A month after Clyde Sanger’s article in The Guardian on the “Bonfire of Documents,” which reported on the colonial destruction of records across Kenya, M. P. K. Sorrenson wrote to Thomas Neil. Sorrenson was in Kenya conducting research on White settlement for his DPhil at Oxford and he appealed to Neil “not to burn any more Mau Mau records.”Footnote 1 His interests exceeded the fate of administrative records, he wanted to know “about the correspondence from the other side: letters from Mau Mau leaders, detainees and other Africans, and captured documents? Have all these been photographed and copies sent to London? They are of historical importance too.”Footnote 2 His remarks illustrate a rare appeal for preserving perspectives other than the European or administrative. He concluded his letter with his greatest unease, which foreshadowed the events to come. A senior government official had informed Sorrenson that there were some Mau Mau records that “will never be made available to the public, not even after 50 years.”Footnote 3 He wanted to know if this was true. As we now know, these records were made available sixty years after the removal due to the persistence of survivors of the Emergency seeking recompense for abuse. However, at the time Sorrenson wrote, the only certainty Neil or his colleagues had over these records was that the “Secret papers should remain in the hands of HMG.”Footnote 4 Concerns over colonial document destruction and suppression grew among historians based in Kenya, England, and the United States. The nature of their concerns varied. Some were interested in preventing the destruction of research materials that would be valuable to their own careers, especially those whose work faced an uncertain future upon independence. Others were funded by foundations that had geopolitical interests in developing area studies programs amid the Cold War. Fewer were worried that record destruction might further dislodge African agency from the writing of history.
While anticolonial insurrection foreclosed the colonial future, the British administration was unwilling to surrender control over the documentary record of the colonial past. This dilemma resulted in several different archival formations. These included the nascent Kenya National Archives in Nairobi, the Oxford Colonial Records Project of the Bodleian Library, microfilm copies of the Kenya National Archive holdings held by Syracuse University, and what would become known as the “migrated archives” in London. Each of these formations was driven by the collision of powerful interests of academic institutions and governments based in Kenya, the United States, and England. At stake were competing desires to control access to the record of the colonial past, which was perceived to hold value in the political future. This chapter examines several strands of these desires. The chapter takes a multi-scalar approach, looking at institutionally situated individuals who interacted with the shifting geopolitical contexts of the second half of the twentieth century. In an effort to parse out these entanglements, and relate them to the construction of archives related to Kenya’s colonial past, this chapter introduces several key individuals and institutions before elaborating on the particular archival formations they developed.
The phrase archival formation has several uses. Firstly, it draws attention to the dynamic processes that resulted in documentary repositories. Secondly, it draws attention to the process of consigning administrative records to historic use, that is, to indicate they pertained to finished business and should be preserved for the writing of history, rather than current, political use, that is, as reference to ongoing matters of administration. This distinction was crucial in the period of decolonization, in which the recent colonial past was both an acute political question and a historiographical one. By considering records in light of their historical value rather than their political relevancy, the actors in this chapter denied the potential custodial claim of independent Kenya over documents pertaining to the unresolved problems it inherited from the colonial administration. This rhetoric glossed over the concurrent “race to control [Africa’s] natural resources and efforts by the major powers – East and West – to shape the continent’s political landscape in their favour.”Footnote 5 As this chapter shows, the control of colonial-era documents was a source of power in this race, or scramble, to different ends.
The same administrators in Kenya’s colonial government who corresponded and eventually collaborated with historians on the matter of preserving documents for scholarly research also coordinated the ongoing delivery of secret documents to the Colonial Office in London. By the end of May 1963, the Kenyan colonial government dispatched its first major tranche of classified records, assembled through the “W” system, to London. The Colonial Office had made arrangements with the Public Record Office to make use of a former Royal Ordnance Factory at Hayes in the London borough of Hillingdon to store the records incoming from Kenya and elsewhere. The UK government converted the facility from a tank and gun factory into a secret storage unit for records from the Ministry of Defence and the Colonial Office among other governmental departments.Footnote 6 The Colonial Office favored the repository because of its security features. In addition to offering lockable steel cages to house records, the staff at Hayes arranged files with a numerical, rather than a subject, reference, making it very difficult to search and find specific information (see Figures 4.1 and 4.2). The Hayes Repository was designed based on the principle of inaccessibility in order to prevent “breach of confidentiality.”Footnote 7 Eventually, the Colonial Office brought over 1,000 feet, roughly the length of three football pitches, of secret files from across the world to Hayes.Footnote 8 Various colonial officials had saved these documents from destruction based on their “historical value” but determined they were too “sensitive” for public disclosure in the near future. By bringing them into Hayes, the Colonial Office was buying time to release the documents until “passions have cooled.”Footnote 9 Thus, the UK government maneuvered around its own legislative context as laid out by the Public Records Act (1958), which clearly stated that public right of access to public records was to be given after fifty years. Known to those who worked there as the “Limbo,” the Hayes Repository became an attempt for the Colonial Office to delay the processes of decolonization and to withhold evidence of systematic abuse in its empire during the “Age of Human Rights.”Footnote 10
Figure 4.1 Public Record Office repository, Hayes, 1956. TNA PRO 55/12
Figure 4.1Long description
A report page dated, 4 June 1965, labeled ANNEXE C TO REPORT 4 D slash C 41 slash 22 slash 65 slash C I S, has two photographs with captions below each. The caption for A reads, Photograph A captures a box with part of the lashing tape still attached. It depicts a wooden crate secured with tape and labels. The caption for B reads, Photograph B shows the degree of exposure of documents with 3 slats unattached. It depicts the crate with missing slats and visible boxes, one labeled confidential.
Figure 4.2 Steel racking and shelving, Hayes Repository, Public Record Office, 1955–56. TNA PRO 56/5
In September 1961, Margery Perham wrote directly to Kenya’s Governor, Patrick Renison, about the “future of the documents dealing with Mau Mau.” Perham acknowledged that Kenya’s colonial government “might not want them to fall into the hands of a succeeding Government” but that those “who study history feel very deeply that no documents ought to be destroyed.” For various reasons, Perham was more successful cooperating with the exiting administration in Kenya on the matter of preserving documents than Sorrenson. In 1961, Perham was at the end of an academic career of more than forty years during which she defied glass ceilings within the English university system and shaped the academic field of colonial administration. Throughout her career, Perham developed many acquaintances and friendships among colonial officials across the ranks and published frequently in newspapers, thereby influencing both public and administrative opinion on the British Empire. Regarding colonial document preservation, Perham worked with the colonial administration in Kenya, the Colonial Office in London, Oxford University, other scholars, and funding bodies in both the UK and the United States to obtain and safeguard as many colonial documents as possible. In her letter to Renison, Perham remarked, “I feel for you very much in the incredibly difficult task you are being set these days. I am only too thankful that I am an observer of events and not an actor in them.”Footnote 11 Contrary to her self-description, Perham’s engagement with colonial document preservation was a decisive factor in acquiring funds for Kenya’s early national archives, establishing Oxford as one of England’s most important repositories for colonial history, and facilitating connections between US scholars and the documents of colonial rule in Eastern Africa.
The entangled cooperation between Kenya’s colonial administration; academic institutions in Kenya, the UK, and the United States; and the UK government over the fate of colonial documents resulted in several archival formations. These included the centralization of many documents from across Kenya’s districts to Nairobi, the evacuation of hundreds of files into secret storage in London, the development of Oxford’s Commonwealth and African archival collections, and nascent connections between Syracuse University and what would become the Kenya National Archives. This chapter examines the contours of these entanglements and in doing so highlights historians as historical actors, the close relationship between academic institutions and government in the era of decolonization and the Cold War, and the attempts to control history in the making. No longer able to rule over the present, the colonial administration turned to the past to cope with the uncertainty of the geopolitical future. This served two ends. Firstly, it generated resource for the control over vast amounts of classified documents in Kenya and elsewhere in Britain’s ending empire. Secondly, it decontextualized the role these documents might have had in the present during constitutional discussions. In their scramble for Kenya’s history, as understood as the pursuit to obtain and control documentary record of the colonial past and thus the authority to reconstruct it and in doing so forecast the political future, the actors of this chapter did much to prevent African awareness of and participation in the curation of Kenya’s archives. In doing so, these entangled actors reinforced neocolonial relations through archival patronage.
