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Riley Linebaugh, "Curating the Colonial Past: The 'Migrated Archives' and the Struggle for Kenya's History" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
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Dr. Riley Linebaugh
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Riley Linebaugh about her book titled Curating the Colonial the Migrated Archives and the Struggle for Kenya's History, published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. Now, this book looks at a really interesting collection of documents often called, kind of quote unquote, the migrated archives. We'll talk about why it's called that and why that term is in quotes. But essentially what these are are files that were in Kenya when Kenya was a British colony, that in the early 1960s, before Kenya became independent, were moved by British colonial officials out of Kenya to London. Why? Which files got moved? What happened to them then, what has happened to them since? Turns out, what might just look visually like a bunch of file folders actually has a really interesting story embedded within the files and where they have lived and why they've been moved and all sorts of things like that. So we have a lot to get into here. Riley, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. Riley Linebaugh
Thanks so much for having me. Miranda.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book.
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Dr. Riley Linebaugh
Yeah, My name's Riley. I'm a historian and archivist and I was a Bachelor's student in 2012 taking a seminar with Professor Derek Peterson. As the Hounslow park disclosure, which I'm sure we'll have the chance to speak about, more took place. So I had a history professor teaching me about the sort of significance of historians whose work on both the histories of Eastern Africa and the British Empire more generally, the role that they played in providing expert witnesses, testimony in a court case that resulted in the UK at that time's Foreign Commonwealth Office, admittance to the existence of a previously concealed trove of colonial era documents. So I was a sort of bright eyed student who felt like they were witnessing something as it unfolded. I decided to train as an archivist and then do my PhD to study the history of these files.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
As a fellow historian who loves archives, this is a very understandable story and really cool to kind of see that initial goal realized. Like you have actually looked at the archives, you've written a book explaining what is in there and how it got there. So cool that we can kind of talk about this at the conclusion of the project. The obvious next question then is what files are we talking about? Like what kinds of documents is the Colonial office in the 60s worried about? You discuss in the book? Some, they said should be destroyed, some should be moved to London. Like, what kind of files are we talking about here?
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Dr. Riley Linebaugh
Yeah, great question. And I should say at the outset that although my work has mainly to do with Kemya, this is an exercise which is being repeated across up to 41 other British colonial dependencies, not only in the 1960s, but before and through the 1990s at least. So that's just a word to the listener that we'll be talking mainly of Kenya. But this is an empire wide phenomenon. In the 1960s, Kenya has just ended an emergency period otherwise known as the MAU MAU revolts or uprising. The this is a period of intense, brutal counterinsurgency warfare conducted more or less as a civil war, but with extreme sort of orchestration by the British colonial government in Kenya and also by the metropolitan government in London. And So in the 1960s, there's sort of the context is the British colonial government is facing constitutional negotiations for Kenya's independence in the aftermath of a very brutal war. And so they're interested in asking what types of evidence they want to leave behind for the new ministry. The Independent ministry to sort of run an unimpaired functioning government, but also to remove records that might be incriminating. Although this is not the word that British colonial officials use, they're very careful not to use incriminating language themselves. Instead, in the 1960s, the key word is embarrassing. To remove anything, any record or document that might embarrass Her Majesty's government or members of the police or military forces, or that more broadly compromised sources of intelligence or informants which were cultivated during that emergency process.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that is helpful to give us a sense of what's happening in Kenya and as you said, what's happening kind of more widely in the Empire too, as you mentioned. This is not kind of a oh, no, we've never thought about these things. Questions before. We have no idea what we're doing. It's like, no, no. This is kind of part of a policy going on well beyond the colony in Kenya. If we're thinking then about these documents that are identified as needing to be removed, as you said, you know, without saying that they're incriminating. But that is very much the kind of context here. What should we understand then, in terms of what these files are called? Right. The term migrated archives turns up a lot. It's in the title of your book, but it's in quotes. So what is up with this term?
