The archival colour line: race, records and post-colonial custody

ABSTRACT

Using the concept of the ‘colour line,’ by which W.E.B. Du Bois named the problematic ‘relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea,’ this article argues that the ongoing custody of archives displaced to Europe during decolonization constitutes an ‘archival colour line’ that both results from and recapitulates the racism of the imperial project. The article does this by first arguing that developments in post-custodialism return significance to custody, calling into question the value of ‘digital repatriation’ and ‘joint’ or ‘shared heritage.’ Establishing the importance of archival custody, the article then considers the racialized nature of archival displacements in postcolonial contexts, drawing on data from a recent international survey. To look more closely at how such an archival colour line might be constituted, the article examines the dispossession of people from Kericho, Kenya, to illuminate three stages of archival colour line formation; the colonial setting (provenance); decolonization and the reconfiguration of economic interests (appraisal); and postcolonial archives and the momentum of reckoning (custody). The article concludes that the ongoing European custody of the records in question results from and fortifies a global racist order.

KEYWORDS:

• colour line
• displaced archives
• Migrated Archives
• British colonialism
• Kenya

Introduction: a global order of race

It snakes across the world map: the colour line.¹

Named as such by the American historian and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois at the Pan-African Congress in 1900 and again in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, the colour line is ‘the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.’² Du Bois claimed that it would be the central problem of the twentieth century, at home and internationally. In “Worlds of Color,” Du Bois found the roots of the global system for the exploitation of labour in the ‘dark colonial shadow’ of the European empires: ‘that makes the color problem and the labor problem to so great an extent two sides of the same human tangle.’³ According to Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda and Robbie Shilliam, Du Bois ‘illuminated the crucial significance of race and racism as fundamental organising principles of international politics; axes of hierarchy and oppression structuring the logics of world politics as we know it.’⁴

Though often portrayed as benign in British popular culture, British colonialism is well documented as a racialized and racially violent system of domination. For example, Anjali Arondekar notes that, ‘Indians appeared higher in the stratification of races than Africans, whereby, using allegedly Anglo-Saxon attributes as both the ideal and the norm, the inhabitants of India were considered more acceptable than those of Africa as they were said to have none of the supposed indolence of the blacks.’⁵ Anthropological and bureaucratic records alike describe colonial subjects in the language of racial hierarchy and oppression, but it is not only in the contents of these material traces of colonialism that racism is present, but in their global distribution today. Records displaced during decolonization are almost wholly in White hands.⁶

In this paper, we will argue that it is through the racist global order that persists in the wake of colonialism that ‘white men’s countries’ can and do retain records that rightfully belong in the places of their creation.⁷ We will not rehearse the arguments that support the assertion that it is right to return these records, as they have been set out elsewhere.⁸ Instead, we first look at why possession matters, reviewing archival thought about custody from the colonial period to the present day. We will then look at data from a recent international survey of disputed archival claims to reveal a racialized pattern of displacement in extant claims, which constitutes an archival colour line.⁹ To more fully understand the relationship between Whiteness, property, and archival displacement, we will then look closely at the dispossession of Kipsigis people in Kenya under British rule. This case study reveals three stages of archival colour line formation: 1) the colonial setting (provenance) 2) decolonization and the reconfiguration of economic interests (appraisal) 3) postcolonial archives and the momentum of reckoning (custody). Finally, we will argue that the status quo constitutes an archival colour line that derives from and participates in racism as a global order. This builds on a long history of scholarship about the colour line since it was named by Du Bois, who understood it as working locally within the United States, and globally.

Regarding the operations of the colour line in the United States, Du Bois wrote that, ‘only by a union of intelligence and sympathy across the color line in this critical period of the Republic shall justice and right triumph.’¹⁰ The concept has been widely used in scholarship of American society, found in studies of diverse topics such as queerness, literature, law, barbering, advertising, adoption and sport.¹¹ Much Du Bois scholarship has been intersectional: a 2007 collection of essays edited by Susan Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum surface gender and sexuality in Du Bois’ work, and in the same year Joseph Gerteis used the concept to frame his study of interracial class-based political coalition in the US.¹² In Sounding the Color Line, Erich Nunn (2015) discusses ‘racialized structures of feeling’ connected with genres of music, and Jennifer Lynn Stoever (2016) used the colour line to study how listening and ‘willful white mishearing’ has consequences for the lives of Black people in the US, including a look at Du Bois’ experience of radio as broadcasting became consolidated in White hands after the Depression and ‘American radio became more censored, segregated and propaganda-laden.’¹³ As such, the colour line remains a site of significance in scholarship of the deadly persistence of White supremacy in US society.