The Preservation of Colonial Perspectives
Margery Perham hosted a series of discussions at Nuffield College in September and October 1962 regarding the preservation of colonial records. At the time, Perham was at the end of her own academic career. Besides holding a Readership in Colonial Administration, Perham was the first Official Fellow at Oxford University’s new Nuffield College. As the college’s inaugural leader, she shaped Nuffield into a “base within Oxford for colonial and Commonwealth studies.”Footnote 12 In 1944, Perham became the first director of Oxford’s Institute of Colonial Studies. In addition to training members of the Colonial Service, Perham advised policymakers within government and shaped British public opinion on empire through regular newspaper publications. Perham’s interest in collecting colonial records can be interpreted in several ways. As the previous chapter discussed, colonial administrators dealt with the loss of their careers and sovereignty by turning toward historical thought. By placing empire in the past tense, officers could reframe this loss as progress in a form of mental gymnastics that explained independence as the result of Britain’s role in state-formation rather than attribute it to the success of anticolonial insurrections. Perham had a particular interest in preserving the records of individual colonial officers for fear that they would not do so on their own.
In the late 1950s, the Commonwealth Studies Committee of Oxford began discussing the private papers of imperial administrators. Worried that family members of such administrators would find the task of saving documents and granting researchers access to them burdensome and possibly discard or neglect them as a result, the committee resolved to compile a list of as many senior officials within the colonial service as possible and solicit them and/or their families for their records.Footnote 13 The committee’s selection criteria, which focused on the “Great Men” of empire, were emblematic of a continuity between a powerful strand of Whiggish historical thought that had shaped colonial administration and that which was now summoned to memorialize it. Namely, that the agency of a few, great men was responsible for the progressive end of historical time. In this light, the proposed project was a reactionary response to history’s “betrayal” of Britain’s imperial project. By preserving the record of these so-called great men, the Commonwealth Studies Committee was reserving the right to cast them in another light. While this particular project did not come to fruition, it would lead to the Oxford Colonial Records Project several years down the line.
In 1961, Perham was invited to deliver the Reith Lectures and reflected on the trajectory of British colonialism in her lifetime to a transatlantic radio audience,
People of my generation were taught from their schooldays that our empire was a splendid achievement, conducted as much for the good of its many peoples as for our own […] To the generation before us, the ‘white man’s burden’ was not a rather bitter joke. Then how, we ask, has ‘colonialism’ suddenly become, as it seems, such a term of abuse? Have we been utterly blind? Was the idealism we so often professed merely a cloak in which we tried to hide our complete self-interest from the world, and indeed from ourselves?Footnote 14
Perham asserted that the British Empire’s origin myth of progressive benevolence concealed its cornerstone: “complete self-interest.” Priya Satia has recently described the rupture in British historical thought upon the fall of empire as “rather than doing justice to Britain’s past, history seemed to be mocking it: What future might they possess now?”Footnote 15 Perham attributed this rupture to metaphorical blindness, implying imperial ideology to be somewhat inevitable, but stopped short of naming historical thought as one of its causes.
The September meeting at Nuffield gathered a coalition of different institutions all with interests in the future of colonial documents. The attendees determined three “major classes of materials which scholars will need in order to present an adequate picture of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Asian and African history.”Footnote 16 These included (1) “official documents,” (2) private papers and recorded interviews with former officials, and (3) diaries and other district records. Although it was only one of several events and forms of cooperation that resulted in significant archival formations, the September meeting in Nuffield provides a useful context to examine the transformation of hegemonic power amid decolonization. The attendees were representative of entangled interests in managing end-of-empire administrative shifts and influencing the future governance of new states. In addition to Perham and the Oxford setting, the meeting in September brought together representatives of the Colonial Office, Department of Technical Co-operation, the Ford Foundation, and Syracuse University. Perham followed up the meeting a month later with Richard Cashmore and Gordon Mungeam, who were both working on research on the colonial administration in Kenya and had an interest in helping to preserve colonial documents.
The emergence of independent states from out of Britain’s empire caused Oxford University to pivot in its colonial role. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge had been “stakeholders in Britain’s Empire, responsible for delivering or managing services to the colonies.”Footnote 17 Sarah Stockwell explains that the development of social sciences in the twentieth century and the increasing recognition of “expertise” positioned individuals such as Margery Perham as a powerful interface between the production of “knowledge” about the British Empire and the policy that administered it.Footnote 18 While the nature of Perham’s advice changed throughout her career, from reformist to supporter of independence, the “double function” of her expertise did not.Footnote 19 Her interest in collecting colonial records illustrates this. Perham used her influence on high-ranking colonial officers, such as Kenya’s governor, to advocate the preservation of administrative documents and other colonial records at the Bodleian Library and thereby preserve Oxford University’s control over “knowledge production” on empire.
Oxford, Cambridge, and the University of London intended to maintain postcolonial relevance in the training of new personnel in independent administrations. This continuity was disguised by a shift in nomenclature: from colonial service to technical assistance. This would include the training of personnel at institutions based in England, the distribution of European “experts” and funding across former colonies, and establishing new public administration institutions in new states. These initiatives received funding from the UK’s Colonial Office and later the Department of Technical Co-operation (DTC), representatives of which were also present at the Nuffield on colonial records.
Representing the Colonial Office at the Nuffield meeting was Bernard Cheeseman. His interests were related to, but distinct from, Perham’s. In the meeting minutes, Cheeseman was recorded as a librarian at the Colonial Office. In fact, his recent activity on the matter of colonial record preservation was through the Colonial Office’s Intelligence and Security Department. The Colonial Office established the Intelligence and Security Department in 1955 and as Calder Walton describes, its “remit was truly worldwide, dealing with security and intelligence issues in every major British territory, and liaising closely with all of Britain’s secret services, MI5, SIS, and GCHQ.”Footnote 20 The Intelligence and Security Department was responsible for managing the process of disclosing and/or withholding intelligence with incoming independent governments during the transition to internal self-government and therefore played an important role in the coordination of “Operation Legacy.” For his part, Cheeseman was in ongoing contact with colonial administrations in Kenya and elsewhere on matters related to the withdrawal of sensitive documents. He would have attended the conference not necessarily to advertise this covert, parallel project but to remain informed about other initiatives to remove colonial documents to ensure that classified records were not among them. For example, at the conference, he emphasized that it would be helpful “to know […] the categories of material in [Kenya’s] offices, with some guidance on the question of what proportion is secret.”Footnote 21
Mr. Greig of the recently founded Department of Technical Co-operation (DTC) also represented a UK government perspective at the Nuffield meetings but from a different angle. The Department of Technical Co-operation was founded in 1961 in what Stockwell describes as “a significant step from the ‘colonial’ to the ‘post-colonial’.”Footnote 22 As the transition to political independence in former colonies made many roles within the Colonial, Commonwealth Relations, and Foreign Offices obsolete, officials transferred to the new DTC. The Department of Technical Co-operation was responsible for technical assistance and the Overseas Civil Service. The department was an attempt to restructure the colonial service and maintain British control over the political and economic evolution of former colonies. In the case of records management, the DTC financed the employ of technical personnel and equipment on the condition of maintaining control and oversight. This included funding for Richard Cashmore’s research and a small camera for low-grade microphotography. In the terms of Cashmore’s contract, the Department of Technical Co-operation asserted that “any documents copied or collected during [Cashmore’s] field work should be kept in safe custody for disposal only at the discretion of the Secretary for Technical Co-operation.”Footnote 23 As this chapter will show, the DTC did not succeed in acquiring custodial control of the documents accrued by Cashmore. He was but one investment of the DTC, which was more widely involved in providing “technical expertise” in Kenya and other former colonies. Eventually, the DTC would fund the first professional archivist, Derek Charman, in Kenya for a one-year appointment.