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Dr. Riley Linebaugh
Yeah, another great question. Migrated archives comes up as a term for the first time in the 1970s, so already a decade or so after the moment of their removal in Kenya. And it comes up as a term by the then director of India's National Archives. Again, we're thinking about this as a real transnational project, not just of removal, but then retrieval and requests or demands to restore. Restore documents to former colonies. And it comes up in 72 in a debate held between Shitla Prasad on the National Archives of India side and eid, then the person responsible for the Public Record Office in the uk, and they're debating the custody and location of colonial era documents. And migrated archives then comes to take on many different meanings. So its first initial meaning by Shitla Prasad is to refer to all records, no matter where they were created. So regardless of whether they moved actually or not, that no longer exist in the sites of subjugation or rule. So in India's case, these included all records that were held by the Indian office in London, whether or not they were ever removed. But for the uk, the migrated archives becomes the phrase to refer to all records that were systematically removed and then concealed, sealed. So it has kind of A two pronged meaning, one, referring to this dislocation process and secondly, a process of concealment, partly due to the ambiguous status of these records under the Public Record act of 1958. And then migrated archives takes on a whole other set of meanings for other former colonies that don't exactly know. They don't have indices where they can specifically name or list. Exactly, exactly. The files that were removed, but know very well that many types of not only records, but other materials were removed from, from former colonies from the 1960s onwards. So the name, depending who's using it, means different things. But you're, you're right to point out that I use it in, in these quotation marks, firstly, as a kind of critical distance from the, its euphemistic past participle in the first place. So migrated. So documents aren't animate objects. They can't move themselves, but were moved. So here to have it in the passive sort of takes focus away from the act of removal, which is, to anyone who's visited British museums, a very sort of characteristic way of referring to actions in the past that are perhaps indicate some form of culpability. And the second thing to point out is that archives almost always move. So the site where a record is preserved is rarely the site where it was created, if that makes sense. And so once again, it's really this characteristic of concealment that is more specific to the migrated archives.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's very helpful so that we understand kind of what sorts of terms are being used by whom and for what purposes. And yeah, the point about the file folders don't move by themselves. Right. There are decisions involved in all of this, which is exactly what you're interrogating. So is there anything further we need to understand then about what exactly the files were that were considered to be so incriminating? Though obviously, without using those words, like, why in the early 60s was the colonial Office especially worried about this? Like, I mean, surely governments are worried about incriminating files all the time, or like, what's, what's going on here specifically?
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Dr. Riley Linebaugh
Yeah, a few different things. A part of the transition to independence in the Kenyan case, but perhaps also more broadly across the empire as it transitions to a Commonwealth, is a transition between seeing a group of people as an enemy. So in the Kenyan case, again, there was this, this emergency period, this MAU MAU revolt, where there was a pretty indiscriminate understanding by the colonial government against the various sort of linguistic communities of central Kenya and elsewhere in the, in the colony, to then needing to forge so called friendly relations with emerging independent countries that would hopefully, from the British perspective, join a kind of Commonwealth project. So there's this tension or perhaps even paradox on the one hand of just sort of coming to an end of an acute phase of violence and antagonization to one, of trying to forge friendly diplomatic bilateral relations. And two, a part of this is in the 1960s, I would say a persistent desire by the UK to avoid any form of either retribution or significant claims to reparations by the emerging post colonial states on the basis of sort of late colonial administration.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Got it. Okay. So a concern about kind of the very recent past and the potential near future as well, which is helpful to understand kind of, you know, there's multiple incentives going on for these files. Now when we're talking about an archive of any kind, migrated or not, of course, the word implies that, like, it's not just a random collection of paper, that it's organized in particular ways. Was that true here? Like before the files were moved? Was there, I don't know, like a big room of all the files and one room of like these are the ones we're worried about, or were they organized in different ways? Like, was this a single archive that already existed in that sort of conceptual, coherent sense that then was wholesale removed to London?