In international context, the global colour line has framed studies of international relations and history. In studies in a 2014 volume edited by Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda and Robbie Shilliam, the colour line is used to look critically at international relations theory and its applications in contexts such as the Cold War and the sugar plantations of British Guiana.¹⁴ Kojo Koram’s edited volume of 2018 examines the construction of race in international drug prohibition regimes, and Carina E. Ray (2015) has studied the ways that interracial sex complicated and illuminated tensions around the colour line between Britain and Ghana during and at the end of the colonial period.¹⁵ Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, through the colour line concept and Du Bois’ thinking about Whiteness in his 1910 essay “The Souls of White Folk”, study closely the international dimension of White racial identity, showing it to be the basis of geopolitical cooperation in the face of revolt.¹⁶ They argue that ‘the assertion of whiteness was born in the apprehension of imminent loss,’ hearing what Du Bois called ‘somnolent writhings in black Africa … angry groans in India … .’¹⁷

Could the scramble to remove records at the end of empire also have happened in the apprehension of loss? Are British claims to ownership of the Migrated Archives, a collection of records sutured together by Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office from records removed from 37 former colonies, hidden for many years and only revealed in 2011, steeped in a sense of colonial loss? And does this help to explain Britain’s refusal to entertain the requests for their return since the late 1960s? Though British thinking about the ownership of these records has varied over time, the current line is that the records are British public records and belong at The National Archives in London, where they are presently in custody.¹⁸

Cartographies of custody: why possession matters

The custody of records has been an important archival precept since ancient times, when the safekeeping of records in palaces, temples and specially designated store rooms placed records at the seat of power, and imbued them with a trustworthiness derived from their unaltered state, presumed because of the authority of their custodians.¹⁹ This connection between authority, custodianship and trustworthiness was recited and reified in subsequent archival regimes, perhaps most explicitly by the ius archivi theorists of seventeenth century Germany, such as Ahasver Fritsch who wrote that, ‘documents (scripturae) produced from a public archive, even if they might not be public themselves, routinely generate complete confidence, and prove fully.’²⁰

While ius archivi arguments about the connection between custody and trustworthiness are eclipsed by diplomatics in Western archival thought, and in the Dutch Manual of 1898 custody is not yet firmly coupled with concepts of ‘archival quality,’ in 1922 the English archivist Sir Hilary Jenkinson powerfully reasserted the significance of custody in his Manual of Archives Administration.²¹ Here, continuous custody becomes more firmly wedded to the archival quality of records. Treating at length the arrangements for custody that might apply in different administrative circumstances, Jenkinson finally comes to articulate the conditions that must be present to secure archives’ ‘reputation for impartiality and authenticity’ during transfers of custody.²² These are:

1) There must be reasonable probability of the Authority’s own continued existence … . 2) The Archives must be taken over direct from the original owner or his official heir or representative. 3) The authority taking over must be prepared to subscribe to the ordinary rules of Archive management directed to the preservation of Archive character … . 4) In all cases, then, the Authority taking over must be prepared to take over en bloc: there must be no selecting of “pretty” specimens.²³

Breaking with Jenkinson, T.R. Schellenberg and his colleagues at the US National Archives and Records Administration would recognize the necessity of appraisal in the face of the velocity of records production by the state.²⁴ Though this began the development of a discourse around appraisal and the proliferation of theories and methods for appraising and selecting records for archival preservation, custody as a component of the defence of records essentially remained intact, though Jeannette Bastian notes that American archivists tended to think less rigidly about the chain of custody espoused by Jenkinson.²⁵ It was not until the microprocessing revolution that would see desktop computers enter office work that custody would be squarely re-examined, during a period of fervent research and debate on the nature and substance of records, how they should be defined and identified in digital environments, and what their particular characteristics meant for record-keeping theory and practice. In anticipation of the technical issues, F. Gerald Ham supposed in 1980 that a ‘post-custodial paradigm’ was on the horizon.²⁶

