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

Chapter 4 widens the view on those interested in controlling Kenya’s colonial-era documents at the time leading up to and directly following political independence to include British and US-American academics and the formation of area studies. It historicizes the formation of archival collections in Nairobi, Oxford, Syracuse, and London as the result of entangled interests held by Oxford and Syracuse Universities, the British colonial government in Kenya, the Department of Technical Co-operation, and the Colonial Office, namely, its Intelligence and Security Department. By claiming colonial-era documentation as archival rather than as a political record with current relevance for incoming African ministers, these institutions scrambled to collate and control colonial-era documents for different purposes but all through the exclusion of African partners.