While the process of Africanization oversaw the replacement of European civil servants within government this did not disappear European influence within the administration of former colonies. In Kenya, the number of foreign advisors and educational experts including volunteers increased between 1966 and 1972 by over 1,000.Footnote 24 New institutes of public administration were established in former British colonies across Africa, often under the management of British officers, but increasingly funded by US-American and other international aid. For example, the Kenya Institute of Administration (KIA) opened in July 1961 in order to provide training facilities for the higher cadre of the Civil Service.Footnote 25 Its inaugural director was Alan Simmance, a mutual friend of Perham and Cashmore. In fact, Alan and his wife Plima had encouraged Cashmore to get into contact with Perham regarding the question of preserving colonial documents and hosted him in Nairobi during his nine-month survey later in 1962–63. Simmance also figured in to the Syracuse connection. Early on, the KIA had on staff five “experts” from Syracuse University teaching in the departments of public administration, executive training, local government, community development training, and co-operative training.Footnote 26 While the creation of the DTC was partly the UK’s response to the increasing presence and influence of the United States in former colonies, the September meeting at Nuffield brought representatives from both.
Also in attendance was Robert Heussler. Heussler had come to Oxford in 1959 as a Fulbright scholar in order to write his doctoral dissertation, which historicized the making of the British Colonial Service, under Perham’s supervision.Footnote 27 His research, which made extensive use of “unpublished administrative files,” culminated in Yesterday’s Rulers: The Making of the British Colonial Service, published with Syracuse University Press in 1963.Footnote 28 By 1962, Heussler was employed with the Ford Foundation’s International Training and Research Program. Founded during the Progressive era, the Ford Foundation embodied the period’s “reverence for science and technical expertise” which could be deployed to “strike at the root causes of social problems.”Footnote 29 Following the Second World War, the foundation’s spending extended beyond national borders and supported arts and humanities grants that were “cast in ideological terms, [as] weapons in the Cold War quest for the hearts and minds of men.”Footnote 30 From the mid-1950s to early 1960s, Ford “became the most significant external arbiter of the development of university research outside of the natural sciences.”Footnote 31 Ford’s International Training and Research Program, where Heussler was employed, had provided over $100 million for area studies in US universities by 1962 and $250 million by 1967.Footnote 32 While Western European colonialism declined in the second half of the twentieth century, the opposite was true for the United States, which expanded its imperial presence.Footnote 33
The expansion of US imperial influence included interaction between many different institutions across public, private, and nonprofit spheres. These included the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), State Department, corporations, universities, the Ford Foundation, and other philanthropic entities. Area studies was among the investments of these institutions. While individual scholars and technicians certainly had a variety of intentions with and views on their work, funding agencies pressed their own priorities onto the development of area studies.Footnote 34 The CIA, for example, invested in the training of area experts to assist the US government to design “intelligent programs of economic assistance, political reorientation, or psychological warfare.”Footnote 35 Looking at the career of Stephen K. Bailey helps to illustrate some aspects of these entangled institutions. Bailey had received BA and MA degrees from Oxford University before serving with the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during WWII, where he worked on various intelligence missions in the Middle East, Greece, and the Mediterranean.Footnote 36 The Office of Strategic Services, which had formed specifically for the purpose of intelligence collection during the Second World War, grew into the Central Intelligence Agency. After his service, Bailey held various positions within academia and public administration until taking over as dean of the Maxwell Graduate School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in 1961. Of recently independent states, Bailey justified the need for “expertise,” by arguing that “[t]he modernization of traditional society in Africa, Asia, and Latin America cannot take place without a more sophisticated theory and practice of public administration.”Footnote 37 Sara Lorenzini argues that “it required some intellectual acrobatics to criticize the legacy of European colonialism while financing development plans that continued colonial […] structures.”Footnote 38 The Syracuse Microfilm project exemplifies an effort to attract Kenyan partners with financial and resource offers in order to obtain documents to cultivate “expertise” for political and academic ends, at exactly the time that the United States was competing for the political future of the former colony.
Bailey toured Africa in 1962–63 and stopped at his alma mater upon his return, where he met Perham. Together, they conspired on the question of collecting colonial documents across the African continent. Of their meeting, Perham wrote,
Professor Stephen K. Bailey, Dean of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, came through Oxford on his way home after travelling through South, Central and East Africa. He is deeply interested in this question, having long been a colleague with Robert Heussler in these and similar activities, and there are several Americans, working either as administrators or as students, who would be very glad to help, if this were permissible. Obviously, our first choice would be British officials for such activities, but if, e.g., in Nyasaland, there should be any tension over the examination and microfilming of ‘colonialist’ records, it might prove quite useful to have a well-informed and co-operative American on the job.Footnote 39
Perham’s mention of Nyasaland (present-day Malawi) requires some unpacking. In response to growing protests against colonial rule, the Nyasaland government declared a State of Emergency in 1959. As in Kenya, the colonial administration utilized the Emergency to ban African political associations, to detain thousands of people without warrant or trial, and to use physical violence and the destruction of property with impunity.Footnote 40 At the time of Bailey’s tour, Nyasaland was part of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, which would dissolve the next year but at the time represented the endurance of British imperial domination and the threat of White rule from Southern Rhodesia. Perham’s perspective acknowledged the optical problem of record removal/microfilming by British officials in Nyasaland, which she seemed to think would be solved with the presence of a “well-informed and cooperative American.” Her assessment stopped short of questioning the entitlement of British/US-American authorities to the documents of Africa’s political history. Ultimately, the funding that came to KNA via Syracuse University, further elaborated later in this chapter, was soft US security money, channeled in a wider effort of exerting influence and extracting resource, in this case valuable documents of the recent colonial past.
Richard Cashmore was also among the Nuffield meeting attendees. Margery Perham and Cashmore met at a screening of The African Lion in Nairobi in the late 1950s.Footnote 41 The film opens on its feline subject with the voice of Winston Hibler, “Enter the king of beasts, a monarch come to review his subjects. Largest member of the cat family, the lion roams and rules a vast territory.”Footnote 42 Hibler’s metaphor of the sovereign lion and its animal subjects contrasts the absence in the film of any reference to the actual imperial context in Eastern Africa. The film was released in 1955, the same year that Barbara Castle (MP, Labour) visited Kenya upon reports of fatal abuse within the police and detention systems during the Emergency.Footnote 43 While The African Lion depicted lions and their ecosystems in the high plateaus of Kenya and Tanganyika to audiences worldwide, Castle requested an inquiry into prison conditions, police impunity, and the use of corporal punishment in Kenya. Castle’s request came after an inquest into the death of Kamau Kichina and the involvement of European police and district officers. Suspecting him of petty cash theft, officers arrested Kichina without warrant, charges, or a trial and detained him for five days. During his unlawful detention, officers beat, tortured, and starved Kichina until his death.Footnote 44 Castle drew attention not only to the conditions leading to Kichina’s death but to the efforts of various administrative officers to conceal both official evidence and, consequently, complicity. She wanted to know what kind of system and culture produced this degradation of human life. Later, she summarized that in Kenya, “Europeans tend to become hardened, and to say of the Africans, ‘They live like animals. They are better off inside [detention camps].”Footnote 45 Inside the Nairobi cinema, The African Lion anthropomorphized East African animals, using metaphors of “ruler and ruled” to portray a symbiotic ecosystem and to naturalize imperial hierarchies, while outside the colonial administration dehumanized African life.
In October 1962, Richard Cashmore wrote to Margery Perham on the matter of preserving Kenyan records. His letter arrived a few years after their last meeting at the cinema in Nairobi, and Cashmore remarked, “since then a good deal has happened.”Footnote 46 Notably, the first Lancaster House Conference in January 1960 established African majority rule and initiated the transition to self-government. The second constitutional conference occurred in February 1962 and focused on land decolonization and the future constitution. Facing the impending departure of the British colonial administration, both Cashmore and Perham directed their attention to the “fate of some of the Kenya Records.” “As I am also interested in the cause of preserving what can be rescued, I thought it would be of use if I wrote to you,” Cashmore explained.Footnote 47 In 1962, Cashmore opted out of the Limited Compensation Scheme, which would have provided him funds from the British Government for the premature termination of his employment. Instead, Cashmore accepted a grant from the UK’s Department of Technical Cooperation in order to write a historical account of the District Administration in the East African Protectorate at Jesus College, Cambridge University.Footnote 48 He explained to Perham that his PhD dissertation, which focused on early district administration in the East African Protectorate, had the support of the colonial administration. Acting Governor Eric Griffith Jones would allow Cashmore unfettered access to all district records if he would in turn box and hand list all political records up to 1945 and bring them to Nairobi. Cashmore would then microfilm those documents which dealt with his own research.Footnote 49 He planned to spend nine months in Kenya, from December 1962 to September 1963, surveying both provincial and district offices for records.Footnote 50 While Cashmore was open to assisting with the preservation of colonial documents more broadly, he made his limits in doing so clear,
if I try to undertake too many jobs, I will come badly unstuck on all of them. I am being paid to write a report, and I am at the same time trying to help out the [British Colonial] Kenya Government over preservation of records. I have also to watch my own future, as I am trying to start a new (-as yet unknown) career.Footnote 51
At the start of his dissertation research, Cashmore had hoped to return to East Africa in an “academic capacity” in late 1964, depending on the “political situation prevailing at the time.”Footnote 52 This vision did not pan out. Cashmore would instead go on to work for the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the research department, where he would continue to play an important gatekeeping role in determining access to the records of late colonial rule in Kenya (Chapter 7). It is not possible to ascertain exactly what security clearance was formally accorded to Cashmore at the time of his 1962–63 research. However, the level of access he had to files at this time and his cooperation with the central government was a privilege of MI security service officers.
