single out one historical episode or linguistic community, the newly formed Inter-Ministerial Committee on Retrieval of Kenya Archives from Overseas Countries would “try to co-ordinate the whole exercise of obtaining historical records from the British Government.”Footnote ⁴ Omamo’s response was an example of how nationalism, as articulated by political elites, disempowered specific demands of those still seeking redistribution in the aftermath of political independence. 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.

From the mid-1960s onward, staff at the Kenya National Archives actively pursued the identification and retrieval of various documents and audiovisual materials located outside the country—either originating in Kenya and later removed, or created abroad but nonetheless deemed relevant as cultural heritage or records of political precedent.Footnote ⁵ KNA looked not only to England as a place for relevant collections but to the India National Archives, archives in Koblenz, Germany, across the United States, institutions in Japan, and elsewhere, in what was referred to at the time by other African archivists in similar situations as a “diaspora of documents.”Footnote ⁶ KNA considered more than textual documents and in 1977 pursued the identification of films made in Kenya and stored outside the country to form an audiovisual collection of “migrated archives.”Footnote ⁷ By maintaining a wide view of what constituted the “migrated archives,” KNA could claim some success in their pursuits, for example by obtaining photocopies of materials held in public view at England’s Public Record Office and appeal for further funding on the basis of this success. In some ways, the identification and retrieval of selected documents is a usual activity of any archival institution, which generally cooperate with external offices, individuals, or companies to select and maintain documents for permanent preservation that were created elsewhere.Footnote ⁸ However, behind the general project of retrieving the “migrated archives” lay the delicate and, to quote an oft-used term by their British gatekeepers, “thorny” issue of restoring the political papers of Kenya’s British colonial government to the independent government.

While evading repercussions for the sanctioned use of indiscriminate violence provided the UK government impetus for record removal and ongoing suppression, the Kenyan government pursued the retrieval of records from the UK for other reasons. In fact, as the previous chapter argued, the Kenyan government favorably viewed the absence of Mau Mau-related documents that corresponded with broader efforts to “bury the past.”Footnote ⁹ When Jomo Kenyatta assumed office first as Prime Minister and then as President, he maintained the colonial laws banning Mau Mau, in large part to repress the ongoing demands for land redistribution.Footnote ¹⁰ The early efforts by KNA, in cooperation with the Kenyan government, to recover documents were not part of the colonial reckoning that the UK government feared. In fact, in the mid-1970s, Kenyatta’s administration was actively staving off criticism of his own government by independent historical and political thinkers and activists.Footnote ¹¹ Rather, the Kenya National Archives and Kenya’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs promoted the retrieval of “migrated archives” as a matter of prestige. The underwriting political support for the retrieval process was the significance of personality, namely, Kenyatta’s, and the interest in recuperating his personal library that was confiscated at the time of his arrest in 1952. Lastly and less overtly, the Kenyan government pursued the return of colonial political papers in order to address problems of the nation that were unresolved from the colonial era, such as boundary disputes in the Northern Frontier District. Following a discussion of the context in which KNA originally pursued retrieving the “migrated archives,” this chapter will then examine the process of archival retrieval in the frame of decolonization at the international, bilateral, and national levels.

KNA’s Pursuit of the “Migrated Archives”

The “Migrated Archives” and Decolonization

When reflecting on KNA’s pursuit of the “migrated archives,” Musila Musembi, the institution’s third Chief Archivist, explained, “when you get someone from the outside to strengthen your ideas, then it is easier to sell.”Footnote ⁵⁰ This point sheds light on the role of UNESCO, the ICA, and other international organizations in generating an international framework within which to resolve the custodial and locational issues of colonial archives. International activity on the “migrated archives” established terms of reference and credibility for KNA’s search that resulted in the Kenyan government’s financial investment in the project, despite limited resources. For example, at its 19th General Conference held in Nairobi in 1976, UNESCO resolved to promote the development of archives both as a tool for “administrative efficiency” and “as a factor in the preservation and presentation of the cultural heritage and of national identity.”Footnote ⁵¹ By referring to this resolution, Kagombe was able to advocate the political importance of KNA to the government in order to release funds to pay for a survey team in the UK, after the Directorate of Personnel Management made it quite clear that that his office was “extremely reluctant to establish any additional posts in the Archives Department.”Footnote ⁵² However, Kagombe’s appeal was successful, and in 1978, KNA organized a small team to survey England-based archival collections. This survey was meant to generate an overview of what they held and what was likely kept out of public view by the Colonial Office and its successors. The team, which comprised Mr. Sarone Ole Sena, Mr. Edward Waiguru Muya, and Dr. Anne Thurston, worked under the Kenya High Commission in London. Kagombe explained that the team would “not be attempting to make an exhaustive study of migrated archives,” but rather to identify “relevant sources and to prepare the ground for the officers who will be occupying posts eventually in London.”Footnote ⁵³

