On November 20, 1952, a delegation of the UK’s top intelligence officers met in Nairobi to make a plan to curb anticolonial resistance. Just the month before, the governor of Kenya, Evelyn Baring, had declared a State of Emergency in order to relieve his government of restrictions on its reaction to the Mau Mau Uprising.Footnote 1 Since the British occupation of the British East Africa Protectorate (1895–1920), later known as Kenya Colony and Protectorate (1920–63), peoples resisted dispossession and exploitation in a variety of ways, including the Nandi Uprising (1895–1905), the Giriama Uprising (1913–14), the women’s uprising in Murang’a (1947), and the Kolloa Affray (1950).Footnote 2 However, the British colonial government continued to authorize harsh restrictions to reinforce their rule, protect White settlers, and establish economic advantage, such as with taxes, agricultural bans, and decreasing wages.Footnote 3 In response to this and other injustices, anticolonial sentiment continued to culminate, and on October 9, 1952, dissidents assassinated Senior Chief Waruhiu, a key supporter of the colonial administration. This became a flashpoint for the British colonial government, which had previously failed to take seriously the threat to their order. To redress their ill-preparedness, the intelligence team met shortly after Baring declared the Emergency. Among the group was none other than Percy Sillitoe, director-general of MI5. Within days, the team drafted recommendations for the reorganization of intelligence services in Kenya in order to launch a counterinsurgency campaign.Footnote 4 Sillitoe suggested that Kenya Special Branch “establish a dedicated registry for intelligence records” that should span the colony.Footnote 5 This separation of intelligence records to preserve their secrecy is where our story begins.
Separation is the key process in the making of secrets. This is evident in the word’s origins, from the Latin secernere: se- “apart” and cernere “sift.” British attempts at secrecy characterized the Emergency in Kenya from the start until well after its end. From whom exactly the British colonial government attempted to keep secrets differed according to circumstance, as the following chapter will discuss, although restrictions were always racialized.Footnote 6 However, the word attempt is key.Footnote 7 Awareness of detention camps, of torture, and of starvation campaigns existed first and foremost with those subjected to violence during the Emergency, and those who authorized and enacted it. Further, there were those who observed it and those who read about it in reports distributed within and beyond Kenya.Footnote 8 At a certain point, keeping secrets about the Emergency was no longer just about managing awareness but about depriving potential and actual claimants of corroborating evidence. Sillitoe’s suggestion, to create a dedicated registry for intelligence records, facilitated this separation by using a recordkeeping solution. When the combat of the Emergency slowed, the British colonial government issued its first ever regulations concerning administrative archives, in order to preserve the secrecy enshrouding the British colonial government’s documents related to the Emergency. 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.
Secrets formed one part of the British colonial government’s information management strategy during the Emergency, which included the production and controlled circulation of “propaganda,” “information,” and “intelligence.”Footnote 9 These terms did not operate with stable definitions, neither to those employing them in situ nor in the following discussion. This fluidity lends understanding to the eventual attempt to comprehensively remove records from Kenya to London that dealt with the Emergency. Still, distinguishing between them helps clarify the originating context for the “migrated archives.” According to the UK Ministry of Defence’s explanation of psychological warfare, which is an alchemy of these different principles, information is “the free communication of facts favourable or unfavorouable, with no undue effort to sway the judgement of the audience.” Propaganda is “the communication of selected information with the aim of leaving a definite impression and possibly inducing action.” Intelligence should include “accurate and complete information about the enemy’s psychological weaknesses.”Footnote 10 The clarity of these definitions emanating from the Ministry of Defence is misleading, as are the apparent distinct intentions behind the use of each, especially regarding the blurriness between “information” and “propaganda.” However, they illustrate the British colonial government’s attempts to control the flow and impact of information within Kenya and beyond within the context of a counterinsurgency in order to establish and control one legitimate perspective on the Emergency.Footnote 11 “Information” and “propaganda” refer to the British colonial government’s public messaging, which contrasted the attempts to conceal evidence of the Emergency. It was in this context, through protecting bad intel in a dirty war, that not just what would become the “migrated archives” originated but the overall design and regulation of Kenyan colonial archives.