Shortly after receiving his letter, Perham invited Cashmore to another discussion at Nuffield on the matter of collecting documents before his departure to Kenya. Also in attendance were A. F. Madden, then Director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at Oxford, and Gordon Mungeam, who was conducting research for his DPhil on British administrative rule in the East Africa Protectorate to 1912. The purpose of the meeting was to “draw together all the threads” of those in pursuit of using and preserving Kenya’s colonial documents.Footnote 53 Mungeam suggested the Royal College in Nairobi as a central repository for Kenya’s records since it was a “non-political institution there would be more chance of the material being unaffected by political change.” The group agreed that “a central repository would have many advantages – microfilming could be done at leisure by an expert.” At this time, microfilming was the ultimate aim of their work, which they framed as a “rescue operation.” Perham had secured further agreement from the Bodleian library, Rhodes House section, to serve as place of deposit for microfilm copies of colonial administrative records.Footnote 54 Through the course of his own research, Mungeam had microfilmed some of Kenya’s earlier political records and planned to deposit them at Rhodes when he was finished writing his thesis. Cashmore intended to continue photographing Kenya’s administrative documents through the later years at the district level. Informed by similar experience, Mungeam cautioned that “any personal selection would necessarily reflect personal bias,” and that “there would be an inevitable conflict between [Cashmore] and the general interests of the salvage operation.” The group also worried that “the removal of material in such bulk from the Districts would be disliked by the Africans.” They concluded to meet again in Nairobi in order to discuss “problems on the spot.” Despite, or perhaps because of, their worries that their pursuit for Kenya’s documents might be “disliked by the Africans,” they excluded Africans from deciding the fate of Kenyan documents.Footnote 55
Who Wasn’t There?
The constellation of individuals at the Nuffield meetings on colonial records did not represent the full range of people or institutions interested in controlling Kenya’s colonial documents. The most obvious representatives missing from the Nuffield conference were Africans and Africa-based institutions. This absence is reflected in the archival record in which the actors in this chapter corresponded with one another, in communication networks built through affinity and according to position. Rather than simply reproducing it, the following draws attention to the making of African archival absence by showing how a group of British and US elites deliberated the control over the colonial past via archival custody through exclusion.
Around the same time as the Oxford meeting, Dr. C. J. Gertzel of Makerere University in Kampala wrote to Mr. de Bunsen, Vice Chancellor Designate of the University of East Africa. Gertzel cautioned that “a considerable amount of destruction of archives is taking place in the process of which a great deal of valuable historical material may well be lost.”Footnote 56 She proposed that the “University of East Africa should offer to assume initial responsibility for the preservation of these records.”Footnote 57 The University of East Africa (UEA) was formally established in June 1963 as a regional association of university colleges in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Michael Mwenda Kithinji has argued that the UEA “epitomized the realization of a colonial idea conceived in the immediate post-Second World War period, aimed at cultivating an elite intelligentsia and containing rising East African nationalism.”Footnote 58 The Royal College of Nairobi became the second university college in East Africa in 1961 and one year later proposed to obtain Kenya’s colonial administration’s records and build an archival service. In December 1962, representatives from the Royal College met with the colonial administration in Nairobi to discuss the future of Kenyan history.
The Royal College proposed to construct a permanent repository at its library to preserve and house Kenyan colonial records. The college’s representatives, Professor Isaac, Dr. Morgan, and Messrs. Wright, Kemp and Eustace, presented a development plan to J. A. Cumber of Kenya’s Governor’s office during the 1962 meeting. The college representatives proposed collecting administrative documents from provincial and district offices, surveying them to “determine what is worth keeping,” and storing the selected documents at the college. They further argued that financial investment of £20,000 would pay for additional space, the employment of two research fellows, micro-photographers, camera equipment, filing cabinets, and two land rovers, thereby establishing a sustainable research and acquisitions oriented colonial archive.Footnote 59 Furthermore, their presentation emphasized that,
The Royal College appreciate that classified records […] must be securely housed, and the College would be prepared […] to construct a strong-room to house such records and employ a watchman. The Royal College experts also realize that certain classified records will be stored in the United Kingdom (e.g. Emergency records of a Secret nature).Footnote 60
The latter point demonstrated that the Royal College was aware not only of record destruction but also of the administration’s plan to smuggle documents to London. That this was mentioned indicates that awareness of the “W” system was so wide that the Royal College regarded it appropriate to address.
Ultimately, the colonial administration passed on the Royal College bid to house its documents. They chose instead to remove documents to London, to cooperate with Richard Cashmore on the consolidation of district records in Nairobi and with Margery Perham on the deposit of personal papers at Oxford. While there is not much documentation related to the decision-making process leading to the rejection, Makerere librarian E. J. Belton offered the following insight in 1962: “the Colonial Office was, and so far as I know is still, adamant on the question of letting Government documents out of Government control.”Footnote 61 In his official response to the Royal College, J. A. Cumber provided a misleadingly innocuous reason, stating that “the Kenya Government cannot engage to hand over the historical records of this country to the Royal College since this is, properly, a decision for the Government of an Independent Kenya.”Footnote 62 This is the only instance in the archival record indicating Kenya’s colonial administration’s acknowledgment of independent Kenya’s sovereign claim to its own archive. However duplicitous its engagement with the Royal College was, the colonial administration avoided investing in a soon-to-fail institution. Where the Royal College’s bid failed because it did not suit the interests of the colonial administration, the University of East Africa failed because it did not represent the interests of independent East African governments. The UEA disintegrated in the late 1960s, challenging the endurance of Britain’s postcolonial influence.
No African politician or scholar was present at the Nuffield Conference. This was not for want of contacts. By the time the meeting convened in Nuffield, Margery Perham herself was in touch with Tom Mboya and Bethwell Ogot. Perham met Mboya around the same time she met Cashmore; not in Nairobi but in Oxford, where Mboya attended a course on industrial relations at Ruskin College. During his time in England, Mboya published The Kenya Question: An African Answer, which Priyamvada Gopal argues deeply influenced Perham’s shift from imperial reformist to emancipationist. This influence is most visible in Perham’s treatment of Mau Mau as a political movement. Mboya’s writing criticized colonial propaganda that emphasized the “the form of the [Mau Mau] revolt but not the causes of it.”Footnote 63 He summarized the “political, economic, and social frustrations experienced by the African people” that resulted in rebellion, namely: land alienation and racial segregation in all aspects of economic, social, and political life. Margery Perham repeated the same line of thought in her foreword to Josiah Kariuki’s memoir ‘Mau Mau’ Detainee (1963), where she argued that “the movement had three aspects: sociological, economic, and political.”Footnote 64 While Perham’s thinking had much to gain from Mboya, the reverse does not appear to be the case.
After Mboya returned to Kenya in 1957, he remained in written contact with Perham. Perham suggested publication of their correspondence. However, she wrote to Alan Lennox-Boyd, UK Colonial Secretary, “I don’t flatter myself that I have much influence with him.”Footnote 65 Perhaps wary of what intentions lay behind her book idea or uninterested in any further collaboration with British elites on the matter of Kenyan independence, Mboya did not pursue the publication. At the time of the Nuffield meeting, Mboya was leading constitution discussions at the Lancaster House Conference as Minister for Labor. Where the parties at Nuffield’s meeting might have regarded control over colonial documents as proxy for political influence in former colonies, Mboya’s political imagination was center stage in the planning of Kenya’s future.
