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

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

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

Archival Preservation: Coda to Empire or Prelude to Independence?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Africanization and the Kenya National Archives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Costs of Preservation

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

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

1. 1. Provincial and District quarterly reports,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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