A decade later, David Bearman suggested that custody was unnecessary for the preservation of digital records, and that they could remain in the places and systems of their creation, to be audited by archivists.²⁷ Adrian Cunningham’s excellent summary of the post-custodial debate that ensued notes that the effect of Bearman’s proposal was that’ “postcustodial” became fatally confused with “non-custodial” in the minds of many observers and participants in the discourse.’²⁸ Here, Luciana Duranti intervened, reasserting the importance of custodianship, drawing on the ius archivi writers in ‘‘Archives as Place,’’ which named the archii limes (archival threshold) as the crucial line across which records become archival evidence.²⁹ James Lowry has recently suggested that social and socio-technical developments since the 1960s, such as loss of trust in the state and the advent of civic technologies, have inverted the operations of the threshold.³⁰ Aside from what the threshold represents in judgements of evidentiality, in practice most state archival systems continue a custodial model. But while state records follow the pattern of appraisal and transfer from creator across a threshold to custodial repository, the post-custodial concept has continued to develop.

Read together, Cunningham’s and Bastian’s précis of custodial and postcustodial evolution elaborate the nuances of the 1990s debate, and, particularly in Bastian, the many formations of post-custodial practice that developed in the 2000s, including the shift to participatory custody and responsible stewardship, much of it stemming from the community archives movement.³¹ One important feature of the more recent post-custodialism is its centring of records creators or owners, which is evident in the process Michelle Caswell describes at the South Asian American Digital Archive:

We borrow records from individuals, families, organizations, and academic and government repositories, then digitize them, archivally describe them in a culturally appropriate manner, link them to related materials in the archives, and make them freely accessible online to anyone in the world with an internet connection. After digitization, the physical materials remain with the individual, family, organization, or repository from which they originated.³²

This practice is a definitive break with the Jenkinsonian idea of custody as a tactic for preserving the archival character of records because it recognizes the digital surrogate as a useful and usable representation of the original, which is retained by the person, body or community that created or received it. Although this form of post-custodialism is most commonly practiced by community archives, special collections, and other kinds of collecting bodies (as opposed to the state archives tradition that shaped the post-custodial debate of the 1990s), where concerns about access, representation and memorialization may arguably outweigh concerns over the (legal and bureaucratic) evidential value of the records and their surrogates, this practice also nevertheless reflects an understanding that social and legal norms of records interpretation have and continue to change. While a traditional Jenkinsonian view would not even recognize these archives as properly archival, but perhaps as digital humanities projects, we must acknowledge that the juridical parameters and trust in the state that bounded the efforts of Jenkinson’s generation are less distinct now than they were one hundred years ago; both evidence and justice exist in much different registers today. The archival apparatus can no longer anticipate the evidential benchmarks set by the legal regimes into which records may be called for proof, because laws, precedents, and record-making and -keeping technologies evolve out of sync with each other. Indeed the transnational movement of people and records is such that it is not really possible to fully anticipate the future official or unofficial uses of records across time and space. This is apparent in the Refugee Rights in Records Initiative’s work with the Rohingya Project, which is applying human-centred post-custodialism to bureaucratic settings, capturing digital copies of official records carried by Rohingya refugees into diaspora, hashing them in a blockchain and storing them in cloud storage.³³ Combining these technological measures with the testimonies of community experts and witnesses, there is an attempt to anticipate the rules by which the copies will be gauged in future, while recognizing that certainty is impossible where every person, record and technology may be found in or between any possible jurisdiction(s): the post-custodial digital archive becomes a hedge against future need.

Post-custodialism, then, is no longer anchored to a dichotomy between juridically-oriented state record-making and use on one hand and socially-oriented community collecting and representation on the other, but recognizes that the fluidity of regulatory environments has a parallel in the fluidity of socio-technological records practices. Through this thinking about digital images of records, it becomes possible to conceive of ‘digital repatriation’ as a fully satisfactory solution to archival displacement. But claims from across the archival colour line for original records persist, and the data from the International Council on Archives survey of archival claims, which we will discuss below, shows that most claims are for originals, though many claimants appear to be willing to accept copies when the alternative is to receive nothing.³⁴ While restorative justice and reparation frameworks could be used to argue against digital repatriation as a resolution to archival claims, the current form of post-custodialism already contains within itself a reaffirmation of the importance of custody. Importance not for the preservation of an archival character, but as a physical manifestation of personal or community ownership (and provenance), and historical justice and reparation, both material and symbolic. This elevates archival custody from a factor in narrowly conceived ideals of trustworthiness to an archival practice that participates in much larger social and historical relations. Human-centred post-custodialism says: custody is important; the records belong with the individual or community. Significantly, it is the community that determines what is copied and held in custody. In the seeming immateriality of the digital environment, we see how material matters. It is for this reason that the notion of digital repatriation should be rejected as a solution to archival displacement in colonial contexts. Any further decision-making about the location, copying, distribution and display of displaced records by their post-colonial custodians is a continuation of the injustice of the original expropriation: it is the originals that belong in the places of their creation, and ethically, any copies retained in Britain or elsewhere should only be made and kept with the permission of the rightful owners. For the same reason, notions of shared or joint heritage, currently poorly articulated in the literature but nevertheless held out as ‘solutions to the very problems that custody itself has created,’ should be treated with suspicion in postcolonial settings.³⁵