Bethwell Ogot was another relevant individual missing from the Nuffield meeting on the future of Kenya’s history. Born in the southwest of Kenya, Ogot went on to study at Makerere University, the University of St Andrews, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), and in 1961–62 held a studentship at Nuffield College.Footnote 66 Early in his career, Ogot straddled the scholarly and political worlds of East Africa and the UK. In 1960, he supported Mboya during the first Lancaster House Constitution Conference by preparing relevant documents, carrying out research, and analyzing statements from rival groups.Footnote 67 A leader of the Kenya Students Association, Ogot argued a clear and consistent line of historically oriented, anti-colonial thought. Against foreign domination, Ogot exclaimed, “it would not only be cowardly for the African to accept a permanent state of subordination in the land of his birth, it would also be a big betrayal to his posterity.”Footnote 68
As a young historian, Ogot opposed both political and historiographical domination. With his dissertation, which proposed to look at the history of the “movement of the Luo people into Kenya from the fifteenth century and the subsequent history of their settlement,” Ogot revolutionized the field of African history by removing the “colonial” as the definitive temporal lens through which to see it.Footnote 69 In doing so, Ogot broke colonial archives’ monopoly on the African past within professional history, and advocated methods such as oral history, archaeology, paleontology, and linguistics. Ogot had previously turned down a studentship at Nuffield due to Perham’s suggestion that he change his dissertation topic and chronological span. In her view, the earliest period of Kenya’s past that was eligible for historical study coincided with the availability of documentary archives. Ogot refused, opting instead for “something more demanding and groundbreaking.”Footnote 70 He was not alone. In December 1961, Ogot traveled to the University of Senegal in Dakar, to participate in the fourth International African seminar to discuss “the meaning of African history to contemporary Africans.”Footnote 71 In his autobiography, Ogot reflected that the seminar was the first instance of African academic historians meeting “other practitioners from all parts of the world […] to discuss the history of their continent.”Footnote 72 Shortly after his Nuffield studentship commenced, Ogot was offered an appointment as Lecturer at Makerere’s Department of History. In accepting the offer, Ogot became a colleague of Dr. Gertzel at the same time she appealed to the Royal College to advocate preserving colonial documents. While Ogot was not invited to the Nuffield meeting, he would become a crucial architect of academic history in Kenya, Eastern Africa, and the world in the decades to come, partly through his involvement with the Kenya National Archives.Footnote 73
The exclusion of Africans and Asians from the Nuffield meetings, which purportedly convened to discuss the future of Asian and African history, mirrored several dimensions of British imperial historical thought. Firstly, there was the question of who qualified as an historical actor: administrations and great men, which largely excluded non-male, non-European peoples. Secondly, there was the question of what authorized the scholarly rendition of the past: archival sources made by the aforementioned actors. Finally, and perhaps more subtly, paternalistic imperial ideology relegated “primitive” and/or “atavistic” Africa and Africans into another historical time. It was exactly this temporal difference on which the White man’s burden was predicated. The Nuffield attendees discussed the preservation of colonial documents as a “salvage” or “rescue” operation, a framing which preserved their self-perception as progressive campaigners and, to borrow from Perham’s own analogy, blinded them from their “complete self-interest.”
Archival Formations in Nairobi, Syracuse, Oxford, and London
In August 1962, Margery Perham, A. F. Madden, and Robert Heussler wrote to the Kenya Colonial Government about “Research in Colonial History: Problem and Proposal.”Footnote 74 They proposed microfilming administrative records, from the district level upward, so that copies could be held in England and in situ. Their letter expressed concern over the “danger that vital materials may be permanently lost,” which would jeopardize any scholarly reconstruction of “the European role in the development of new states.”Footnote 75 In a demonstration of the British penchant for the passive voice, the letter writers avoided naming who or what might cause the destruction, allowing the reader to interpret according to their own assumptions. All three of the letters’ signatories were aware of the reports of document bonfires and likely concluded that the colonial government was involved with the destruction of records, especially in district offices. Rather than point this out, the authors opened the possibility that the risk lay, not with the colonial administration, but with the future independent Kenyan administration, which they suggested was disabled by “highly charged emotional movements such as nationalism.”Footnote 76 This paternalistic suspicion of Kenyan politicians would become an important tool for the colonial administration in their later requests for funding. A. D. Garson of the Department of Technical Co-operation, who also attended a meeting at Nuffield on document preservation, wrote to Kenya’s Governor a few weeks later offering an even more sympathetic perspective: “I have no doubt at all that you will yourself wish that posterity should have something of the relatively selfless chaps who did so much before our time to build the real halls of the show that are being launched today.”Footnote 77 Garson presented document preservation as an opportunity for the British Empire to frame itself as midwife to the states emerging from its dominion. The diplomatic and favorable petitioning by these historians and technocrats convinced the colonial administration in Kenya of the “pressing need to collect and preserve records.”Footnote 78
In September 1962, Patrick Renison, then Kenya’s Governor, asked one of his private secretaries to comment on Garson and Perham’s letters. His secretary, P. L. Johnson, reported on the extent of document destruction under the “W” system. He remarked that district officers had destroyed many papers that dealt with “Mau Mau/Nationalist/one-time subversive personalities,” and that the Provincial Commissioner’s Office in Nyeri had destroyed over 400 files the previous year.Footnote 79 In fact, Johnson himself had burnt “a large number of Embu office files covering the Emergency period.”Footnote 80 He emphasized that “time is undoubtedly a vital factor” and proceeded to describe the kinds of files in district and provincial offices likely of historical value in addition to listing officers who would be candidates for oral history interviewing. Renison passed Johnson’s comment to Garson, who forwarded it onto Perham. There was, therefore, significant awareness of the “W” system and its extent among high-ranking individuals at Oxford and within the Department of Technical Cooperation. By placing attention on the possibility that some newly independent states may not “take their obligation to history seriously,” Perham was able to raise concerns about document destruction without questioning the colonial administration’s own activity.Footnote 81 However, in doing so, Perham endorsed the paternalistic notion that independent African states would be unreliable archival custodians and failed to bring public attention to the British colonial administration’s mass destruction of imperial evidence. Perham judged this a fitting cost to convince Renison to preserve for posterity record of Kenya’s “first class Administrative Service.”Footnote 82 Renison wrote to Garson that he would assign two senior officers, Frank Loyd and Robin Wainwright, to the task.Footnote 83
“Mr. Cashmore’s Ravages”: Archival Centralization in Nairobi
In December 1962 the academic-administrative cooperation over Kenyan colonial documents formalized. Margery Perham, Richard Cashmore, Robin Wainwright, and Thomas Neil met in Nairobi to discuss the future of Kenya’s administrative records. Renison tasked Wainwright, who had served previously as a District Officer in the Rift Valley and in 1962 worked as Chief Commissioner at the Office of the Minister of State for Administration, with preservation. Thomas Neil had been involved with Kenya’s records since the mid-1950s when he assumed responsibility for coordinating the destruction of classified materials during the Emergency. He later took over the central archives after Clare Bwye’s dismissal and eventually played a central role in the implementation of the “W” system. During their meeting, the group reached two key decisions regarding Kenya’s records. Firstly, they agreed to further centralize district and provincial records in Nairobi so that they could be more easily microfilmed.Footnote 84 Secondly, they decided that Margery Perham should pursue funding for an expert/professional archivist to join their efforts.