Before examining the conditions in which the “migrated archives” arose in greater detail, it is necessary to establish a context for the Emergency. The term “Emergency” is used here in order to refer to the British Colonial response to anticolonial dissent in Kenya between 1952 and 1960. Careful not to declare war and trigger either a legal context that would have limited or scrutinized British colonial government activity or create the idea that Britain had lost control in Kenya, the administration used a tactic common to the British Empire and declared an emergency.Footnote 12 The Emergency manifested as a war in Kenya’s central highlands between the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, often referred to as Mau Mau, and British forces that delegated much of the actual combat to the Home Guard, a government paramilitary force comprising predominately Kikuyu-speaking peoples.Footnote 13 Among the legal affordances of an emergency were powers of search and arrest, movement restriction, curfew, censorship, restrictions on public meetings, detention, collective punishment, mass internment in prison camps, and a uniquely high use of the death penalty.Footnote 14 “Emergency” thus refers to the British colonial government’s toolkit of repression, which incited armed self-defense from those who resisted, and it centers the British colonial government as the originator of the Emergency’s violence.Footnote 15 The difficulty of stating how many deaths and detentions resulted from the Emergency is no accident, but is itself the result of the indiscriminate use of violence, the colonial method of documentation during the Emergency, and the subsequent concealment and destruction of relevant records. However, it is estimated that British Emergency policy contained 1 million people in village reserves, murdered 14,000 people, and led to the detention of at least 150,000 Kikuyu-speaking peoples, a uniquely high proportion of the population in comparison to other British colonial emergencies.Footnote 16 Much of the vast and impressive historiography of this period aptly discusses the moral and political economy of anti-colonial dissent in Kenya, the complexities of loyalism, and the political, cultural, and social legacies of this trauma in Kenya.Footnote 17 However, until the early 2000s, few works directly addressed the British colonial government’s authoritative role in institutionalizing and systematizing violence at this scale.Footnote 18 The mass suppression of relevant documents facilitated this omission.
The Emergency presented the British colonial government with a complicated puzzle. The central government wished to manage a colony-wide operation to suppress Mau Mau and the wider anticolonial sentiment developing in Kenya, which was of special concern to the White settlers. However, the task required a more sophisticated understanding of its enemy than the British colonial government had. The racism which facilitated colonial dominance produced a general narrative of Mau Mau which was unhelpful in launching targeted military action but served rather to intensify and magnify the use of indiscriminate violence. Parliament at this time, Conservative-led, was running out of positive spins for British violence across the empire and anti-imperialism was growing in its base across the UK as it was globally. The British colonial government therefore had to control the type of information it provided to the international/British press and Parliament in order to maintain legitimacy in the colonies or at least to mitigate its decline as an imperial power.Footnote 19 To redress ignorance, the British colonial government invested in developing its intelligence operations across Kenya. To cope with Parliament, the British colonial government introduced complicated systems of control over what kind of information circulated outside of the colony regarding the Emergency. Colonial recordkeeping was, in part, an attempt to control these circuits of communication and their consequences. By making more transparent the processes by which information and intelligence developed and the ways in which they were used by the British colonial government, this chapter establishes the body of records that would later be known as the “migrated archives” as a function of colonial power.
Screening and Superstition: Bases of British Colonial Knowledge during the Emergency
In July 1954, at age fifteen, Jane Muthoni Mara was arrested for being a “Mau Mau sympathizer” because of her work coordinating food supplies and laundry services for traveling freedom fighters as they passed through her family’s village in the Embu District. Following her arrest, Jane was brought to Gatithi screening camp where a British District Officer ordered Kenyan guards to beat her and the other detainees in the hopes that torture would produce Mau Mau intel.Footnote 20 In her testimony fifty-six years later, Jane recalled:
I was screaming and resisting and trying to wriggle and free myself from the men who were holding me down. Suddenly Edward produced a glass soda bottle. Waikanja told him to push the bottle into my vagina which he did. I felt excruciating pain and then realised that the glass bottle contained very hot water. Edward literally forced the bottle into me with the sole of his foot while Waikanja was looking on and directing him.Footnote 21
In addition to beating and sexual violence, the torture techniques in screening included using hot spades to brand detainees and pliers to castrate male prisoners. Despite the extreme efforts of the screening officer, Jane refused to share information regarding the identities of any Mau Mau. As a result, she was detained for three more years. By focusing on documents, it is all too easy to forget the human harm behind the making and maintaining of the “migrated archives.” Jane went on to play a key role in the ultimate release of the “migrated archives,” records inscribed with the violence inflicted on her and so many others.