In the particular case of archives expropriated to Britain during decolonization, it is interesting that Jenkinson’s abhorrence of appraisal has been forgotten by his heirs at The National Archives, which has accepted custody of the ‘pretty specimens’ that make up the Migrated Archives, furtively, heavily, multiply and abstrusely appraised over decades of secret third party custody.³⁶

Archival displacement during decolonization

Although we will look more closely at a portion of the Migrated Archives, this collection is only one example of ‘displaced archives,’ which are any archives removed from the place of their creation where the ownership of the archives is disputed.³⁷ There is a long history of archival displacements, described in work by R.H. Bautier and Leopold Auer, and in recent years there has been a proliferation of writing about archival displacements.³⁸ A strong current in the displaced archives literature concerns displacement at decolonization.³⁹ What has not been described to date is the racism implicit in these decolonial displacements. We will show that archives displaced by decolonization tend to follow a global colour line.

In 2018 and 2019, Lowry conducted an international survey of disputed archival claims over the ownership of records, along the lines of Auer 1998 survey.⁴⁰ Twenty-seven claims were made in total in the recent survey. The majority of these claims constitute dyads in which the claimant is the weaker power, economically and/or militarily, and this power asymmetry takes on a strongly racialized character when we look at the cases relating to decolonization, of which there are seventeen. These are: Claim 1 — Cameroon against France; Claim 5 — Swaziland against UK; Claim 7 — Benin against France; Claims 8 and 9 — Greenland against Denmark; Claim 10 — Malta against UK; Claim 13 — Morocco against France; Claim 14 — Morocco against Spain; Claim 15 — Uganda against UK; Claim 16 — Uganda against Tanzania; Claim 17 — Bank of Uganda against UK; Claim 18 — Kenya against UK; Claim 26 — Jamaica against UK; Claim 27 — Rwanda against Belgium, Germany, the Vatican and the ‘Protestant church’; Claim 28 — Trinidad and Tobago against Spain; Claim 32 — South Africa against the UK; Claim 33 — Bahrain against United Kingdom, India, Iran, Turkey and other Gulf Cooperation Council countries.⁴¹

The majority of these claims (13 of the 17) are made by countries where people of colour are the majority population, against majority White countries (in the case of Claim 33, a White majority country and others). Of the four claims that do not follow the colour line, it has been suggested that Claims 8 and 9 should actually be classified as intra-national claims rather than postcolonial claims,⁴² while the report itself notes that the claim of Uganda against Tanzania may derive from the movement of records during British decolonization.⁴³ There is, therefore, an almost totally racialized pattern to decolonial displacement in this data. It is not surprising that decolonial archival displacement follows the colour line drawn by European colonialism, or that records, like so much else, were extracted for the enrichment of Europe, but the racism in the ongoing displacement of these records has not yet been elucidated.⁴⁴ In the following case study of British colonialism in Kenya, we will look more closely at the racialized dispossession of land and records in and from Kericho, in Kenya. Kenya repeated in the 2019 survey its previous claim from the 1998 survey; both have gone unanswered.⁴⁵

Case study: the dispossession of Kericho

In their 2019 special issue in Archival Science, J. J. Ghaddar and Michelle Caswell (re)centralized the question of land reclamation in their appeal for a decolonial archival praxis.⁴⁶ It is through this lens that this section discusses the ‘colour line’ and the UK-Kenya ‘migrated archives.’ By looking at the social life of these archives, this section reflects on the ongoing relationships between colonial expropriation, racialization, and the multigenerational persistence of peoples dispossessed by these processes seeking reparations. The logic at work behind the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s unsubstantiated insistence that the Migrated Archives are the property of Her Majesty’s Government resembles the method of ownership through coercive assertion that characterized the establishment of a land tenure system in Kenya. These logics underlie the preservation of a White-British monopoly on lawmaking that supports a racialized distribution of rights and privileges. Cheryl Harris has argued that, ‘racial identity and property are deeply interrelated concepts.’ Harris elaborates that, ‘whiteness and property share a common premise — a conceptual nucleus — of a right to exclude.’⁴⁷ This case study examines how exclusionary record-keeping practices accompanied racialized land alienation with a focus on Kericho, Kenya. This focus is due to an ongoing claim filed by 115,000 people originally from Kericho who, together with legal representation, are lodging a complaint with the UN regarding their forcible removal from ancestral lands.