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Dr. Riley Linebaugh
Great, thank you. Absolutely not. So I think in talking about any administration, but also maybe specifically British colonial administrations, very little was coherent in the first place. There was a big gap in my, in my sort of reading and understanding of the research I've done between the sort of fantasy of having a comprehensive coherent record keeping project whereby there would be an even comprehensive application of sort of sensitivity classification schema that would then result in the sort of complete and perfected transfer or destruction of records according to the Colonial Office's mandate. My understanding is that it was a haphazard, lengthy and imperfect process to coordinate between sort of the centralized government and Governor's house in Nairobi with then provincial administrations across the colony. And this is a time when colonial officials are burdened by lots of different types of work. Again, this is sort of the end of colonial administration as they knew it. And performing or completing a record keeping exercise was not perhaps at the top of most officials to do lists. And, and there are reports also of sort of the indiscriminate use of bonfire to destroy materials. In my reading of the, of the files, this was largely for duplicates, but individual officers interpreted the instructions of what might be embarrassing in very different ways. I mean, this is purposefully vague. Language and it also was inconsistently applied for that reason. So there are files of correspondence of officers disagree, agreeing whether certain types of files should be left behind. Because of course, while the UK government and British colonial governments are interested in destroying or dislocating records, they're also interested in maintaining records in the former colony that they perceive would give a favorable sort of transition for the incoming ministries. So this was sort of haphazard, chaotic, occurring without a lot of time or resource and reliant on the sort of subjective interpretation of individuals.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that definitely sounds pretty chaotic. Very good to get a sense of that because it would be easy to assume that it is more organized than this reality that you're telling us about would be. Right. As you said, there's kind of a directive going round. You would think, oh, colonial officers, the colony's been around for a while, they'd have all these procedures. You know, there's even a military sounding operation, Operation Legacy that sounds like all super organized. What actually was this operation and how did it influence these practices you're telling us about on the ground?
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Dr. Riley Linebaugh
Yeah, so Operation Legacy is a phrase used first by the colonial government and then Tanganyika, now Tanzania, and then was used to describe a similar process of record purging in Uganda. I use the phrase in the book because I think it really sort of well describes the, as you just did, the sort of the wish for systematic legacy curation and that it's really understood as a project in Kenya, although officials are corresponding with others with their sort of peers in Tanganyika and Uganda use something called the W system or the Watch system. And this is a system whereby officials with authority who are authorized and security clearance, and it should be stated that these are specified as officials who are of, of European descent. So it's quite clearly a racialized project, are given a stamp. So every registry and every sort of administrative office at the level of the district up to the province and then also the Governor's house and the secretariat have a stamp to put on records. It's a, it's a purple W stamp meaning for watch, meaning this file should be either destroyed or removed. It's sort of the highest security grade from the 1960s onwards. And individual sort of registry clerks might be responsible for doing this depending on sort of the staffing of any given office. Or it might come under the purview of a more senior ranking official. And it comes out of. Again, we're talking about this really sort of dense 10 year period of incredible change in the Kenyan colony. So from 1952. The onset of this emergency, which is also accompanied by an extreme overhaul of intelligence services following the emergency in Malaya. It's understood that to launch an effective counterinsurgency, the British colonial government needs to have what it considers sophisticated intelligence operations. And this has in the 1960s, in a pre computer era, a big record keeping component. So how to gather intelligence about your so called enemy or insurgents, but then also ensure that this intelligence remains internal. So the W system can also be understood as an acceptable extension of sort of, on the one hand, solving the problem created by the emergence of documents understood as intelligence or that might be incriminating to the UK government, but also seeking a record keeping solution to that, if that makes sense.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it definitely makes sense and kind of helps explain as well some of the chaos. Right. Because there's some very clearly competing incentives going on there. And also the kind of fact of trying to implement this. I mean you mentioned bonfires. Those are like not the most subtle things in the world. Right. You mentioned the kind of busyness and not that many colonial officials trying to do sort of too many things quickly. These archives we haven't been able to see, or we weren't able to see for quite a long time, but like the fact that something was going on couldn't surely be kept a secret. So like how soon do. Do we see people going, hang on a second, what is up with the archives? What are you taking? Why?
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Dr. Riley Linebaugh
Yeah, simultaneously, and I will perhaps also, before answering this question, make another point which I find important and not necessarily obvious, which is that records that are preserved within archives are usually records that are no longer in use. So you have in the UK, for example, a 20 year rule after a record by any public office has been closed for 20 years, it will be reviewed for archival preservation. The records being assembled through this W system are not closed records. These are records that very much have to do with sort of pertinent political questions at the time. Meaning kind of the. Exactly this. The civil war and processes of detention, villageization and the use of torture by the police in Kenya, but also things like border committees. So they're not yet archival in this sense. They're being sort of prematurely removed precisely because of the political sensitivity they may have. But let me come back to the question you did ask, which is, was this secret at the time? And the answer is no. I mean, as you rightfully point out, anyone who's near a bonfire sees it. But also there was reporting happening at the time about, about bonfire. So it wasn't only sort of localized knowledge. But then this knowledge was communicated more broadly. This sort of sparked the the concern and interest of historians both in and outside of Eastern Africa. So there was an awareness at that level. And then too, as the colonial government is transitioning or being displaced by an incoming independent government, the independent government is being informed that the outgoing colonial government is taking with them some records. So there's sort of widespread knowledge on site at the time. Yeah. Which was an important part of the research I did because it sort of provided a different narrative than that in 2011, 2012 of sort of the big discovery of these previously concealed records.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that is definitely helpful to kind of take us back into the moment rather than assuming that the way we reacted decades later is how people were reacting at the time. But I'd love to pick up on this idea that the knowledge wasn't just localized. Why would people, for example, outside of Kenya care about this happening at the time?