From the onset of the Emergency, screening was the process by which a coalition of British security forces, White settlers, and the Kenya police attempted, often through force, to get information from a Mau Mau suspect and/or to persuade them to confess their own affiliation.Footnote 22 In her work on the screening camps, historian Caroline Elkins identifies Christopher Todd, the first settler appointed as a screening officer, as one of the architects of the process. A two-time veteran of both world wars, Todd resumed his residency in Kenya’s Rift Valley in 1950. Together with some of the other “exasperated” White settlers, Todd formed a Vigilance Committee, which took “the law into their own hands for the purpose of protecting the lives of their families should the occasion arise.”Footnote 23 Rather than penalize this self-organized gang of settlers, Governor Baring recruited Todd into his government to participate in the design and execution of screenings in order to extend Crown protection to the vigilante and to benefit from his local “knowledge” and enthusiasm. In his memoir, Todd summarizes his approach: “I did not believe in obtaining information under threat of violence, although there are cases where such methods are necessary, such as in a case of Emergency.”Footnote 24 According to Elkins, screenings typically began with a long question and answer session during which the subject of interrogation was often silent. Silence was met either with final deportation to reserves or further forceful questioning directed by White settlers and policemen and enacted by Black guards.Footnote 25 Coercive, and often violent, interrogations were thus the government-endorsed mechanism to collect intelligence of military/political value in their counterinsurgency effort.
Todd was an asset in eyes of the British colonial government not only due to his interest in interviewing and willingness to use violence but also because of his self-professed expertise in identifying Mau Mau. Regarding the basis of recognition, Todd later stated, “There was something about the ideas and whole demeanor, an aura of evil which emanated from the man or woman which showed the state of utter degradation to which a once normal human being had been reduced by the foul oathing ceremonies.”Footnote 26 Todd’s description reflected a general misunderstanding of Mau Mau. Described as a “disease” or psychological state of madness which spread among Kenyans, though mainly Kikuyu-speaking peoples, Mau Mau was declared an inhumane condition beset upon the already atavistic Black peoples in Kenya. Historian of British Colonial Administration and friend of Governor Baring, Margery Perham, described the Emergency as an attempt to “break the spell of the Mau Mau.”Footnote 27 Here Perham expressed British colonial ignorance of the powerful anticolonial movement through mystification. Chinua Achebe describes this as a “perception problem,” in which the European othering of the Black African was deliberately invented to better facilitate colonial domination.Footnote 28
Fatal Costs of Flimsy Evidence
The Emergency itself was announced on October 20, 1952, and launched in the early morning hours of the following day with a mass arrest. Hoping to decapitate the anticolonial movement, Operation Jock Scott targeted over 140 individuals believed by the British to be the political leadership of Mau Mau and ordered for their capture and arrest. The strategy, however, miscalculated the role played by the detained individuals, many of whom were not at all connected to and others still explicitly opposed Mau Mau.Footnote 29 Jomo Kenyatta, one of the most esteemed of Kikuyu’s political leadership, was among those arrested. President-elect of the Kenya Africa Union and champion of Kikuyu nationalism, Kenyatta was thought by the British colonial government to be the head of Mau Mau. Kenyatta’s threat as head to the anticolonial movement was so powerful to the British that his personal library, journals, writings, and collected artifacts were seized at the time of his arrest, thereby erasing material evidence of his intellect and stealing the cultural objects he had collected throughout Africa and its diaspora. His arrest and trial, however, were based on flimsy and purchased evidence.