The relentlessness of peoples not only in Kenya but worldwide who have worked to counter the myths of colonial benevolence with evidence of its exploitation has culminated in what must be regarded as a critical juncture for European archives and their relation to the archival colour line. This section elaborates three stages of archival colour line formation: 1) the colonial setting (provenance) 2) decolonization and the reconfiguration of economic interests (appraisal) 3) postcolonial archives and the momentum of reckoning (custody). If this section reads as heavy with historical detail, that is because this context is absent from Britain’s National Archives’ catalogue descriptions and that absence aids to cover-up the institution’s own imperial duress.

Provenance: racialization and expropriation in service of a commercial economy

‘Documentary bullying’ played a central role in British colonial occupation in Kenya. The following section focuses on how recordkeeping practices aided racialization and expropriation processes in order to historicize ongoing archival and land restoration claims. Driven by both financial aspirations and debts in the late 19^th century, British colonial officers surveyed the British East Africa Protectorate for ‘economic potential’ and identified the lands most suited for agricultural production.⁴⁸ The territory was established as a settler colony and administered through a system of direct rule for the purpose of revenue generation. By the early 20^th century, the colonial government and foreign-owned companies such as Brooke Bond and James Finlay took an interest in Kericho as a site for tea plantations and maize cultivation. The area is located in the highlands west of the Rift Valley and is one of the leading rainfall areas in Kenya with an earth covered by rich, red and well-draining soils. These climatic features combined with a short dry season and low range temperatures piqued the interests of a colonial government, White settler population, and agricultural corporations who shared an interest in revenue generation and a fantasy of making the land a ‘White Man’s Country.’⁴⁹ This process was a matter of force and law, both inscribed in colonial documents.

The Kericho area was inhabited by Kalenjin speaking peoples who were involved in both cattle keeping and in tilling the land, which was regarded communally and controlled by clan elders.⁵⁰ In order to develop commercial agriculture, the British colonial authorities proceeded to alienate the peoples of Kericho from their lands. As John Lonsdale remarked, ‘this transformation was the work of force. The British employed violence on a locally unprecedented scale.’⁵¹ This force was met by resistance.⁵² As Nanjala Nyabola summarizes, between 1893 and 1911, ‘the colonial administration was forced to launch 28 major military operations in the territory, often aimed at suppressing communities that refused to collaborate with the colonizers.’⁵³ In Kericho, one of the ways resistance took form was through agricultural refusal. For example, the colonial government established maize cultivation in Kericho in order to feed the labour force that the neighbouring tea plantations would require. In her doctoral dissertation on commodity production in Kericho, Sally Kosgei explains how colonial authorities condoned the use of financial coercion and physical force to incorporate the local Kipsigis into farming. According to Kosgei, askaris ‘rounded up men and women and forced them to plant maize … those whose maize did not grow were whipped and fined.’⁵⁴ Nevertheless, the Orkoiyot, the spiritual and military leader of the Kipsigis, resisted the agricultural imposition for decades until the colonial government deported the entire clan. Concurrently, the colonial authorities alienated roughly 520 square kilometres of Kipsigis land, incorporating it into the White Highlands.⁵⁵

In the 1930s, hundreds of dispossessed Kipsigis families walked, accompanied by the army, for weeks from their Kericho homes to a ‘native reserve’ in the uninhabitable Gwassi Hills.⁵⁶ Between 1897 and 1920, the British government enacted a series of regulations that created a legal framework for an English freehold tenure system in order to ‘protect the settlers’ land rights after expropriating land from the natives.⁵⁷ This resulted in the racial spatialization of territory into the White Highlands, which consisted of the fertile and temperate lands of central Kenya, and native reserves, which were the designated lands the British allocated to African peoples on the basis of a colonial interpretation of ethnicity. The racialization of identity and the racial subordination of peoples across the territory provided the ideological basis for expropriation.⁵⁸ Political scientist Christopher Leo summarizes, ‘in order to be viable, the colonial system of landownership had to be sustained by laws that rigidly separated Europeans, Asians, and Africans into strata of differential status, rights, and privileges. The division of land was the keystone of the system.’⁵⁹ For example, the Crown Lands Ordinance of 1915 restricted Africans from owning or acquiring land in the highlands, making it impossible for the expropriated peoples of Kericho to buy back their land and acquire the title, lease or deed recognized by the tenure system, even if they would have had the means.

