In the early 1960s, British colonial administrations in East Africa organized the systematic destruction and removal of secret documents from colonies approaching independence. The Colonial Office in London arranged the deposit of these documents in high security facilities, where they remained inaccessible until 2011 following a compensation suit by Kenyan survivors of British colonial rule against the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Curating the Colonial Past presents the first full length exploration of these 'migrated archives', chronicling the struggle between British attempts to conceal and Kenyan efforts to reveal evidence of the colonial past. Neither displayed nor destroyed, Riley Linebaugh explores how these records formed an archival limbo in which the British government delayed moral and legal judgement of empire. Yet, these practices did not go unchallenged. Linebaugh demonstrates how disputes over the 'migrated archives' facilitated the continuation of anticolonial sovereignty struggles beyond independence, struggles which persist into the present.
‘To whom does the past, especially an arguably dark colonial past, belong? Linebaugh's is the first, fascinating, fully detailed, vitally important, account of the fifty-year struggle of Kenyan citizens, against not only the British, formerly imperial, government but also their own, to uncover their agonised past and seek justified reparations from those whose responsibility had been thereby revealed. This is as much an international history of post-imperial bargaining over documentary decolonisation as a bilateral one between Britain and Kenya-and a warning to all historians of how much more our evidence might have been knowingly contaminated than we have always known to expect.'
John Lonsdale - Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge
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