New African political leadership in Kenya rivaled the authority of chiefs and former hierarchical distributions of social authority. As such, African informants became strategically available to the British for a price – both financial and political (with the hopes of restoring/maintaining the power of the chief over new ethno-nationalists, such as Kenyatta). Historian Charles Douglas-Home suggests that at the time of Kenyatta’s accusation, “no African witness would dare to give evidence against Kenyatta unless rewarded by government.”Footnote 30 The trial resulted in the imprisonment of Kenyatta along with the rest of the Kapenguria Six, the name given to the most famous of those arrested during Operation Jock Scott, despite the lack of evidence that the six were essential, or even related, to Mau Mau operations. The trial demonstrated the value of bad evidence: If it promised to assist in dismantling the anticolonial threat and/or to maintain the image of British right-doing, the government would authorize its use.Footnote 31
The trial not only failed in putting the brakes on Mau Mau but also marked the intensification of fatal violence during the Emergency because the British colonial government had gravely misunderstood Mau Mau’s structure and aims. It was neither a contagious psychosis nor a terrorist army dependent on hierarchical leadership. Thousands of Mau Mau militants fled to the forests after the trial where they formed armies. Without comparable area expertise, the British colonial government resorted to air strikes to combat the forest armies, resulting in deaths of unknown numbers. Like the terrain, the relationship between Mau Mau, Kikuyu, and other politicized “ethnic” groups across the colony eluded the British government. The colonial knowledge which facilitated administrative dominance had homogenized the many peoples of Kenya into ethnic groups to which the British attributed different physiological, moral, and intellectual traits. These categories failed to explain the crisis their government faced. It was in this context that a violent screening process began, to compensate for the limitations of colonial knowledge without ever acknowledging them as such. However, Huw Bennet, the first historian to make use of the “migrated archives” in narrating the history of British counterinsurgency in Kenya, argues that “the army never succeeded in separating insurgents from civilians.”Footnote 32 John Lonsdale summarizes: “Panic is common in rulers who are shown to be ignorant. Political surprise was blamed in black deception rather than white negligence.”Footnote 33 In fact, the realities of Mau Mau and other Kenyan peoples who opposed the colonial government were not as important or instructive to British counterinsurgency as what the British colonial government perceived to be or projected as their aims.Footnote 34 The Emergency empowered strategies of colonial ignorance.
Perception Control via Censorship and Propaganda
The growing crisis in Kenya presented a difficult public relations challenge to the colonial government: how to spin a story that sympathized with, even valorized, the British administration despite the escalation of authorized violence during the Emergency. Civil servant and soon-to-be Emergency apologist, F. D. Corfield described it as “the necessity of conducting what must still, in effect, be an autocracy on democratic lines, and of being answerable ultimately to a democratic Parliament which has […] little or no practical experience of the difficulties which face these Governments of still primitive peoples.”Footnote 35 Still, popular opinion was essential to the maintenance of political legitimacy and, as pointed out by historian Joanna Lewis, official propaganda and censorship – their uses established and exploited in the Second World War – were the preferred tools.Footnote 36
Faced with the task of delivering a speech regarding the Emergency just one week into Kenyatta’s trial, Secretary of State for the Colonies Oliver Lyttelton wrote to Governor Baring:
Your telegram provided useful material about numbers detained and charged but I would be grateful for latest available figures both for those arrested after initial screening and of those detained under Emergency regulations. In particular I will be asked about numbers detained without having been charged with any criminal offence. Is there any information in general terms (i.e. not referring to individuals) which I can use about latter other than that which you have already provided. I notice from press reports that some murderers are about to be hanged at Thomson’s Falls. In view of previous publicity about detainees being herded in sight of the gallows there, may I assume precautions will be taken to ensure executions are not REPEAT NOT public. Details of arrangements to achieve this might prove useful.Footnote 37
Lyttelton’s telegram, dispatched as a cypher and marked with a bright purple “CONFIDENTIAL” stamp, indicates the contradictory circuits of communication that colonial intelligence would have to navigate during the Emergency. On the one hand, Baring’s office was required to collect and distribute statistical information regarding detainees and their charges and later death/casualty tolls as a kind of progress report for Whitehall’s consideration, but on the other hand, his government would have to censor the realities behind these statistics such as the hangings mentioned here. As a result, the central colonial government in Kenya instructed the provincial and district offices to collect and record numerical information on deaths, casualties, and arrests. In fact, the reports do not even offer “Mau Mau” as an identifying category for victims of Emergency decree. Rather, the dead and wounded were described only in their quantity.
