The culling of imperial archives led me to turn to oral history. But for many scholars, the official myths of the British Empire persist
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| Soldiers guard suspected Mau Mau fighters behind barbed wire in the Kikuyu reserve, Kenya, at the time of the Mau Mau uprising against British colonial rule, October 1952. Photograph: -/AFP/Getty Images |
'Africans make up stories." I heard this refrain over and again while researching imperial history in Kenya.
I was scarcely surprised when it came from former settlers and colonial
officials living out their days in the country's bucolic highlands. But
I was concerned to find that this position took on intractable
proportions among some historians.
At the time of decolonisation,
colonial officials destroyed and removed tons of documents from Kenya.
To overcome this, I collected hundreds of oral testimonies and
integrated them with fragments of remaining archival evidence to
challenge entrenched views of British imperialism.
My methods drew
sharp criticism. Revising the myths of British imperial benevolence cut
to the heart of national identity, challenging decades-old scholarship
and professional reputations.
Some historians fetishise documents,
and historians of empire are among the most hide-bound. For decades,
these scholars have viewed written evidence as sacrosanct. That
documents – like all forms of evidence – must be triangulated, and
interrogated for veracity using other forms of evidence, including oral
testimonies from colonised populations, mattered little.
Instead,
many historians rarely questioned the official archive, nor the
written, historical record. Instead, they reproduced a carefully tended
official narrative with either celebratory accounts of empire, or
equally pernicious, by turning their collective heads away from the
violence that underwrote Britain's imperial past and towards more benign
lines of inquiry. Either way, their document-centred histories served
as excuses for liberal imperial fictions.
In spite of postcolonial
criticism, these views have lingered. That such methodological
conservatism has persisted is stunning in the face of archival
discoveries, and the lack thereof.
During the course of the recent Mau Mau case in London's high court
– where five claimants filed a suit against the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office (FCO) for systematic torture in Kenya's detention
camps – the British government made a massive document discovery. Some
300 boxes of previously undisclosed files that had been spirited away
from Kenya at the time of decolonisation were found in Hanslope Park. Alongside them were countless boxes of files from 36 other colonies, removed at the time of imperial retreat.
The
Hanslope Park files have recently moved to the National Archives. Their
contents, however, have been less than satisfying. The FCO has not been
fully transparent in the release process. Some 170 boxes of "top
secret" files are missing. Moreover the FCO has released information
that it holds additional files – thousands of linear feet – in Hanslope
Park. These files – some of which are clearly related to potential
litigation from Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Malaya and elsewhere –
well-exceed the 30-year rule. There is no indication that they will be
released anytime soon. Even if they were, it would take over 300 years
based upon the pace of release of the "migrated archives" for them to
see the light of day. Even then, I would have zero confidence in
government transparency.
One thing is certain: official British
archives have been culled and withheld. Still, oral history sceptics
persist, and some historians cling to documents as the only source of
evidence.
There is one caveat, however. Some recent publications
that eschew oral histories include multiple citations of oral
testimonies from members of the British military and colonial service,
held in the archives of the Imperial War Museum.
This leaves one to wonder if hiding under the sheep's clothing of
methodological rigour is the abiding wolf of racial paternalism. Are we
to believe that Africans make up stories, but European testimonies are
reliable sources of evidence? If the Mau Mau case taught us anything,
it's that African oral testimonies are neither meaningless nor
fictional. Instead, like all forms of evidence, they must be
triangulated and read with other sources to determine their significance
to the past and present.
It is not possible to write imperial
histories from documents alone. The scale of archival erasure and the
withholding of documents is so vast that such a pursuit is
irresponsible. Only through a greatly expanded methodological and
theoretical toolkit can historians begin to interrogate the history of
20th-century British Empire. Without it, we run the risk of reproducing
carefully tended official myths of Britain's past.
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