Guilty Secrets: Deceit, Denial, and the Discovery of Kenya’s ‘Migrated Archive’

In April 2011, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office revealed that it was illegally holding a large archive of documents that had been removed from the former colonies at the point of independence. This included files taken from thirty-seven countries between the late 1940s and the 1970s. This revelation emerged as a consequence of a case mounted in the High Court to seek compensation for Kenyan victims of alleged abuse and torture during the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s. This article recounts how these ‘migrated archives’ were first removed from the colonies, and how their existence in Britain then came to light more than forty years later. Destruction and secrecy are the principal themes of this story, which raises wider questions about the censorship, control and ownership of archives.