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Dr. Riley Linebaugh
Yeah, well, there are a few sort of significant actors and sort of actor networks who cared a great deal. Kenya is situated in sort of different geopolitical concerns of the 1960s, 60s. There's the sort of US American and UK concern about maintaining Kenyan allegiance in sort of Cold War competitions and with either the sort of socialist or communist influence of surrounding countries. And a few specific institutions become involved. The Kenya Kia, I think it is the Kenya Institute of Administration is an organization set up in partnership with cp, Syracuse University in New York. As there's kind of an emergence of Area Studies on the one hand, so this is a transnational phenomenon. But in the US Area Studies emerges partly, not completely, but partly in sort of the ascendance of US American hegemony through sort of cultural and sort of university involvement. And the Kenya Institute of Administration becomes a project where US American influence is exerted on the incoming class or sort of debut class of Kenyan politicians. And they become interested in obtaining not originals but copies, digitized copies or microfilm copies of Kenyan records to house at Syracuse University. So this is one example. Oxford University sets up by Marjorie Purim, the Oxford University Colonial Records Project. Here we have a few highly influential academics who had been instrumental in building relationships with and also careers on training the people who staffed colonial administrations. And there was a concern over sort of the ways in which the history of the British Empire would be written if left in the hands of the sort of post colonial state. And the Oxford University Colonial Records Project is set up in order to augment and quote, balance the official view of the period by collecting private papers of imperial administrators. So you have people who are institutions that are interested in the political future of Kenya, especially as kind of a regional ally in geopolitical terms. And then you have also institutions and people deeply invested in sort of controlling who gets to write the history of the British Empire.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's a very helpful kind of set of international actors to map out because that really sort of puts in perspective that we haven't actually talked about the independent state Kenyan archives yet, which one might expect to have come up before now, right? Like a country becomes independent, they have all the apparatuses of government, one of which, probably not the most sexy but fine, would be a sort of national archive, right? I mean, you mentioned that this is sort of a standard practice. There are general rules about a 20 year period or whatever. Like these are sort of standard things. And yet what you've just described to us is like, it almost sounds like everyone except the Kenyans have the Kenyan archival papers. So is there a Kenyan National Archive? When does it emerge? How does it deal with these sorts of questions over like, who gets to see what?
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Dr. Riley Linebaugh
Yeah, a well timed question. It would be a huge error to overlook the Kenyan National Archives, which emerges almost directly after constitutional independence. So in, in 1964, Joseph Murumbi, who will become the Vice President of Kenya, circulates sort of the draft of provisional regulations to put Kenyan National Archives and building sort of in political legislative terms, which is then ratified in 65, thereby founding the Kenyan National Archives. And it's founded on the most organized, coherent, regulated basis as ever before. Because although the British colonial government placed a high nominal value in record keeping in connection with its rule, its own archival practices were fairly dysregulated and disorganized. And so in 1965, Murumbi's regulations are passed as an act of Parliament, thereby setting up the National Archives. It will later on move into the building it currently sits in in the central business district of Nairobi. But it's invested in very early on by Kenyana, the first Prime Minister and then President of Kenya and also his successor. It has a lot of sort of political capital attributed to it, which in different moments of its existence also corresponded to political funding, meaning it was not only sort of enacted in 1965, but also invested in, in order to come into existence. And we've talked a little bit in different ways about sort of the, the chaos of the outgoing British colonial administration. And I would be remiss if I gave the impression that they were successful in removing everything. There were plenty of records that were available in Nairobi and also that had been centralized to Nairobi as a part of the W system. So you have an early state in 1963, 64, 65, that's also in its own process of nation building and political reconfiguration. And the National Archives becomes a way to do a few different things at the same time under Kenyatta's administration. On the one hand, it's an institution that facilitates the sort of project of centralization. So moving away from kind of a political system whereby different provinces and linguistic communities would retain regional control to a centralized form of government. So the, the retrieval of records to the center kind of mirrors that