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1 results

  • 6 - “The Memory of a Nation”

  • from Part II - Struggle to Reveal
  • Riley Linebaugh, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
  • Book:
    Curating the Colonial Past
    Published online:
    12 September 2025
    Print publication:
    02 October 2025, pp 200-235
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  • Summary

    Chapter 6 returns to Nairobi as the site of the Kenya National Archives and the capital of a government in the throes of establishing its forms and functions in the aftermath of independence. It examines how Kenyan politicians, historians, and archivists employed the national archives as an instrument for nation-building, burdened though it was by the colonial origins of the institution. Aware of the massive removal, destruction, and weeding of secret records and bogged down by the over-stuffed and poorly organized offices of their colonial predecessors, a group of Kenya’s first independent politicians conceived of a national archives service as a way to demonstrate superior methods of recordkeeping and, thus, governance. The institution enabled politicians to at once advocate continuity between the colonial and independent governments as well as to claim unique mastery in both administration and history-writing