The British colonial government in Kenya strategized public perception via propaganda and censorship concurrent to developing their systems of intelligence. During Kenyatta’s trial, in December of 1952, MI5 sent a delegate to Nairobi responsible for the reorganization of the colony’s Intelligence Department.Footnote 38 On December 19, 1952 Governor Baring invited A. M. MacDonald of the UK Security Service to the post of Intelligence Adviser to the Kenya Government for one year. According to the invitation, the post would require MacDonald to: organize the collection of intelligence, coordinate the work of all intelligence agencies within the colony, and promote the collaboration with Special Branches in neighboring territories. In addition to appointing MacDonald to reorganize the Kenya Special Police Forces and systematize intelligence gathering, Governor Baring ordered the development of a Kenya Intelligence Committee (KIC), responsible at the provincial level for collecting and advising on matters of intelligence. This structural overhaul triggered the formalization of intelligence infrastructure across the colony. The colonial government thereby self-fashioned itself to the metropole without describing the fatal violence or the torture techniques employed during the Emergency while attempting to develop protected channels for an information flow to facilitate counterinsurgency.
The formation and purview of the committee was not entirely thanks to Governor Baring’s idea and MacDonald’s execution. Two years before the formal declaration of the Emergency in Kenya, James Griffiths – Secretary of State for the Colonies at the time – circulated a report among British colonial government offices across the empire on lessons learned from the Emergency in Malaya. Among the first of these lessons was the significance of instating systems of intelligence, coming after the establishment of a police force and before creating a legislative context which provides the colonial government any authority deemed necessary for their purposes. Griffiths wrote, “complete agreement exists that the first essential for the prevention of emergencies, and for dealing with them if they should occur, is a regular and efficient system for information and intelligence.”Footnote 39 Historian Rory Cormac argues that the escalation of anticolonialism across the British Empire, not only in Kenya, intensified the significance of colonial security in the eyes of Whitehall and that, especially in the Cold War context, this “led towards a greater centralization of the management of colonial […] intelligence.”Footnote 40
Kenya’s Intelligence Committee had its first meeting in 1953 under the direction of A. M. MacDonald, during which the organization’s role was further clarified. The committee was responsible for obtaining and providing “operational intelligence.” MacDonald elaborated that this meant (a) providing information about an area for commanders immediately prior to operations in that area, (b) enabling action to be taken to intervene in terrorist activity or at least to be on the spot as soon as possible after incidents, and (c) briefing units entering an area on the local situation.Footnote 41 In other words, the committee should establish contacts, informants, or surveillance such that they could in turn prescribe strategic military action to the central government according to British interests. The desire to create channels for information flow brought the British colonial government to prioritize relations with loyalists, on whom they depended for any route to intel.Footnote 42
In the second meeting of the Kenya Intelligence Committee on February 25, 1953, MacDonald led the committee to agree that “there was little chance of obtaining immediate information of incidents in progress until there were sufficient loyal Africans on the ground [via] the proper and rapid expansion of the Home Guard.”Footnote 43 In the Cold War period, forming militias of local peoples was commonplace in combatting emerging nationalism.Footnote 44 Early on in the Emergency, the British colonial government created different “information” strategies according to four different groups: the loyalists, the “waverers,” active supporters of Mau Mau living in reserves, and forest fighters.Footnote 45 Several common themes cut through the messaging to all four, such as the emphasis that “there was in effect a civil war and that the struggle was not black versus white.”Footnote 46 This point tried to shift the focus from the British colonial government to the Home Guards as Mau Mau’s enemy, an enduring tactic in the British colonial government’s evasion of responsibility for the violence of the Emergency. However, General George Erskine and Governor Baring were the responsible individuals for authorizing all military measures during the Emergency.Footnote 47 Active in the years of most concentrated violence (1953–55), the Home Guards were responsible for watching over Kikuyu reserves, conducting anti–Mau Mau sweeps, penetrating forest fighter groups, and engaging in armed combat.Footnote 48 Among their duties in the villages, the Home Guards were armed with megaphones to serve as mouthpiece for the British colonial government’s campaign in anti–Mau Mau psychological warfare.