process. But secondly, again, we're in the context of this deeply bloody conflict that was fought along the lines of a civil war, but also Amidst ongoing disputes about sort of who shall own the land, how shall the economy be redistributed after expelling British colonial government. And the National Archives was understood to be an instrument of national unity, that this could be a house where sort of all of the Kenyan peoples might belong. So a deeply political project and ideal that I do not argue was successful in creating a sense of unity, but that sort of expectation, and it did then correspond with funding to get it on a good basis. So where the archives under the colonial administration weren't necessarily. They weren't per se, accessible. Scholars or visitors could negotiate access by requesting it by sort of gatekeeping administrators. In 1965, we have, for the first time, black Kenyans who are able to use the central government library. And we also see then sort of the first generation of Kenyan scholars who are doing historical research at the Kenya National Archives.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, so that very much shows that the archives were on the list of priorities for the independent colonial government, the independent Kenyan government, which is really helpful to understand. Right. This is something that, as you said, has gotten investment, has gotten political attention. What, therefore, do they think about these archives that got taken to London? Like, is that just sort of, okay, well, I guess we have to live with it, or is that. No, we'd really like to have those back, please.
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Dr. Riley Linebaugh
Yeah. There's a couple of different points of view, but of note in that 1965 bill instituting the National Archives, among the powers listed and codified in that bill to the chief archivist is the power to seek and retrieve expatriated records. So it's also understood within the founding of this institution that one of its sort of inherent characteristics is to be a site and power of retrieval. So it's. It's sort of written in the DNA of the institution. But that's, of course, a different thing than sort of internal discussions and deliberations in 1960. In the early 1960s, the Kenya National Archives is being founded in sort of connection with a British archivist who's sort of on loan through the Department of Technical Cooperation. And he's becoming aware for the first time of what he calls kind of Britain's ravages of sort of destroying and removing records. And he's shocked, and he's speaking with Murumbi about this. And Murumbi has a more cooled demeanor about it. He's aware that these records have been removed and in fact, indicates that they are. Indicates not an agreement that's too strong, but a point of view that to have records relating to MAU MAU, not accessible in the 1960s was not necessarily a problem. So I've used a lot of double negatives there. But so Internally, in the 1960s, there's a feeling within the Kenya National Archives at the political level that the absence of certain records is advantageous. However, that changes over time because it's not only sort of these intelligence files on Malmo that were removed, but also there is a Jomo Kenyatta who was arrested during the first year of the emergency. His own sort of personal library had been confiscated upon arrest. And for him, at least in my readings of the files about retrieval processes, it was also a personal matter to restore not only his materials, but also as a part of recovering kind of sovereignty to retrieve these materials. So there's a sort of a personal element of it under Kenyatta's cabinet, and then this develops over time. But to answer again simply and quickly, there's initial understanding by the architects of the Kenya National Archives that many materials have left the country. There's an initial interest in recovering them, and there's also an initial kind of landscape in which not all parts of the recent past are being prioritized in their representation at kn, at the Kenya National Archives.
- [36:03]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
See, this is always what's so interesting about asking these sorts of questions, because the answer is always more nuanced and complex, which is intriguing. Right. So, yes, I agree. I have asked you a big question to sort of simplify. The book has way more details about all of this for anyone who's interested, but that definitely gives us a sense that the answer isn't kind of 100% yes or 100% no. I would like to add another actor, though, into our conversation at this point, and I know we've mentioned a number of different people being involved and interested, which speaks to the importance of these archives and these questions about kind of who should get what. Obviously, they're relevant in the context of Kenya becoming independent, but as you mentioned earlier, this is happening across the British Empire. There's also a lot of other independence things happening outside of the British Empire in this sort of period. So I was not hugely surprised to read about the International Council on Archives. The ICA seems like a reasonable thing to exist, especially in this sort of context. What did they do and maybe not do to support these claims that independent Kenya, the Kenya National Archives, are making around access to information?
