The British government yesterday April 18, 2012 released secret files from its colonial rule, one year after a High Court ordered that they be made public, the BBC reported. Some of the papers cover controversial episodes like the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, the evacuation of the Chagos Islands, and the Malayan Emergency.
The 1,200 records being released are the first of six tranches to be made public at the National Archives by November 2013. They cover the period between the 1930s and 1970s and were physically transferred to the UK. According to reports, the information also reveals efforts by the then colonial government to destroy and reclassify sensitive files. However, the Foreign Office has promised to release every paper it can.
The first set of papers released yesterday concerns among others, official fears that Nazis pretending to catch butterflies were plotting to invade East Africa in 1938, detailed accounts of the policy of seizing livestock from Kenyans suspected of supporting Mau Mau rebels in the 1950s and secret plans to deport a Greek Cypriot leader to the Seychelles despite launching talks with him to end a violent rebellion in Cyprus in 1955.
Following a High Court case brought by four Kenyans involved in the Mau Mau rebellion, the British government was in January 2011 forced to admit that 8,800 files had been secretly sent home from different colonies prior to their independence. It admitted at the time that the files had been held irregularly. Professor David Anderson, an adviser to the Kenyans in the case and professor of African History at Oxford University, said progress had been made in retrieving the 'lost' British Empire archives, but added that there was still a lurking culture of secrecy within government.
Writing in The Guardian yesterday, Caroline Elkins, a professor of history at Harvard University and author of a book on British colonial rule in Kenya, said the British government has for decades crafted and affirmed its own fictions of colonial benevolence. Its officials both at home and in far-flung colonies, she says, intensely managed a system of document culling, destruction, and removal in the waning days of imperial rule. Anything that might embarrass His Majesty’s Government was largely scrubbed or sequestered from records.