The colonial authorities restricted and controlled the mobility of Africans from their reserves through a process of bureaucratic racialization, which was enforced with the threat or use of force. The separation of the highlands and reserves spatially linked territory to concepts of ethnicity (i.e. the ‘Kipsigis reserve’) and concepts of ethnicity to concepts of race (making distinctions between ‘European,’ ‘Asian,’ and ‘African’). This process was reinforced by the kipande system, which required all ‘African’ males 16 years and older to wear a metal container holding a biometric document around their neck whenever they left their reserve. Neither Asian nor European peoples had to carry such a pass. The law required African males to produce the pass to police when asked. The failure to do so could result in heavy fines, imprisonment, and/or flogging.⁶⁰ Scholars Derek Peterson and Giacomo Macola summarize, ‘colonial governments were documentary regimes’ that used paper-based bureaucracy as a tool of domination.⁶¹ The British colonial government used the kipande system to punish the ‘disobedience’ of Africans who did not conform to the racial spatialization that expropriation produced and to reinforce racial and ethnic identities. By contrast, any ethnic variety of the White settler population, which was composed of agricultural migrants from South Africa, British and other European aristocrat-adventurers, post-war English migrants, and itinerant career colonists, evaporated into shared legal rights and privileges claimed on the basis of superiority.⁶²

Another way of rationalizing the expropriation of peoples from these lands to attract private commercial production was the introduction of a document-based system of land registration and tenancy that provided a 21-year renewable lease to settlers and companies, which was later extended to 99 years, and later still 999.⁶³ In the 1920s, tea companies Brooke Bond (now Unilever) and the African Highlands Produce Company (now James Finlay) formed in the Kericho regions, benefiting from the practically permanent 999-year lease opportunity that the Crown Land Ordinance afforded them. Tea had been a profitable commodity for centuries, the production and market control of which was fundamental to imperial pursuits. Since the 18^th century, England’s tax base rested upon overseas trade, and corporations such as the English East India Company financed the monarchy through loans.⁶⁴ The global tea industry amassed wealth through tax and retail, which was shared between state, crown and company. In 1933, Kenya’s Colonial Administration started exporting tea to London.⁶⁵ At that time, the United Kingdom accounted for roughly half of the international tea consumption.⁶⁶ In the same year, former rivals Dutch and British tea growers signed an agreement to restrict the production of tea in their respective colonies in order to protect their imperial industries across Asia and eastern Africa, which was, as historian Erika Rappaport points out, effectively ‘a step toward European economic integration.’⁶⁷

While European primacy consolidated the global tea economy, the tea estates of Kericho recruited young African boys as labourers to pick tea, plough the land, and tend seedlings. Preferred for their nimble fingers and lower salaries, which were half as much as for adults, these boys lived on the estates in buildings resembling Mississippi sharecropper shacks. They worked from half past six in the morning to three in the afternoon without a break and attended classes on the estate from five to eight in the evening. The education was poor and very few attendees achieved full literacy. The wages were too low to subsist on and the turnover rate was high.⁶⁸ While the British colonial government coerced Africans into wage labour, the administration prohibited them from growing the most profitable cash crops for themselves, including tea.⁶⁹ The aligned administrative, settler, and corporate interests racially segregated the economy as they did territory. The cornerstone to this segregation was land ownership, created through forceful expropriation and codified through deeds, titles, and leases.