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Dr. Riley Linebaugh
Yeah, the International Council on Archives is sort of a part of a cohort of international organizations founded in the aftermath of the Second World War. It's founded, if I remember correctly, as A branch of UNESCO in 1948. And it sort of is set up to do two things in the first instance. One is to sort of facilitate international cooperation amongst archivists, but specifically national and sort of state archivists, and then secondly to sort of regulate best practices. So archives as such are a super old phenomenon. I mean the word itself comes from the Greek rights to rule and then from to rule to be the holder of the public record. But as institutions that we and the listener might be familiar with, they are very recent in terms of their international regulation. And the ICA sort of forms in the post war context to sort of further regulate them at an international level. As I mentioned them earlier as the host of a conference in 1972 where the British and Indian national archivists could debate this question about who should have custody of colonial era records. So that's sort of the first part of the answer. So the ICA creates a platform for international archival issues to be discussed and debated. It is like other international organizations, an organization that sort of privileges the national sovereignty. So its sort of criteria for participation is belonging to a recognized independent state. So that means that the ICA transforms dramatically from the late 1950s, 50s onwards as more and more former colonies emerge as independent countries. And this provides sort of an interesting level of influence on what the ICA's activities have been, which in the first instance were sort of cooperation between global powers. And then more and more aspects of asymmetry within global powers are shaping its activities, but it doesn't seem solve them. So the ICA becomes a very good feeder for discussion and also awards resource. So there's different funding initiatives which assist the archives of what at different stages belong to the third World or the postcolonial world, and also provides a platform for sort of consolidating blocks of interest. So that means that it's not just Kenya against the uk, but it's Kenya and Algeria and India and other sort of similarly positioned countries forming, forming a bloc. But what we know from many examples of this time period is that the existence of these blocks doesn't resolve the asymmetry on which they're founded. So the ICA depends on the goodwill of all participating member states to resolve disputes, including also who shall own the migrated archives or where shall they be. And so as Kenya, at the level of sort of official governmental retrieval pursuits, continues from the 1960s through the 1980s to try and enter negotiations with the UK for sort of a joint heritage concept, meaning a kind of bilateral agreement that says, hey, these records that exist, they pertain to both states. And here is an agreement that sort of reconciles that. The ICA provides at this time sort of support in engaging that process, but ultimately fails to incentivize the goodwill by the UK and other former imperial powers.
- [41:17]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hmm. This is very interesting to understand. Again, it kind of goes back to that idea of nuance, not 100% of one thing or the other. Now, obviously, as we've mentioned, the book has loads of detail we're not going to be able to get into here. I'm not going to make you read out every word of the book. But there is, of course, another key moment in all of this. It's not just what happens before Kenya becomes independent or in the first few years or even first decade after the country becomes independent that's relevant. There's also the stuff that happened that got you interested in the first place. Right. The things in pretty recent history, you know, less than 20 years ago. What changed in this sort of 21st century moment that made kind of all of these archives relevant and part of news discussions again?
- [42:02]
Dr. Riley Linebaugh
Yeah. So the conversation so far has discussed kind of this process of record creation during the Kenyan Emergency, then removal to London. And then where we've just been is in this kind of post colonial period of dispute facilitated by the ica. But during this period of dispute, the records which had been removed, again, not just from Kenya, but From up to 41 other former British colonial territories numbering, I think something close to 20,000 files, were held in secret storage outside of London until 1994, when they were transferred to HLO Port park, which is a very high security facility. I think the journalist Yin Cobain called it the best place imaginable for secrets to hide. It's an MI5, MI6 facility, or it's at least used by those organizations. So these records, although the Kenyan government and peoples in Kenya were aware that they had been removed, and although not only Kenya but other former colonies were demanding for their restitution, the UK government was able to maintain their secrecy through concealing them. Again, first in these outside of London repositories, and then later Hounslow park until what's known as the Hounslow Park Disclosure. So this was a part of a legal case whereby the firm LI Day represented five claimants who survived torture under British authorization during the Kenya Emergency. And the. The case was settled out, of course, excuse me, out of court in the claimant's favor. And throughout the proceedings, LI Day, together with historians again who were acting as, as expert witnesses, were able to finally place a sort of consequential pressure on the Foreign Commonwealth Office to for the first time advocate admit to the existence of the migrated archives. There's lots of sort of academic writing about this period. It was hugely exciting for it promised on the one hand, the release of sort of previously unseen records of British colonial history. These files were transferred after a sensitivity review to the National Archives in the uk. They were transferred sort of partially and in different batches. And when they were transferred to the national archives in the UK, they were organized into the series FCO 141. So that's Foreign Commonwealth Office 141. So that's another sort of key phrase that your listeners who are familiar with this will already know. But for people who are interested in finding these so called migrated archives, that's how they're then discoverable.