Just one month after the declaration of Emergency, MacDonald emphasized the utility of psychological warfare campaigns in fighting Mau Mau. On November 26, 1952, a meeting convened at the Government House in order to discuss the Emergency and preliminary actions the administration should take. In attendance was son-of-missionaries, anthropologist Louis Leakey, who agreed to draft a statement condemning Mau Mau in order to drum up support by the Kikuyu for the British colonial government. Leakey would ask Eliud Mathu, the first Black member of the Legislative Council of Kenya, and Harry Thuku to sign the statement as an act of revival for the moderate Kikuyu Provincial Association. MacDonald ordered that such a statement be “splashed” through the press and radios as the first official act of propaganda during the Emergency.Footnote 49 Over the next three years, the British colonial government attempted a smear campaign against Mau Mau in the Emergency through control over vernacular press, whisper campaigns, sky shouting, broadcasting and photographic services, mobile information vans, and traveling megaphone announcements.Footnote 50
An Information Working Party formed in September 1953 and was responsible for identifying audience groups for British colonial government’s propaganda and soliciting relevant messages from the intelligence committee. Each class, according to the working party, required a tailored approach, but they agreed on the following universal messaging: (1) Mau Mau is an evil thing. (2) It is Africans’ responsibility to destroy Mau Mau. (3) The British Administration is in the best interest of Kenya and all its inhabitants. Otherwise, the Information Working Party specified that messaging toward loyalists should emphasize that “they are on the winning side” and they “need not fear their position will be undermined by the return of subversive leaders.” To the waverers, the working party wanted to “show that the loyalists are the future leaders.” Lastly, to the “gangsters,” the working party wished to emphasize “the growing revulsion of feeling against them.”Footnote 51 The propagation of this “information” was accompanied by ongoing repression of vernacular press, which circulated printed anticolonial critique. The working party’s messaging, across the board, omitted mention of the British colonial government itself, except for as the bastion of “law and order.”Footnote 52 It thus aimed to make unknown the colonial administration’s role in the Emergency and eradicate public discourse which showed otherwise.
The Information Working Party was an offshoot of the Kenya Information Office (KIO), an organization which developed in 1940 at the start of the Second World War. The office was responsible for distributing wartime news to settler and administrative communities across Kenya. At the war’s end, the Report of the Development Committee suggested that the KIO transition into an “Information Service for Africans.” As such, it reorganized its services in 1946 to include producing publications (news, periodicals, pamphlets, and booklets), daily vernacular broadcasts, commercially produced and distributed photographic prints, and some films that were shown by KIO’s officers in charge of cinema vans, all of which were deliberately made to promote British interests. In 1953, KIO offered its information services and infrastructure to the Emergency effort in order, according to their self-authored institutional history, “to use propaganda methods to help restore peace and form sound opinion amongst Africans in the disaffected … areas of the Colony.”Footnote 53 The Information Working Party produced records to circulate publicly within Kenya in order to try and manipulate public opinion and incite action against Mau Mau. Its title thus blurred the distinction between information and propaganda. Distinctions were rather made on the basis of who could know or prove what, who could be privy to which kinds of information. For this, recordkeeping practices were central to the Emergency in order to regulate which messages the British colonial government advanced and what evidence it withdrew.
Security of Documents and the Development of Colonial Archival Practice
That the British colonial government in Kenya felt its own precarity during the Emergency is evident in its anxious obsession with recordkeeping. With faltering confidence in its legitimacy, systems of rule took on new meaning. If the administration could outline and abide by rules within the protective measures of bureaucracy, then they surely had not strayed too far from their claims to modernity and civilization. Additionally, the delicacy of the Emergency encouraged the colonial administration to tighten security control in all realms. Berman observes:
the Emergency was a powerful weapon of bureaucratic politics with which administrators could attempt to reverse the decline of their prestige and authority in relation to the technical departments and overcome the growing breach with the central administration.Footnote 54
These bureaucratic politics were articulated through paperwork, as though order on the page would yield order in the colony. The carefully collected intelligence had to be first gathered and then protected: Restricting access and use of sensitive records was a part of the Emergency effort. This section aims to outline the development of archival practice generally and more specifically with the Kenyan British colonial government in order to clarify the archive’s function(s) to colonial power.