The decision to centralize Kenya’s administrative documents was based on several factors. In addition to consolidating Kenya’s historical records for ease of microfilming, centralization would also facilitate a more comprehensive shipment of documents, deemed too sensitive to remain in Kenya, to London. Richard Cashmore, who would spend the next nine months surveying over twenty district and provincial offices across the colony, agreed with Robin Wainwright to transfer documents such as annual reports and political records to the Secretariat in Nairobi. Wainwright wrote to all Provincial Commissioners to alert them of this cooperation and to encourage them to prepare for his arrival by gathering important documents. He was clear that only “expatriates” should be aware of the work to avoid growing suspicion among Africans that they “were losing their records.”Footnote 85
Cashmore set off on his nine-month record survey at the end of December. He began with a one-month stay at the Coast Province, along the Indian Ocean, followed by another month in Nyanza, followed by several weeks in Isiolo, another few weeks in the Central Province, two months in the districts surrounding Nairobi during the rainy season, another month in the Rift Valley, and several weeks at Kitui, Narok and Kajiado. By April 1963, he had travelled 4,500 miles, visited 21 district headquarters and 5 provincial headquarters, and snapped 1,800 microfilm frames.Footnote 86 His tour occurred amid Africanization, a process by which Africans replaced British officials in the very administrative offices Cashmore rummaged through for documents. The political climate marked his archival sojourn in several ways. In an appendix titled “vital statistics” in his interim report, Cashmore tallied “1 rock thrown at the car” and “2 political demonstrations.”Footnote 87 Cashmore tried to correspond with District Commissioners in order to alert them of his visits and coordinate preparation before his arrival, but this was not always possible. As the District Commissioner of Northern Nyanza informed him, “sorry […] but democracy comes first these days.”Footnote 88 Nonetheless, by April, Cashmore assisted with the transfer of political records from thirty-one of forty-one districts and from two of six provinces to the Secretariat. They totaled fifty boxes of material, for which Cashmore had written a 150-page handlist. He mentioned several items of interest such as “the English and Arabic/Swahili versions of the 1908 Treaty with the Sultan of Witu; the Secretariat file on buying out the Liwali of Takaungu’s claim for 1000 slaves,” “Frontier and Somali problems from 1910 onwards” and “the problems arising out of the female circumcision issue.”Footnote 89 While Cashmore emphasized the historical value of the materials he collected, he conceded that the selection was “patchy and uneven – selected by personal bias and surviving by chance.”Footnote 90 His collation of these records partly formed the basis for what would soon become the Kenya National Archives.
Cashmore’s contribution to centralizing administrative records from their local contexts into Nairobi coincided with the broader political question of how independent Kenya would be governmentally reconfigured. On December 12, 1963, Kenya officially achieved independence. However, as David Throup summarizes, it had two substantial, unresolved issues: the institutional arrangement of governance and the Northern Frontier District border dispute. Throughout constitutional negotiations, the UK demonstrated a preference for a federal constitution, which was taken up by the Kenya African National Union (KANU) delegates. However, the opposition party, the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU), “insisted upon the devolution of power to seven regional governments.”Footnote 91 At the time that Cashmore was sifting through district and provincial offices and removing political documents, these questions were pressing. By dislocating political records, including those related to the Northern Frontier border disputes, from their original context into the Secretariat, Cashmore aided with the consolidation of political authority in Nairobi. Two months before official independence, a regional government agent in the northeast region of Garissa wrote, “I fear that after Mr. Cashmore’s ravages, I have no material worth of placing in a regional archive.”Footnote 92 The Kenyan government would spend the coming decades searching to reassemble and control all records pertaining to the Northern Frontier District.
Meanwhile, Perham set her sights on obtaining funds and resources for archival expertise and equipment. She considered the Ford Foundation and the Department of Technical Co-operation in her appeals for archival support. Ultimately, the DTC proved more willing to fund a short-term contract for an archivist with the understanding that their main focus would be to collect and microfilm colonial Kenya’s administrative records as comprehensively as possible. Bernard Cheeseman of the Intelligence and Security Department assisted with identifying Derek Charman as the DTC’s choice. However, as Chapter 6 will show in greater detail, once appointed, Charman objected to the focus on microfilm and instead cooperated with Kenya’s independent political leadership on instating a sustainable national archives service.
Neocolonialist Exploit: The Syracuse Microfilm Project
Although Charman would later reject the microfilm mandate as his chief archival responsibility in Kenya, Syracuse University ambitiously pursued the matter from the mid-1960s. Eventually, Fred G. Burke and Robert G. Gregory led Syracuse’s initiative to obtain microfilm copies of as many documents pertaining to the British colonial government in Kenya as possible. Gregory had obtained his PhD in the history of the British Empire at the University of California Los Angeles in 1957. Shortly thereafter, Gregory joined the faculty at Syracuse as an assistant professor with the Program of East African Studies. Established in September 1962 by Fred G. Burke and Eduardo Mondlane and funded by the Ford Foundation, the program was created in order to “keep up with new knowledge and events” brought on by “rapid social, economic, and political developments on the continent of Africa.”Footnote 93 Further, Syracuse’s East African specialization was an attempt to “achieve excellence” as an academic center of expertise at exactly the same moment that the US government funded area studies programs in order to acquire and exert expertise in the former colonial world amid Cold War competitions over global influence.Footnote 94 To that end, in addition to research, the Program of East African Studies played an essential role with the Kenya Institute of Public Administration. The founding of the program also coincided with a challenge from African and African American scholar-activists who took issue with the “white domination of the field of African Studies.”Footnote 95 Black historian John Henrik Clarke summarized that in the United States and elsewhere, academic disciplines were in conflict over “who will interpret African history.”Footnote 96 While Clarke and other likeminded scholars insisted that African Studies acknowledge its own political context by denouncing colonialism, apartheid, and “anti-Black” racism in Africa, Burke accepted a $25,000 grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation to microfilm Kenya’s colonial documents and make them available to scholars in the United States before they were accessible to Kenyans.
By February 1967, positive copies of over 150 microfilm reels, which included secret and confidential files created as recently as 1963, were made available at Syracuse. US-American scholars were able to point to Britain as the arbiter of colonial White privilege and power and thereby avoid acknowledging the political and self-interest influencing academic engagement with the continent. Gregory illustrated this in his view that “the fact that [Kenya] was to retain after independence a relatively free society, invite outside capital, and welcome scholarly investigation was to enhance its attractiveness to Americans.”Footnote 97 Furthermore, aware of the tendency, especially of the British, to remove documents, artifacts, artworks, and other objects to install in collections outside of Africa, Burke and Gregory perceived microfilming to be a superior alternative. Gregory argued that “at a time when many valuable records were being taken secretly from Kenya to build the Africana collections of European and American libraries, the project had a special appeal in that it was designed to collect, preserve, and duplicate Kenya’s records rather than remove them.”Footnote 98 While it is true that Syracuse did not smuggle out unique copies of documents, they did enable access to secret and confidential materials to scholars in the United States before such access was granted to Kenyans under the terms of the 1965 Public Archives and Documentation Service Act.
Syracuse’s acquisition of Kenyan colonial documents and their provision of advanced access attracted scholarly interest in the United States and disappointed their Kenyan partners. Between 1965 and 1974, Syracuse obtained over seventeen reels of microfilm.Footnote 99 In addition to administrative documents, these microfilms also included scans of the East African Standard and more records from across the colony. In 1966, Syracuse initiated a devastating change to the terms of the project agreement. Due to pressure from both the National Science Foundation and other African Studies scholars across the United States, Syracuse reconfigured the agreement to obtain more control over the microfilms’ distribution. Whereas the original agreement stated that Kenya would hold both negative and positive sets of the film and Syracuse only a positive copy, Syracuse re-filmed the entire set in 1966 “so as to provide Syracuse with a negative film from which positive copies could be produced and loaned.”Footnote 100 This eroded Kenyan control over the records. Future director of the Kenya National Archives, Musila Musembi, lamented that as a result,
the supply of copies of Kenya records to the University of Syracuse had the effect of opening certain documents for public inspection much earlier to the American Scholars than was the case in Kenya. Some Scholars have in fact complained that they had access to some Kenyan records in the U.S.A. while the same records are not similarly available in Kenya.Footnote 101
Musembi, aware of the destruction and removal of classified records by the British colonial administration, referred to cooperation with the University of Syracuse Microfilming Project as “the greatest blunder ever made by Kenyan archivists.”Footnote 102 While Gregory acknowledged the charge of “neocolonialist exploitation,” he continued with microfilming African archives.Footnote 103 In 1973, he packed his car with the equipment purchased for use in Kenya and drove to Addis Ababa to begin microfilming in Ethiopia before the coup that overthrew Haile Selassie severed ties to the United States. The following chapter will elaborate further the Syracuse microfilm project, especially the ways in which Kenyan politicians and archivists shaped the partnership. What becomes clear in this preliminary examination is the race to interpret the recent African past in the era of decolonization for hopes of influencing the postcolonial future with little regard for the consequences for Africans themselves. The Oxford Colonial Records Project can also be read onto this frame.
