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

Chapter 1 analyzes the recordkeeping practices established in Kenya during the Emergency through the reorganization of colonial intelligence services. This chapter explores the connection between the British paranoia against Mau Mau fighters in particular and Kikuyu-speaking peoples in general and the administration’s anxious obsession with recordkeeping and the maintenance of Emergency secrets. Following a discussion of key terms and contexts, such as the colonial concept of information management and the Emergency period, this chapter situates the “migrated archives” in the colonial politics of concealment.

“In the years before independence, people were beaten, their land was stolen, women were raped, men were castrated and their children were killed,” explained Wambugu wa Nyingi in his witness statement during the 2009 Mau Mau claim. He concluded, “I would like the wrongs which were done to me and other Kenyans to be recognised by the British Government so that I can die in peace.”1 Nyingi ensured that his wish came true. In June 2013, the United Kingdom’s foreign secretary William Hague announced that Britain was to pay out £19.9 million in costs and compensation to more than 5,000 elderly Kenyans whose abuse the British colonial government had authorized during the Kenya Emergency (1952–60).

Chapter 6 returns to Nairobi as the site of the Kenya National Archives and the capital of a government in the throes of establishing its forms and functions in the aftermath of independence. It examines how Kenyan politicians, historians, and archivists employed the national archives as an instrument for nation-building, burdened though it was by the colonial origins of the institution. Aware of the massive removal, destruction, and weeding of secret records and bogged down 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. 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

Chapter 5 provides an overview of the development of the International Council on Archives and its role mediating custodial disputes over colonial archives. This chapter, admittedly, interrupts the book’s narrative. Chronologically, it covers the late 1940s through the 1970s and largely examines the council’s main conferences during the period in order to trace the emergence of the notion of the “migrated archives” and debates over their custody. Like the role of international organizations themselves, this chapter is significant but somewhat detached from the realm of everyday activity surrounding Kenya’s “migrated archives.” However, as is demonstrated by the chapter, it provided important resources with which former colonies advocated the return of political documents as a matter of postcolonial sovereignty. These advocacy efforts were stalled by the reconfiguration of imperial hegemony upon which the International Council on Archives was based.

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

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