In addition to facilitating support for the KNA from the Kenyan government, international activity on the “migrated archives” pressured European governments to address the issue. However, through its emphasis on nations, national identity, and sovereignty, the logical rhetoric and membership criteria employed by international organizations created a framework that acknowledged not only the position of new states independent from former colonial rule but also the imperial sovereignty of former colonizing countries. The limitations and consequences of this approach are most visible in the 1983 Vienna Convention on Succession of States in Respect of State Property, Archives and Debts, which addressed decolonization as a form of state succession, thereby accommodating the interests of former colonial powers as states with legal claims and protections, even though there had been no legal framework during the period of colonial administration in Kenya that established an archives, just general rules.Footnote ⁵⁴ Furthermore, by discussing state archives as cultural objects, the convention failed to adequately address their unique, multi-scalar political relevance, which accentuated the neglect of decolonization as a particular political process of redistribution and preserved the legitimacy of imperial property. In fact, by historicizing the “migrated archives,” not only the different imaginations and aspirations pinned on to them clarify but also the different understandings of what decolonization was and should be. The following will discuss activity on the “migrated archives” at the international, bilateral, and national levels within the context of decolonization with a focus on Kenya, the UK, and the 1983 Vienna Convention.

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.”Footnote 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. Although neither Kibinge, Kamau nor any of their successors in the pursuit of Kenya’s removed records were aware of the exact location or extent of these records, they nonetheless took an active role in determining their fate. The struggle between Kenya and the United Kingdom over the “migrated archives” has characterized the curation of their enmeshed past.

In order to conclude this “thorny” story, the following summarizes the arguments of this book and reflects on their contributions to both historiography and a future “relational ethic” between the UK and its former colonies regarding the still contested fate of the “migrated archives.” This book has examined the curatorial processes behind these records, and the colonial past more broadly, in two phases: the struggle to conceal and the struggle to reveal. It set out to answer what the “migrated archives” are, who is involved in them, and how they addressed and engendered political interests in the period leading up to and following political independence in Kenya, the UK, and across the British Empire. In doing so, several actors came into focus: those expected, including the colonial government in Kenya, the Colonial Office and later Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the UK, and the Kenya National Archives and the Kenyan government. However, several other key individuals and organizations surfaced in the course of this analysis. Among them are international organizations, universities in Oxford and Syracuse, the UK’s Department of Technical Co-operation, the Ford Foundation, the UK Colonial Office’s Intelligence and Security Department, governments of newly independent countries such as India and Algeria, and survivors of the Emergency in Kenya. More remain in the shadows, beyond the accessible archival record, such as the US Central Intelligence Agency and Kenya’s Office of the President.

The “migrated archives” meant different things to the aforementioned. However, in order to demystify the UK practice of record removal, destruction, and concealment, which was global in its effects, this book has considered the “migrated archives” as the collection of records that the Colonial Office and its Intelligence and Security Department drew from colonies and from which it created archival limbos. These limbos were not incidentally formed but rather designed as holding cells, where evidence of the recent colonial past awaited a decision. The “migrated archives” grew and grew, as the UK government continued to covertly remove records from colonies and dependencies, and alongside, grew the secrecy encasing them. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office denied requests to return or grant access to relatively innocuous documents in order to preserve the “migrated archives” in its entirety, lest someone pull too tightly on a single thread and unravel the spool. In the case of Kenya, these records were removed in order to preserve the reputations of individual officers, loyalists, informants, and co-conspirators as well as to ease the geopolitical transition to political independence. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s reasons for their ongoing concealment persisted over decades: to self-fashion the colonial past as a period of British benevolence, to create the conditions of impunity, and to maintain colonial references for possible future use. However, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had to contend with the demands and actions of many others who had different visions for the “migrated archives,” the contours of which are outlined in the following.

The bulk of Kenya’s “migrated archives” originated during the brutal counterinsurgency (1952–60) directed by the Colonial Governor and Colonial Office in London, wherein the active concealment and use of secret documents formed a core part of the Emergency strategy. The colonial approach to information management during this period was a reaction to the government’s ignorance during the counterinsurgency and the growing disapproval of the colonial administration in international fora. As such, securitizing documents was a priority and practice that did not disappear with the end of the small war. The British colonial government understood and pursued document security as the categorical prohibition of African access. In this context, it began to regulate its archives on a semiofficial basis during the Emergency. Administrative, racialized secrecy and control were the logics determining archival access and design by the late colonial government.