“Operation Rescue”: The Oxford Colonial Records Project
In 1963, Margery Perham retired from her teaching and administrative roles at Oxford and shifted her attention to the Oxford University Colonial Records Project (OCRP). Over the course of a decade, Perham, together with Dr. A. F. Madden, advocated the project’s maintenance, growth, and recognition. Administered by the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in Oxford and Rhodes House Library, the project was directed by Jack Tawney, a former colonial administrator and editor of “Corona,” a journal published monthly by the Colonial Office. The project received funding from Lord Boyd of Merton, a former Secretary of State for the Colonies, the African Studies Association of America, the Goldsmiths Company, the Drapers Company, the Ford Foundation, and the Pilgrim Trust.Footnote 104 In contrast to the wider problem of colonial records discussed at Nuffield in the early 1960s, the OCRP set its sights on “private papers of imperial administrators,” which they believed would “augment and balance the official view of the period.”Footnote 105 Tawney, Perham, and Madden agreed to compile lists of “men who had served in all the territories administered by the Colonial Office as it had been reconstructed in 1925.” Within the project’s first year, Tawney approached 1,600 of these men from whom to solicit papers.Footnote 106 The OCRP’s focus was steeped in great men of history theory that its organizers viewed as objective but pursued with enthusiastic reverence.
In its publicity material, the Oxford University Colonial Records Project stated a commitment to “dispassionate appraisal.”Footnote 107 However, its director, Jack Tawney, did not conceal his excitement working to preserve the legacy of his peers. In a talk shortly after the project’s launch, Tawney exclaimed, “this seems to me to be the warm flesh that clothes the bones of history, and I must admit that I find it not unmoving to be able to reach out and touch it […] We are not seeking romance (though sometimes we find it difficult to avoid it).”Footnote 108 Tawney offered a new name to the project: “Operation Rescue.” Whether he or his associates were aware of the Colonial Office’s term “Operation Legacy” is not made clear. That the name mirrored the phrasing and sentiments behind the Intelligence and Security Department’s covert project illustrates the affinity between the dominant school of historical thought and colonial intelligence operations. Rather than a counter-operation, the Oxford University Colonial Records Project was guided by a similar premise: an attempt by colonists to preserve documents, especially those of their heroes, which risked oblivion. In this case, the OCRP’s emphasis on “dispassionate appraisal” precluded people like Tawney from noticing how the project’s emotional and commemorative dimensions narrowed the historiographical view onto a few White men.
In a summary of the Oxford University Colonial Records Project’s achievements, one of its archivists, Patricia Pugh, outlined the redemptive historical narrative that provided the basis for and was reaffirmed by the project. Pugh described collections as illustrating colonial officers’ life stories by beginning with “post-graduate training at Oxford or Cambridge and London in native law, a language and how to live in a tropical climate.”Footnote 109 After being sent off into the colonial world, the young man would move up in rank from cadet to assistant district officer and his personal papers documented “how he fulfilled his responsibility for maintaining order in a large area, administering the law, assisting in the development of its natural resources […] caring for the health and welfare of the people committed to his charge.”Footnote 110 The project’s ethos thus aimed to, if not rehabilitate, then “balance” the view of colonists through their experiences and achievements exactly at the moment when anti-colonialism triumphed over the British Empire.Footnote 111 That this approach accorded with the interests of people with colonial-political power, dwindling as it was, afforded the OCRP greater access to the private papers of imperial administrators who were eager to claim their place in history. Tawney even conducted oral history interviews with retired officers, so as not to lose “many valuable details of colonial history.”Footnote 112 This pursuit occurred after the controversy stirred by Bethwell Ogot’s dissertation and his suggested use of oral and other non-textual evidence. While Ogot recalled the reaction to his proposal as putting “African history itself […] on trial,” Tawney introduced oral history into the OCRP archive without trouble.Footnote 113 The difference? Ogot intended to interview African peoples, whereas the Oxford University Colonial Records Project took interest in British colonial officers. However, the OCRP did not have complete acquisitional freedom and the Colonial Office paid close attention to their work.
Given the intimate crossings between private and professional life for colonial officers, it happened on occasion that administrative files were interspersed within Oxford University Colonial Records Project acquisitions. For this reason, the Intelligence and Security Department paid close attention to the papers coming into Oxford. The case of one individual’s “personal” papers directly raised the issue of who owned record of the past. In June 1965, Michael Blundell left a large crate containing 208 lbs. worth of papers with the British High Commission in Nairobi to dispatch to Oxford. Blundell was a prominent settler politician who had moved to Kenya from England in 1925. In addition to owning a farm in the White Highlands, Blundell spent over a decade working in Kenyan politics on the Legislative Council, Emergency War Council, and later as Minister of Agriculture. He was several years into his retirement when he offered his personal archive to the OCRP. Upon receiving it and taking note of its contents, the High Commissioner wrote the Intelligence and Security Department before sending it off to Oxford. Among personal letters and private records were a number of Top-Secret documents dealing with the War Council, Emergency Committee, and constitution. The High Commissioner requested advice, commenting that the files should not be “placed in any depository for historical records in Kenya” “because of their nature,” nor should they be destroyed “since much of the material will be of interest historically.”Footnote 114 The ISD demanded that Blundell’s papers be redirected to their office for screening.
By October 1965, the Intelligence and Security Department reviewed Blundell’s papers and removed several Top-Secret files and other classified materials. The ISD added these files to the others it had received from Kenya’s colonial administration in the months leading up to internal self-government. Upon hearing the news that his papers were intercepted and weeded through, Blundell was incensed. He wrote to the High Commissioner, “May I stress once again to you as forcibly as I can that these are my personal papers and your Officers or similar Officers in London have no right whatsoever to take them without the courtesy of informing me.”Footnote 115 Blundell, prominent though he might have been in Kenya, was no match for the Intelligence and Security Department, which would in a few months pass to the UK’s Defence Department. Eventually, the Colonial Office’s Library and Records Department recorded eight boxes of “Blundell Material” added to the “migrated archives.” They consisted of Emergency Committee, War Council, and Emergency Liaison Committee materials as well as correspondence pertaining to propaganda and constitutional discussions.Footnote 116 The interaction between Oxford and the Intelligence and Security Department illustrates the British curation of colonial history. The former sought after and housed the personal records of officers it revered, forming an archive filled by the human voices and documentary traces of individuals but sanitized of more sinister evidence. Meanwhile, the Intelligence and Security Department coordinated the collation of such evidence and its withdrawal into an inaccessible archival limbo.
Stealing Away the Past: Colonial Limbo at Hayes
In December 1962, just as Perham, Cashmore, Wainwright and Neil met in Nairobi to plan the consolidation of colonial records prior to internal self-government, the Secretary of State for the Colonies wrote to Kenya’s colonial government regarding the disposal of classified documents. Duncan Sandys, a Conservative and militarist, had held the position of Secretary of State for the Colonies for just under six months when he wrote to Kenya’s colonial administration. “In the light of constitutional development,” Sandys asked the administration to forward to the Colonial Office “the papers to which Mr. F. D. Corfield was given access in the preparation of his report on the origins and growth of Mau Mau” for “safe custody” for both “security considerations” and on account of their “special historical value.”Footnote 117
Sandys approached the transition to internal self-government in Kenya and elsewhere with a focus on British interests. His insistence on removing records related to Mau Mau illustrated this. As the previous chapter demonstrated, Sandys played a decisive role in the Northern Frontier District (NFD) border controversies, wherein he ignored the local secessionist preference and advocated maintaining the NFD in Kenya. Cashmore assisted in removing all relevant documentation regarding the NFD borderlands from Isiolo to Nairobi. In his travels across the colony, he also alerted Wainwright of the presence of Mau Mau files in district offices and proceeded to bring them to Nairobi so that they could be removed to London, per Sandys’s instructions. Unlike the records that Cashmore indicated were of unique historical value, these files pertained to critical contemporary issues such as land distribution, colonial violence, and border demarcation. Sandys ordered their removal precisely because of their salience in constitutional negotiations and the high stakes the UK government held in the issues to which they related. The selection of files to remove to London was based on the desire to control and conceal evidence that could be used, legally or otherwise, in determining the outcomes of decolonization.