In 1928, a new filing system was introduced by the Honorable Chief Native Commissioner in Kenya in order to more efficiently and usefully manage the storage and therefore accessibility of communication within Kenya and other British colonies. The Commissioner reported at the time of the instructions that it was estimated that 33 percent of clerks across the colony were spending an entire day looking for files, which should be found, according to him, in thirty seconds or less. Better (and faster) recordkeeping seemed to be the key to managing not only the information produced by colonial rule but also the actual work of governance. Thus, the memorandum emphasized the organization and retrieval of current records. For noncurrent records, or those which had not been used for at least twelve months, the instructions stated that “all old files should be marked ‘ARCHIVES’ in red ink, and reference should be made on them to any subsequent volumes opened,”Footnote 55 thereby enforcing a retention schedule, or method by which records were selected for archival preservation or destruction, in which every single file should be preserved. The British government paid more specific attention to the archives across the colonies when the fragility of its empire was no longer possible to ignore.
In December 1948, amid the emergence of independent states out of the British Empire, the colonial Secretariat addressed all heads of Department in Kenya regarding the importance of proper preservation of records that might be of historical interest. The archive was no longer just a dumping ground for the growing piles of “old” and unused files, but the foundation on which the British Empire would be memorialized. In October 1955, a set of Draft Rules and Regulations for the Management and Control of all Archives of the Central Government was circulated to all remaining colonial governments. The timing of these rules, the first of its kind issued in Kenya, corresponded with an apparent dwindling in the active combat in the Emergency and the reorganization by the UK of its intelligence services during the early Cold War.Footnote 56 These instructions introduced a new retention schedule which specified the kinds of documents which should be preserved. The list of record-types illustrated the colonial ideal of well-organized and well-documented rule. The first chief archivist in Kenya appointed in 1956, Clare Bwye, asserted that the colonial archive should “serve the practical purposes of administration by providing precedents and historical background to government business in the shape of old departmental files and administrative reports.”Footnote 57 As indicated by the Intelligence Committee, the practical purposes of the Kenyan colonial administration in 1955 did not necessitate historical background from its archives as much as strategic control. Managing the colonial government’s archives in Kenya during the 1950s was a matter of protecting intelligence for internal reference and possible future use. From the start of the 1950s onward, the recordkeeping principle most exercised across colonial government was the protection of counterinsurgency documents.
By April 22, 1953, the Kenya Intelligence Committee had begun to install Security Officers across administrative departments in order to enforce security precautions for classified information.Footnote 58 The previous year, the British Government introduced a “special procedure” to vet the reliability of all Civil Servants in Kenya who “might have access in the course of their duties to information of an exceptionally secret or delicate kind.”Footnote 59 The vetting process involved the Special Branch conducting a background check based on intelligence gathered on an individual basis for every nominee to work within British colonial government or existing employees facing promotion.Footnote 60 Once the matter of personnel was clarified, the KIC, together with the Cabinet Office and Ministry for Defence, considered further protective measures for sensitive information. These measures included the use of a classification schema for all documents, access and storage of classified documents, transport and encryption of secret communication, and destruction and/or disposal of records. The classification schema consisted of four security grades, here listed in descending order of sensitivity: “Top Secret,” “Secret,” “Confidential,” and “Restricted.” To further complicate things, British colonial government introduced three subgroups for classified documents: “Personal,” “Guard,” and “U.K. Eyes Only.” These labels further indicated rules of access. For example, “Personal” files were not to be seen by non-officials, even not by elected ministers, and “Guard” materials were specifically forbidden to share with a national of the United States of America.Footnote 61 Beyond their intended viewership, these grades indicated corresponding modes of transport and storage.
The British colonial government attempted to articulate and enforce strict mechanisms of control over their sensitive records. The directive Material Security Protection for Classified Information in Government Offices described the ideal conditions for storing such documents across government offices in Kenya. For example, they should be kept locked in steel filing cabinets secured to the wall. An appointed security officer should keep the key on their person at all times. These cabinets, it was instructed, should be stored in locked windowless strong rooms, the doors of which should be reinforced on the outside by steel plating.Footnote 62 Identified as “Key Points,” these strong rooms, the British colonial government insisted, should be seen as important to the Emergency and/or survival capacity such that their “destruction or damage would impair either the general or local war effort.”Footnote 63 When it was necessary to transport or communicate classified information, the grading indicated how to do so most cautiously. For example, Top Secret material was ordered to be transmitted in a container fastened by a combination padlock and carried by an authorized European “safe hand.”Footnote 64 Telegrams were encrypted using the Kenyan police code and sent to the Cypher Office for deciphering. For oral transmission, colonial officials were reminded of “common sense precautions,” that they should always keep in mind offices with ill-fitting doors, thin partition walls, or open fanlights to better avoid eavesdropping.Footnote 65 In 1958, G. J. Ellerton, Permanent Secretary of Defence, summarized the anxieties of interception: “We know that certain people have realized the possibilities and advantages of penetrating the Government’s secrets. This is a threat to security which is bound to increase and makes all the more important the proper enforcement of security measures.”Footnote 66 Record storage was the British colonial government’s attempt to maintain Emergency secrets. The archive did not simply preserve records of the Emergency but was a technology of concealment.
