Decolonisation and the new sovereignties

An orange and black Gold Coast stamp, bearing the portrait of a queen and the printed overprint “Ghana Independence 6th March 1957”. — Gold Coast 1-shilling stamp, on which “Ghana Independence” was printed in 1957. British Government, Public domain, source

In 2011, a trial in London forced the British government to admit that it held twenty thousand files from thirty-seven former colonies.

Throughout this domain, the same question keeps coming back: who wrote this document, and for whom?

The story that follows is the one in which this question becomes an event.

What happened at the time of independence

When a colonised territory became independent, the departing administration left behind offices, buildings — and archives. Decades of registers, reports and correspondence.

It did not leave everything.

Officials sorted through them. Some files were left in place. Others were taken to London. Others were destroyed.¹

This operation had a name, notably in the British Empire: Operation Legacy.²

Documents found since then show that, in Kenya, the administration took steps at the time of independence, in December 1963, to remove files, so that they would not be handed over to the Kenyan government that was about to take office.³

How it came to light

Not through an archivist’s discovery, but through a trial.

In 2011, a trial was held before the High Court in London: five Kenyans accused the British government of torture suffered in the colonial era. The British Foreign Office was then asked whether it held documents relevant to the case. It replied that it did not.⁴

It did.

Pressed by the court, the Foreign Office first admitted to unlawfully holding fifteen hundred Kenyan files at a site called Hanslope Park. Then twenty thousand, concerning thirty-seven former colonies.⁵

These twenty thousand files were then transferred to the National Archives, where anyone can consult them today. There they form a series with an innocuous-looking name: the “Migrated Archives” — as if they had drifted of their own accord into the Foreign Office’s basements.⁶

One important clarification runs counter to expectations. The content of these files is very mixed: it covers a wide range of subjects relating to colonial administration. What makes it a scandal is not so much what they contain as the fact that they were hidden.⁷

In 2013, the British government expressed regret before Parliament and agreed to pay compensation to 5,228 former Kenyan detainees — nearly twenty million pounds, legal costs included.⁸

The wording deserves careful attention, since that is the subject of this page. The minister stated that his Government “sincerely regret” that these abuses took place. To regret is not to apologise, and the text also states that the government continues to dispute its legal liability.⁹

He added a decisive sentence: this settlement does not establish a precedent in relation to any other former British colonial administration.¹⁰

In other words: the settlement applies to this one case alone. A comparable step nevertheless followed in 2019: an out-of-court settlement with thirty-three Cypriots who said they had been tortured.¹¹

Two details

They are anything but anecdotal: they reveal something about the way traces are, or are not, preserved.

The first. In 2011, the British Foreign Office published an official report to account for the affair and to demonstrate its new transparency. The minister then promised to release “every part of every paper of interest subject only to legal exemptions”. Yet this report was itself redacted: some of its passages were blacked out before publication.¹²

The second. A small batch of Kenyan files has never been found. A list from the 1980s records a run of Kenya boxes as destroyed, probably in London around 1980-1981, according to the archivist Mandy Banton.¹³

It should be added that the twenty thousand files made public are only part of what the Foreign Office held. It was later learnt that it was also unlawfully withholding hundreds of thousands of other historical documents, kept out of public view.¹⁴

What the new states did with their sovereignty

Decolonisation does not end with the departure of the former coloniser. The new governments immediately had to choose what they would keep, modify or invent.

Changing names and symbols: Many countries renamed their cities and their territory to erase the colonial imprint (Southern Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, Léopoldville became Kinshasa, the Gold Coast became Ghana).
Keeping the administrative tools: To avoid chaos, most of the new states kept the official language, the administrative divisions and the law inherited from colonisation.
Inventing new national histories: Populations grouped together within artificial borders had to be unified by creating new national narratives, anthems, national holidays and independent school curricula.

A power facing its own traces

The temptation to control the archives and the historical narrative is not confined to the former colonial powers.

After independence, several new states in turn restricted access to administrative documents or selected the authorised narratives. For Algeria after 1962, the historian Malika Rahal describes archives that had become “very difficult to access”. In France too, access to the archives of the Algerian War was long a matter of debate: it was only at the end of 2021 that the state opened its archives relating to judicial cases and police investigations from that period.¹⁵

Finding the words: the French example

The way a former colonial power names the past also changes over time.

In France, for decades, official vocabulary avoided the word “war”. People spoke publicly of the “events in Algeria”, and official texts of “operations carried out in North Africa”.¹⁶

It was not until the law of 18 October 1999 that the French state officially recognised the name “Algerian War”.¹⁷

What to take away

Other pages of this site show that what reaches us from the past is not representative. Stone is preserved, wood almost never. Clay tablets survive the fires that destroy palaces. We call an era “the Stone Age”, when that name mostly describes the state of our archaeological rubbish bins.

All this is down to the chance survival of materials.

Here, it is not chance. It is a selection, decided and organised by people, and it had a name.

This is the third time this encyclopedia has encountered such a situation. In 1562, Maya books were burnt on the orders of a cleric, Diego de Landa; today only three ancient Maya books remain, and a fourth that was long disputed. In 1936, the man who had come up with the idea of the Olympic torch relay, driven from his post because he was Jewish, saw his name erased from the story.¹⁸

So a further question joins those already asked when faced with a gap in the historical record:

has what is missing disappeared, or was it removed?

These are not the same questions, and they do not call for the same research.

Finally, one difficult point remains. What has been found are the files that had been moved. Those destroyed on the spot, in the territories, are lost forever — and there were a great many of them.¹⁹

The world map is recent

One last point gives a sense of the scale of the period.

In 1945, the United Nations had fifty-one member states.

It has had one hundred and ninety-three since 2011, the year South Sudan was admitted.²⁰

In other words, nearly three quarters of the one hundred and ninety-three member states were not members in 1945. The map studied at school is not an old map. It is a recent map, and it is still changing.

Note 1

Reasons for refusals to pass material to successor independent governments, and the underlying security concerns, are spelled out in the records; some indication of the volume of records destroyed or sent to London is given; methods of destruction and transmission are discussed;

Banton, Mandy, “Destroy? "Migrate"? Conceal? British Strategies for the Disposal of Sensitive Records of Colonial Administrations at Independence”, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 40, no. 2, 2012, p. 321-335