By the end of May 1963, Wainwright reported to Perham that the “exercise of bringing all the records in is now successfully completed and there is nothing further we can do this end until we receive help from London.”Footnote 118 To prepare for the incoming classified documents from Kenya and elsewhere, the Intelligence and Security Department solicited information from colonial governments regarding the “general nature” of papers, their classification, bulk, the arrival date of consignments, and the method of dispatch.Footnote 119 The Colonial Office had some storage capacity, but certainly not enough for the extent of Kenya’s records, never mind from elsewhere. C. E. R. Darby of the ISD explained to his colleagues,
there is little doubt that the present accommodation in S420 will be totally inadequate for the storage of papers which are likely to be received from Kenya. Since this storage problem was first raised I have learnt that the Public Record Office could provide us with a ‘security cage’ at their Hayes repository. Not only would this solve our problem with regard to the overseas papers but could also be considered for the storage of the other classified files of the Colonial Office.Footnote 120
S420 referred to an area within the Colonial Office’s Sanctuary Buildings in Great Smith Street that housed secret and Top-Secret papers from former colonies, such as Uganda.Footnote 121 However, as Darby indicated, it was not suited for the bulk of records the Colonial Office ordered from the soon-to-be former colonies.
Already in 1961, the Colonial Office had inquired about the use of space at Hayes. The Hayes storage repository, located north of Heathrow airport, was built by the Robert McAlpine construction company in 1940/1941 as a Royal Ordnance Factory (ROF). The ROF at Hayes was designated for weaponry manufacturing during the Second World War and was taken over by the Public Record Office (PRO) in 1950.Footnote 122 As Elizabeth Shepherd explains, the activities of both world wars, the creation of the welfare state, and the invention of new typing and copying technologies generated unprecedented amounts of records for the UK government to deal with.Footnote 123 The PRO acquired the Hayes facility as an “intermediate depository,” or limbo, to house government records before they were either destroyed or properly archived elsewhere. The PRO installed 210 miles of racking and in 1961 notified the Colonial Office that they could make 10,000 feet of shelving immediately available.Footnote 124 Over the next years, the Colonial Office, Department of Technical Co-operation, and the Commonwealth Relations Office requested 7,500 additional feet for storage, 2,000 of which was dedicated to classified material.Footnote 125
In addition to its lack of storage capacity, the Sanctuary Buildings location was not regarded as “secure for the permanent storage of [Top Secret] material.”Footnote 126 The Colonial Office Security Officer specified the construction of weld mesh steel cages to accommodate classified material at Hayes. The cages were ordered to have no external bolts or screws and only one door of “rigid steel grille” fitted with a Manifoil Mark III combination lock.Footnote 127 These specifications were intended to prevent surreptitious access. However, the Ministry of Defence, which also kept documents at Hayes, deemed the security conditions at the repository unacceptable for the storage of Top-Secret material.Footnote 128 The Colonial Office therefore also used the Curtis Green Building, an annex to the Metropolitan Police’s headquarters, and, later, the Old Admiralty Building for the storage of documents with the highest classification grade. In 1980, amid claims for document restitution, the Library and Records Department of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office appointed C. F. Mochan to survey all of the colonial records in order to comprehensively assess the holdings at both Hayes and Curtis Green.Footnote 129 His survey resulted in the first index of the Top-Secret Kenya material. It featured over twenty classification codes that indicated the reason for a file’s Top-Secret grading. Many of them had to do with intelligence reports, departments, and individuals, including Special Branch, MI5, MI6, police operatives, and/or foreign agents. Others indicated “criticism of local authorities.”Footnote 130 While their titles imply that most of these Top-Secret files were created and used during the Emergency and the approach to internal self-government, dealing with matters such as detention, collective punishment, screenings, the northern border, and constitutional development, files to do with the designation “Watch” and the “purge of classified documents” were also among them. The fortified limbos at Hayes and Curtis Green were intended to keep secret the UK’s methods of secret-keeping.Footnote 131 The Colonial Office took every measure that the existence and whereabouts of these files would be unknown.
In May 1963, the colonial government in Kenya organized the Royal Air Force, East Africa to carry three crates of Secret material and one diplomatic bag of a “very few Top-Secret files” to London (see Figure 4.3).Footnote 132 This was the first of several dispatches. For example, three years after Kenya emerged independent from colonial rule, the UK High Commissioner in Nairobi sent fourteen classified bags, weighing over 600 lbs. to London via Aden.Footnote 133 The British High Commission in Nairobi continued to dispatch documents to London after Kenyan independence that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office stored at Hayes.Footnote 134 Eventually, the Kenya material stored at Hayes consisted of at least 380 boxes and 11 at Curtis Green. By 1980, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had destroyed eleven boxes, numbers 668–678, the contents of which are not listed in any document I consulted.Footnote 135 The Colonial Office arranged for classified files from across the decolonizing world to enter the Hayes Repository. By 1978, Hayes housed materials from thirty-seven (former) overseas territories and colonies, the majority of which were at that time independent from British rule.
Figure 4.3 Wooden crates of classified documents shipped to London from Basutoland, 1965. TNA FCO 141/19930
Just as the dislocation of files within Kenya to Nairobi reconfigured their potentialities, so too did the mass removal of classified records from across the British Empire into secret storage. Centralizing documents into the imperial metropole reinforced racialized borders established by British colonialism. The Colonial Office removed documents that dealt with warfare, policing, surveillance, incarceration, and borderlands, all of which were fundamental mechanisms of subjugation. The Colonial Office hid these files away precisely because they recorded the systemic degradation of non-White life in imperial ventures. As Nadine El-Enany has recently shown, the 1960s initiated Britain’s transformation from an empire to a “sovereign, bordered nation-state.”Footnote 136 Bringing these files into London was a part of that re-bordering process. Just as the UK passed legislation to limit non-White Commonwealth migration into Britain, it smuggled into London documents from the lands and peoples it barred from entry. In 1962, the UK Home Office passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which “drastically restricted immigration rights to Britain’s Commonwealth citizens.”Footnote 137 Thus, the UK refashioned colonial-era hierarchies, based on British notions of race and nation-of-origin, in order to re-border the state and, relatedly, its citizenry in its postcolonial re-formation.Footnote 138 Combination locks and steel cages reinforced Britain’s racialized postcolonial frontiers to prevent the peoples and governments of former colonies from accessing salient evidence of imperial rule. While officials viewed removal as a homecoming, as indicated in instructions that directed officers to “send home” files produced abroad, this was based on nothing more than a possessive imperial assumption. Crucially, these records were also concealed from peoples resident in the UK.
However, the Colonial Office was not the only actor involved removing colonial documents from Kenya. As this chapter has shown, for the first time and with documentary evidence, academics at both Oxford and Syracuse were aware of the UK’s removal of records of colonial rule. These institutions interfered according to their own interests. Margery Perham, at Oxford University, arranged for funding to support a microfilm project with the hopes that the UK would thus obtain a full record of the political documents created in the Kenya colony. Additionally, she designed the Oxford Colonial Records Project in order to commemorate the contributions of colonists and settlers in the empire she had helped train-into-being. Perham, aware of the colonial government’s destruction of its own documents, advocated document preservation by pointing to the version of history that independent African scholars might produce, which would be unfavorable to her and her contemporaries. On the other side, Syracuse University, embedded in US Cold War crossovers between universities, the CIA, and philanthropic organizations, established a microfilm project in Kenya in order to obtain valuable documents to strengthen US “expertise” over a region that the government had strong interests in influencing. Shortly after negotiating the microfilm project contract, Syracuse reneged its original promise to the Kenya National Archives that it would hold and control the master negative, demonstrating the exploitative conditions for US-Kenyan archival relations. Taken together, the scramble for Kenya’s history through the formation of different archival centers in southeast England and in New York illustrates the investment both the UK and the United States had in the former colony’s future. However, as the following will explore, these pursuits had to contend with the enduring, if shifting, interests of not only the Kenyan government but also an international bloc of former colonies laying claim to archival sovereignty through engagement with international organizations.