Although the colonial administration invested in the creation of a centralized archival service in 1956, the increasing likelihood of political independence in Kenya and elsewhere in the British Empire redirected its approach to document preservation. In 1961, the colonial government in Kenya relieved the government archivist from his work and instead launched a program to select all documents that could possibly “embarrass” the UK government and/or its accomplices within Kenya and destroy or remove them to London. This was not an isolated practice. Colonial administrations across East Africa corresponded during the early 1960s on the matter of purging their offices of possibly injurious evidence before African governments replaced them. In Kenya, the criteria for removing records were based on protecting reputations and preserving geopolitical advantage and rested on the subjective appraisal by individual officers across the colony, resulting in a patchwork purge. The Colonial Office in London later distributed instructions on record removal and destruction across the British Empire and held the Kenyan case as a model. However, the UK government was not the only party interested in taking documents from former colonies.

Universities of Oxford and Syracuse, the UK Colonial Office, the UK Department of Technical Co-operation, the Ford Foundation, and the colonial administration in Kenya cooperated in the early 1960s on the matter of extracting and preserving colonial-era documents to accommodate various interests. The variety of institutions reflected the US–UK vying for postcolonial influence in Kenya. Securing record of the colonial past was thought of as not only a way to reverently historicize the “accomplishments” of British colonists and settlers, in the case of the Oxford Colonial Records Project, but also an attempt to retain and/or develop authority in chartering the young country’s future in the context of the Cold War. All of these organizations excluded Africans from these preservation efforts, except for Syracuse, which instead partnered with the Kenya National Archives only to renege on a microfilm contract, leading to the charge of neocolonialist exploitation. These parties were not the only international actors concerned with documentary control over the colonial past.

The “migrated archives” arose internationally as a postcolonial problematic wherein the custody and location of colonial-era documents were discussed and debated in organizations such as the International Council on Archives. International organizations have, in the same stroke, assisted in naming the problem of the “migrated archives” and precluded solving disputes thereover. This deadlock is the result of a number of factors. These include the lasting advantage in the International Council on Archives (ICA) of founding member states, representing the interests of former colonial powers. The ICA’s reproduction of national sovereignty as a legitimizing argument for archival custody has enabled the UK government to argue that the “migrated archives” are imperial property, a position the ICA has not explicitly rejected. Finally, the ICA has adopted developmental practices since the 1960s in its offer to former colonies. Among other consequences, this has allowed the issue of archival lack to be explained through inexperience rather than colonial exploit. However, international organizations offered platforms and resources for former colonies upon political independence to organize around and advocate the archival restitution.

In fact, the independent Kenyan state and its national archives coevolved. The country’s postcolonial government pursued both the political project of nation-building and the process of Africanization through the establishment of a national archives service. Intent on using “unity” to smother the ongoing and particularized demands for land and freedom in the new nation, Jomo Kenyatta did not prevent early use of the KNA by scholars who produced histories of linguistic communities situated in emancipatory struggles. While the politicians overseeing its early development viewed the Kenya National Archives as a way to improve upon the structures left behind by the colonial government, in this case by establishing a modern and robust archival institution, one of its key differences from its predecessor was accessibility. With the creation of Kenya’s national archives, Africans could access documentary record of the political past for the first time. This was amid a period where the place of the past in Kenya was fraught with the wounds of the Emergency, decades of foreign domination, and no obvious linkages between various communities whose claims to land and liberty diverged. The development of KNA was shaped by the political project of nation-building by both the government it belonged to and the peoples who made use of it. Among the latter were not just individual researchers but powerful institutions such as Syracuse University, whose exploitative microfilm project reaffirmed the KNA’s determination to recover its lost archives.

Archival restitution has formed a core part of the Kenya National Archives’ activities since its founding. Archival recovery was situated in the efforts to cultivate prestige as a global, archival leader, to restore Jomo Kenyatta’s confiscated personal archive, and to facilitate political continuity with the return of administrative records. These efforts figured prominently in the related, but unique, pursuits of decolonization and liberation. Former imperial powers navigated international organizations and the rubric they laid out for resolving “migrated archives” disputes by defaulting to the entitlements of imperium sovereignty – raising the question in how far their imperial powers were, indeed former. The Kenya government, through the KNA, pursued the “migrated archives” as a way to invoke a single Kenyan polity as the rightful home to the removed political records, despite the fact that they pertained to issues that still fractured the population. Eventually, it was not the government’s pursuit but the unrelenting quest for justice by a few survivors of the Emergency, strengthened by a powerful coalition of lawyers, historians, archivists, and activists that resulted in the Hanslope Park disclosure.