- [45:10]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that is helpful to understand what is the current state then of the Archives. Like, can anyone just go look at them?
- [45:18]
Dr. Riley Linebaugh
The FCO 141 was, yeah, released starting in 2011, 2012 to the National Archives. Can anyone just go and look at them? Well, I mean, it depends on how easy it is for you to get into the UK in the first place. So these records come from 41 places outside of the UK. It's not my own language, right, but the language of recently publicly elected officials to describe the hostile border practices and policies of the uk. So gaining the visa to enter. If you're from Kenya, for example, and you wish to see these records, in principle perhaps it's possible, but in practice it's quite burdensome. But the sort of current status of them is. Two years ago, the National Archives announced digitization projects that would prioritize digitizing parts of FCO 141 that pertain to largely former African colonies, including Kenya. There's no information on sort of the details of these agreements. So if digitization will also include sort of ensuring the infrastructure needed in these cooperating countries for access. So if that will also mean sort of ensuring that there's computers on site at the Kenya National Archives, for example, to view these records. Also digitization is a different solution than restitution. And then within the field of African archivists, there's kind of an ongoing debate about the status of the migrated archives. Nathan Mjama, who's an archivist archival scholar and indeed one of the people in the 1970s and 80s to engage at the sort of front lines of restitution projects, argues that the migrated archives are an essential aspect of former colonial national heritage to recover. Whereas other archivists and archival scholars in Africa, such as Francis Garaba, argue that archives in former colonies are already so weighed down by the paperwork debris of the colonial past and already sort of African history and the histories of other sort of formerly colonized parts of the world are so, are so encumbered by colonial perspectives. And to what extent is allocating resource for the sort of continued retrieval of these files necessary? So you've pointed out a few times. My answers are sort of neither yeses or nos, but just to draw attention to the question of the status of these files is still very much called, is still unclear, no.
- [48:09]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And continues therefore to still be relevant and interesting. So thank you for helping us understand all, all of those nuances here. Was there anything final we want to discuss about the book or kind of putting this together? Anything? I don't know that in the process of figuring all this out that really surprised you. You want to share?
- [48:26]
Dr. Riley Linebaugh
Yeah, Actually, there's one aspect of this work that is also now the focus of my next project, which is in looking at the implementation of the W system. I was largely reading the correspondence of rather high ranking colonial officials. But what I came to understand, especially as I engage with the file not only as a text, but also as sort of evidence of activity, meaning paying attention to people's initials and the margins or the file notes at the beginning to sort of that document for internal use, how this file is being understood and used in the office. I came to realize that most of the people actually responsible for stamping that W, for ensuring that sort of sensitive files were not seen, were female secretaries. And these women aren't very well represented in historiography. And I've been thinking about them in the phrase used by the former colonial minister of defense in Kenya, who referred to his ministry's work in keeping secrets so diligently. He said, we like to think of ourselves in this matter as Caesar's wives. Which made me think not only of the sort of metaphor of how Caesar's wife is understood by colonial officials, but then also who were in fact the women responsible for sort of preserving the reputation and realm of colonial administration on the ground.
- [50:07]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So that sounds like what you're investigating next.
- [50:10]
Dr. Riley Linebaugh
Yeah, that's right. That's the next project.
- [50:14]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, well, that sounds very intriguing. And I always am especially interested when kind of someone's next project kind of comes out of something that you didn't know you were going to find in the first one. And you're like, oh, wait, hang on, what's this? Thread I could pull. So, you know, hopefully from my perspective, that becomes a book and you can come back and tell us about what Caesar's Wives means in this context. But of course, in the meantime, listeners can read the book you've already written that is out in the world, titled Curating the Colonial Past, the Migrated Archives and the Struggle for Kenya's History, published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. Riley, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [50:51]
Dr. Riley Linebaugh
Thank you so much, Miranda. It was my pleas.