The British colonial government’s elaborate mechanisms of document security were fragile and regularly breached. Throughout the Emergency, colonial offices tracked the movement of classified files, called accountable documents, that detailed sensitive matters in order to best ensure they never fell into the “wrong” hands. Postal workers transported accountable documents in nested protective layers. In 1959, an African postal worker unhappy with their working conditions in Nairobi threatened to deliberately misdirect confidential mail to newspapers in the United States and the USSR causing the Governor’s office stress over the strength of their security.Footnote 67 In August of the same year, the secretary general of the Kenya Federation of Labour, Tom Mboya, claimed that a confidential source gave him copies of cables between Secretary of State for the Colonies and the Kenyan governor that detailed the plans to develop a constitution for an independent Kenya.Footnote 68 Throughout the Emergency, Special Branch cultivated and relied on an extensive informant network that was infiltrated by Mau Mau. The inability to ascertain who was a saboteur and who was an ally increased the British colonial government’s categorical suspicion of Africans, especially those employed by government.
Despite the British colonial government’s investment in document security measures, a number of factors rendered them defective. The extent of colonial ignorance produced a paranoia of Africans, especially Kikuyu-speaking peoples, yet the British colonial government relied heavily on loyalists in the counterinsurgency campaign. Historian John Lonsdale argues that though “official knowledge was distorted by racial separation; opaque and partial, it served the interests of their African informants.”Footnote 69 Thus, despite its attempts to establish a “communications monopoly,” the British colonial government was not equipped to prevent the “soldier-information worker” network of the Mau Mau and their sympathizers.Footnote 70 Reports of redirected mail resulted in the British colonial government’s administrative secretary overseeing that “a European Police courier system [replace] the former Kikuyu postman on all routes” in 1955. However, four years later, in the last weeks of the Emergency, the British colonial government was still registering complaints of interception.Footnote 71 While the military campaign was largely over, the British colonial government was nowhere near finished fighting for the control of information related to the Emergency.
Intelligence breaches were not only the result of anticolonial intention but also of colonial neglect. In October of 1958, G. J. Ellerton wrote to Thomas Neil, who by now was the leading Security Officer, complaining of security weaknesses in the administration. Ellerton criticized his colleagues for leaving classified papers on their desks unsupervised, of misclassifying documents, and for forgetting to read and abide by the Government’s Kenya Security Instructions.Footnote 72 Neil sprang into action, contacting all heads of departments regarding their preparedness for interception. He wanted to know: How quickly could the offices of British colonial government destroy all of their classified materials should the occasion arise?Footnote 73 His survey, completed in 1958, would become the basis of “Operation Legacy,” the coordinated approach to destroy and remove any record which the British colonial government suspected would disturb the transition to independence and reveal the nature of its counterinsurgency (Chapter 3).
The 1955 Rules and Regulations for the Management and Control of all Archives made explicit the difference established by the British colonial government between “archives” and the amassing classified documents throughout the colony. Prefacing its introduction, the text asserted: “these Rules and Regulations do not apply to CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS which should be dealt with strictly in accordance with existing directives regarding … SECURITY REGULATIONS.”Footnote 74 Classified documents, as has been addressed in this chapter, mostly had to do with the activities of the British colonial government throughout the Emergency. The records detail the way in which the British colonial government developed its own perception of Mau Mau and the Kenyan population in order to fatally eliminate anticolonial threats. They are the evidence of different circuits of communication, constructed with the desire to control the perception of the Emergency — in Parliament and in the colony. Their concealment functioned to obscure the British colonial government’s role in authorizing systematic violence. By making these records inaccessible, the British colonial government attempted to avoid consequence for their dirty war. However, as the next chapter will show, the British colonial government could not stave off requests for archival access.