Since the Hanslope Park disclosure and consequent release of the so-called “migrated archives,” the official position of the UK government has been that their concealment was the result of accidental negligence rather than intentional decision-making. In his report on the “migrated archives,” ordered by Justice McCombe of the Mau Mau case, Anthony Cary stated that several factors resulted in the limbo in which they were kept. These included a lack of a sensitivity review, confusion over ownership, and an ignorance of the contents of the files that at once rendered the documents untransferable and a low priority.Footnote ² These claims are at odds with archival evidence released after the disclosure that reveals the ongoing awareness of and decision to keep the “migrated archives” inaccessible. In fact, the reasons for the ongoing concealment of colonial documents resemble the reasons for their removal in the first place: to avoid embarrassment, to maintain geopolitical advantage, and to withhold evidence of colonial brutality from the public. Their limbo was not incidental but by design. The staff of Kenya National Archive’s persistent efforts to retrieve documents known to have been removed upon decolonization not only placed regular pressure on the UK government but also helped to widen awareness of the “migrated archives.” These efforts are situated in a long tradition of using bureaucracy and recordkeeping as mechanisms for political negotiation. However, the interests of the Kenya government in archival retrieval have not always aligned with the freedom to deal with Kenyan history in situ. If it were not for survivors of the Emergency, refusing to be forgotten, the story of the “migrated archives” would still sit in limbo.

As Kamau aptly reported in 1966, the fate of these files is still contested. The Kenyan government currently has an active claim for their return.Footnote ³ Archivists, historians, and members of the public across Africa continue to debate the significance of archival repatriation. At a recent conference on the history of restitution claims, scholar and archivist Forget Chaterera Zambuko asked whether efforts in retrieving the “migrated archives” should continue or if it was an exercise in “chasing ghosts.”Footnote ⁴ Others, such as Patrick Gathara, whose words on the subject have influenced the title and structure of this book, argue that only upon receipt of these records can Africans become “curators of their own history.”Footnote ⁵ Even the UK government has refrained from making an official statement on where the “migrated archives” should be, opting instead to release them to their national archives without acknowledging alternative placements or providing a rationale for doing so.

The omission of a legal position on the ownership of the “migrated archives” suggests that the UK government is uncomfortable making public the logic that has placed these records in England, namely, the perpetuation of imperial sovereignty. Moreover, the indeterminacy of the UK Public Records Act (1958, 1967) does not provide a strong case to argue that the “migrated archives” are the inalienable property of the UK government. This question has vexed the Foreign and Commonwealth Office from the late 1960s until the present, wherein priority was given not to establishing a clear legal position but rather to maintaining the secrecy enshrouding the “migrated archives,” even when there were no legal grounds for doing so. The reluctance to form a bilateral agreement with the Kenyan government, which could include an expansive understanding of binational custody, illustrates the UK’s commitment to archival inaccessibility.

The effects of the “migrated archives” current placement in England are restrictive. In 2019, it was reported that the UK government was twice as likely to refuse visa applications from African applicants than of those from anywhere else in the world.Footnote ⁶ Even when academics from outside of England manage to obtain the right to visit and conduct research, the UK National Archives retains the power to make the “migrated archives” inaccessible, as was the case in July 2022 when the entire series was withdrawn due to concerns over “insecticide use.”Footnote ⁷ Moreover, FCO 141 is filled with documents that pertain to the lives of individuals far away and beyond England’s borders. In Kenya, record removal targeted detention reports, petitions, land claims, trade union activity, vernacular publications, and other documents that were perceived to strengthen emancipatory efforts considered by the UK as a political threat. The maintenance of these records in England is in clear violation of the legal framework established through the UK’s data protection legislation, which grants rights to “data subjects,” namely, the right to be informed about the collection and use of their personal data, the right to access, and the right to erasure.Footnote ⁸

