British colonial rule was always contested, but when the mother country’s rulers began to realise that the game was up, they quite understandably decided to protect their legacy by taking back to Britain the full records of their deeds and misdeeds. This happened everywhere, first in India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and then elsewhere in Asia and Africa as decolonisation became both inevitable and unavoidable.
By the early 1960s, Kenya was an obvious place where Britons foresaw the dangers that could ensue if its administrators let an indigenous, independent new government read and learn fully about the actions of the retreating colonial power. After all, the Mau Mau anti-government/anti-settler insurgency had disturbed Kenya from 1952. Senior Chief Waruhiu, a supporter of British rule, was assassinated in that year; Governor Evelyn Baring declared an Emergency and for the next seven years Kenya’s overlords employed every conceivable intelligence, espionage and propagandistic technique that they knew and learned about to prevent the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (labelled ‘Mau Mau’) from gaining support throughout the colony.
Jomo Kenyatta, a sometime student at the London School of Economics, and president of the Kenya African Union (KAU), was believed to be the real leader of Mau Mau, and he and six other alleged top Mau Mau operatives were tried and convicted of sedition. Kenyatta was rusticated to remote northern Lodwar. Meanwhile, thousands of true Mau Mau adherents fled to the forests of central Kenya.
In their attempt to extirpate Mau Mau, over the next seven years, British soldiers and their local home guard supporters killed 14,000 supposed Kikuyu rebels; Mau Mau had killed thirty-two settlers. The anti-Mau Mau effort also corralled about 150,000 Kikuyu villagers into what amounted to concentration camps and shunted as many as 1 million Kikuyu into special reserves. There were gory atrocities perpetrated, as Linebaugh writes, because of deep ‘colonial ignorance’ (45).
As early as 1955, a fiery British Member of Parliament decried the torture and other injustices that had been perpetrated against alleged Mau Mau conspirators. There was much to cover up, and only decades later, after suits in British courts, were some of the victims and their families compensated.
Even after Kenyatta and others were released from detention, the Emergency declared over, and an independent black-run Kenya was on the near horizon, British officials at home and in Nairobi were still determined to prevent Kenyans from learning what the Britons in charge had done to their compatriots before, during and after the Emergency. The methods and motives of the colonisers, the names and activities of their African collaborators, the nature of torture and other indecencies and imperial shortcuts more broadly were meant to be kept secret. This was the big cover-up about which Linebaugh writes in such great detail.
But she goes well beyond discussing the cover-up effort to examine a wealth of subjects that emanated from the decision to migrate so many of Kenya’s potentially compromising records from headquarters and all of the provincial and district offices to a location near London. She explores the American and British actions to collect the memoirs and personal accounts of a raft of administrators, to microfilm all kinds of archival material and to establish effective depositories abroad.
That examination leads her to a discussion of who writes whose history? Fairly soon after independence, professional Kenyans began to write their own history. But they were deprived in doing so of at least a considerable portion of the archival trove that should have been theirs to explore.
Much of it, as I happened to discover in 1961, went up in smoke. Linebaugh is thorough in piecing together the various shreds of evidence that contributed considerably to Kenya’s resultant historical deficit, or at least its archival losses. She may not know exactly what was spirited away, but she tells us about the categories of dispersal, the motives of the disbursers and what consequences there have been for Kenyans. Indeed, as excellent a historical exegesis as her book is, it also contains many intertwined strands that are only tangentially related to the main theme of historical loss.
Linebaugh briefly – and incompletely – mentions my role in uncovering the retreating colonialists’ attempt to destroy Britain’s records. By 1961, the cover-up had begun – in secret. Orders had gone out to Kenya to scrub the archives and send anything remotely embarrassing home to London to the secure depositories that were being set up clandestinely. The Kenyan administration was busy attempting to comply with directives from the Colonial Office to make sure that Africans already working for the Kenyan authorities saw none of the existing compromising materials and that all functioning parts of the local administrative apparatus knew that history could not be left behind for the incoming Kenyan government to see and perhaps use ‘unethically’ against the former colonisers. Neighbouring Tanganyika became independent in late 1961, Uganda was next in 1962 and Kenya would follow in 1963. The end of British rule was nigh.
I was only dimly aware of Kenyan preparations for home rule when I arrived in Nairobi from southern Africa in August 1961. I was about to start teaching at Harvard University and had been doing research at Harvard and elsewhere in Africa on the rise of nationalism and anti-colonial liberation efforts after coming down from the University of Oxford in 1960. I was obviously interested in Mau Mau (declared defeated in 1959) and in the recovery of Kenyan indigenous sovereignty. I had hosted Kenyan political leader Tom Mboya at Oxford, and my wife and I had lunched with Kenyatta just after his release from detention. We also attended his first public speech in Nairobi, introduced as he was by Mboya.
But the revelation that the retreating colonial power was intent on stealing Kenya’s history came when I drove my small car up into the Kikuyu highlands and saw, in boma after boma (district stations), that the sky was alight with bright bonfires. The British district officers in these Kikuyu-area bomas were burning all of their local records. Even a neophyte could appreciate what was happening and the immense loss to Kenya that was occurring. Kenyans were being deprived of their history.
Obviously, I could hardly urge the local officers to stop burning and pillaging. They were following orders from on high in Nairobi. The fix and the destruction were ordained. However, by a stroke of fortune, my wife and I were staying near Nairobi with Clyde and Penny Sanger. Clyde had edited the Central African Examiner in Salisbury (now Harare) and was now the Guardian correspondent in East Africa. I had written for the Examiner during my long months of research in what was to become Zimbabwe and Zambia.
Sanger and I strategised. He wrote a revealing article (3 Sept. 1961), breaking the story in the Guardian. It exposed what Her Majesty’s Government was doing in Kenya and at least may have tempered the fullest transfer of history from Kenya to London. We will never know what our actions prevented, if anything at all. In my case, I was summoned before Chief Secretary Walter Fleming Coutts in Nairobi for a first-class dressing down. I was told to stop meddling in colonial affairs and go back to my teaching at Harvard (which I was scheduled to do, anyway).
Linebaugh’s book exposes the cover-up in Kenya about which Sanger could only hint. It examines how the migration of archives was organised over what are now decades and how much (or how little) could eventually be considered retrieved. Archives and documents are not usually fodder beyond narrow interest. But this book shows how history can be stolen, and what such a grand theft means to the peoples of a youngish nation.
