In the early 1960s, British colonial administrations in East Africa organized the systematic destruction and removal of documents from colonies approaching independence. This exercise was later repeated resulting in the deposit of roughly 20,000 files from over 40 dependencies in secret storage in and around London, where they remained until a 2011 court case brought against the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office by survivors of the Kenyan Emergency. This talk considers struggles to conceal and reveal colonial records in the context of decolonization – in Kenya, England and the world. In doing so, it raises questions over the relationships between archival location and history-writing and postcolonial claim-making.
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