Digitization further complicates the “migrated archives” issue. In late March 2023, the UK National Archives published an announcement on their website titled “Digitising FCO 141 records.” In it, the institution reports they have begun a “programme of work to digitize and make more widely available records from the series FCO 141.” It lists seven African countries, including Kenya, with which the digitization project will partner, although led by the UK National Archives. The announcement makes no mention of “Operation Legacy”, the Mau Mau case, or the Hanslope Park disclosure. Its strategic ahistoricism is complemented by the following: “Over the last four years, we have worked hard to demonstrate why archives matter as vital assets for democracy.”Footnote ⁹ While it is certainly possible that such a digitization project may enhance accessibility to FCO 141, it retains the UK’s power to gatekeep access to histories of lands and peoples across the globe. Digitization addresses neither restitution nor reparations but still gives the impression of goodwill and democratic leadership in the global community. As this book demonstrates, it must be assumed that self-interests guide the UK government’s decisions around FCO 141 rather than an investment in equity, justice, or meaningful redistribution.

Writing from exile during the mid-1980s, Shiraz Durrani argued that Kenya’s colonial-era documents were safer in England than they would be in Kenya. While the period under Moi’s presidency was acutely repressive, this opinion had precedent. In 1966, Joseph Murumbi, founding champion of the Kenya National Archives, implied that the removal of Mau Mau documents to England was safer for the public. The “migrated archives” are dangerous. They are proof. Proof of expropriation, of extermination, of collaboration, of resistance, of retreat. In Kenya, the same proof that might strengthen a case against the British colonial government might render you suspect to a ruling elite with opportunistic ties to the memory of Mau Mau. Both the Kenyan and UK governments are hostile toward criticism and fearful of accusation. FCO 141 is not only a ledger of British colonial atrocity but also a proof of persistent sovereignty struggles in Kenya.

As demands for and questions surrounding decolonization reverberate worldwide, the “migrated archives” are a powerful source. They are a source not only for a fuller reconstruction of the past under British colonial rule, but also the period leading up to and following political independence – right up until the Hanslope Park disclosure. The story of “migrated archives” is as much about the activities they document as it is about the habituation of colonial secret-keeping and deception in postcolonial UK. They thus speak to the long history of decolonization, as practiced by the UK government, universities, international organizations, and the governments and peoples of former colonies. They offer the UK government, national archives, and public at large a chance to see how imperialism persevered as a governing logic in the postcolonial world, shaping the location and access to documents that formerly assisted in the attempted subjugation of peoples in the colonial world.

Without wanting to reassert the dominance of Eurocentric archival conventions within the historical discipline, I have refrained from telling this as a story of theft. A previous title for this book referred to the “migrated archives” as “stolen records.” While this is an appealing phrase because it maintains analytical focus on the ethics of removal, it reasserts archives as a form of property, a paradigm that perpetuates both colonial proprietary logic and the limitations of national sovereignty as a framework to resolve custody disputes. In other words, you cannot steal something which cannot be owned. What is powerful about renaming the “migrated archives” as “stolen archives” is its refusal of euphemism. Of course, documents don’t migrate on their own – they are moved. However, another interpretation of “migrated archives,” as conceived of by Dr. Shitla Prasad, takes us away from Eurocentric archival principles such as provenance, custody, and fixed preservation and toward the powers of mobility and emplacement.Footnote ¹⁰ The questions, where should these records be? to whom are they accessible? to what ends? who cares for/curates them? de-center national governments and imperial interests and make it possible to quiet the noise of hegemony.

So, where to go from here? In 2012, Anthony Badger published an article upon his appointment as historian responsible for the review and transfer of the “migrated archives” from Hanslope Park to the UK’s national archives. He did so in order to address and assuage the “legacy of suspicion” that the “migrated archives” left with historians. He reassured his readership that “there was no deliberate conspiracy to withhold embarrassing information but that there was a major management failing” leading to the making of a colonial archival limbo. In addition to being false, this strange reassurance regards “suspicion” by the historian as unwarranted.Footnote ¹¹ However, efforts by national governments to curate the past, as a source of comfort in the British case and as a source of unity in the Kenyan case, make it clear that distrust is necessary in historical scholarship to reveal the curatorial processes behind states’ instrumental rendering of their own pasts. While the potential transfer of the “migrated archives” to Kenya raises important concerns about the extent to which these records would once again be censored, redacted, destroyed, or repressed, it would provide peoples in Kenya with the means to negotiate this process with their government. For as much as the concealment period of the “migrated archives” can be understood as a crucial phenomenon in the making of a postcolonial UK, the retrieval period is part and parcel of the making of postcolonial Kenya. It is thanks to the persistence of those who survived the torment of Britain’s late colonial rule seeking justice, who put not just the UK government but its version of history on trial, that the “migrated archives” are within reach.