Curating the Colonial Past: The Migrated Archives' and the Struggle for Kenya's [Hardcover]

Explores the systemised destruction and removal of key documents by British Colonial administrators in East Africa in the early 1960s.This study offers the first full length exploration of the systemised destruction and removal of key documents by British Colonial administrators in East Africa in the early 1960s. Riley Linebaugh chronicles the struggle over these 'migrated archives', between British attempts to conceal and Kenyan efforts to reveal evidence of the colonial past.This study offers the first full length exploration of the systemised destruction and removal of key documents by British Colonial administrators in East Africa in the early 1960s. Riley Linebaugh chronicles the struggle over these 'migrated archives', between British attempts to conceal and Kenyan efforts to reveal evidence of the colonial past.In the early 1960s, British colonial administrations in East Africa organized the systematic destruction and removal of secret documents from colonies approaching independence. The Colonial Office in London arranged the deposit of these documents in high security facilities, where they remained inaccessible until 2011 following a compensation suit by Kenyan survivors of British colonial rule against the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Curating the Colonial Past presents the first full length exploration of these 'migrated archives', chronicling the struggle between British attempts to conceal and Kenyan efforts to reveal evidence of the colonial past. Neither displayed nor destroyed, Riley Linebaugh explores how these records formed an archival limbo in which the British government delayed moral and legal judgement of empire. Yet, these practices did not go unchallenged. Linebaugh demonstrates how disputes over the 'migrated archives' facilitated the continuation of anticolonial sovereignty struggles beyond independence, struggles which persist into the present.Introduction; Part I. Struggle to Conceal: 1. Protecting bad intel in a dirty war; 2. Secrelã'