Appraisal: preserving elite interests

Across the central highlands and elsewhere in the Kenya colony frustrations over political and economic exclusion fomented into rebellion, leading the colonial administration to declare an Emergency in October 1952.⁷⁰ Land theft ranked high among the reasons for those who organized into the Kenya Land and Freedom Army in opposition to settlers, foreign companies, and colonial administration. By 1960, the UK government, colonial administration, private companies, and settlers were considering what the British/European future in Kenya would be after independence. While the UK government was interested in assisting White settlers in Kenya maintain their claim to land and lifestyle, it was more motivated to preserve commercial agriculture during and after the transfer of political power. For example, the British colonial government implemented a Plan to Intensify the Development of African Agriculture, which included a £5 million UK government loan to reform customary land practices and opened cash crop cultivation to African farmers.⁷¹

Across its falling empire, the UK tried to curate decolonization as a strategic mix between personnel withdrawal and institutional continuity. This was well illustrated by ‘Operation Legacy.’⁷² Facing expulsion, colonial administrations focused on sorting their records. In Kenya, officers across the colony were instructed to sift through classified files and identify any material which would cause the UK or any other European government embarrassment, incriminate any colonial collaborators under an independent administration, or privilege any national political party over one another. Administrators would either destroy, remove or redact files according to these criteria. Officers across the British empire participated in this purge, leading to the destruction of an unknowable number of documents and the removal of over 20,000 files from 37 ex-colonies (referred to as the Migrated Archives). These records were stored secretly in maximum security facilities in and outside of London until 2011 following a lawsuit against the British government for the use of torture in Kenya leading up to independence.⁷³ Much has been written about this exercise and how British recordkeeping was used to cover up the systematic violence of the Emergency period.⁷⁴ Record removal did not end at independence.

The British High Commission in Nairobi continued to collect certain kinds of records through the 1960s and 70s and dispatch them to London. Among these were files related to the Kenya Land Transfer Programme (KLTP), which oversaw the transfer of over 1 million acres of formerly European-owned, large-scale farms and ranches to African families.⁷⁵ In 1981, the British High Commission in Nairobi arranged the disposal of 939 files related to the KLTP with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s (FCO) Library and Records Department, leading to their transfer to the Migrated Archives.⁷⁶ Among these are files related to Kericho estates.⁷⁷ In correspondence arranging the dispatch of the KLTP files, the British officer at the High Commission was quoted, sympathizing with Kenya’s White settlers as ‘the people who had literally carved their estates out of the bush and nursed them to high production.’⁷⁸ The process of record removal (appraisal) was accompanied by colonial mythologies that erased African life and labour because to acknowledge either would endanger the notion of White/European superiority that persisted in postcolonial England.

Meanwhile, Kenya’s new political leadership was quick to act on the importance of preserving certain documents in relation to reconfiguring rights and privileges, especially regarding property and landownership. Rather thanargued oversee a redistribution of lands to the dispossessed, the administration awarded large estates to a coalition of ruling elites.⁷⁹ The new government established a National Archive through an act of parliament in 1965. In its first decade of operation, through a cooperation with the Ministry of Lands and Settlement, Kenya’s National Archives, assisted with a microfilming project of over 1.2 million land titles from 21 district land registries as a way of entrenching property rights and the security of relevant documentation.⁸⁰ However, land files were not easily accessible to the public. The Department of Lands controlled the microfilmed registries. The National Archives, as the nominal site of public record deposit, serviced the court system by providing land records in tenancy/ownership disputes. Many of the daily files of the archive’s activity in the 1970s mention the inability to locate certain case files.⁸¹ Musila Musembi, former director of Kenya’s National Archives, summarized the importance of this problem; ‘there was need to have full documentation on land ownership in order to facilitate a gradual land transfer to the Africans.’⁸² Unfortunately, such documentation was out of reach for those who had fought for land restoration in the war for independence, such as the Kipsigis of Kericho. However, both the government and those still fighting for land restoration pursued archival access.

Custody: postcolonial archives and the momentum of reckoning

Ad-hoc assertion formed the basis of the UK’s custodial claim over the Migrated Archives. In 1963, a Foreign Office administrator described the proprietary right for the UK government to oversee record removal and destruction from across the decolonizing empire. He wrote to a colleague, ‘the disposal of these papers is a matter to be decided between the Colonial Office and the Commonwealth Relations Office since the basic consideration is one of custody and not of origin.’⁸³ However, the independent Kenyan government disagreed. Among the authorities granted to Kenya’s Chief Archivist was the directive ‘to take such steps as may be necessary to acquire and have returned to Kenya any public records of historical value … which maybe have been exported before the establishment of the National Archive’.⁸⁴ In 1967 the Kenyan government asked the British High Commission for the return of removed records.⁸⁵ This request marked the beginning of an ongoing negotiation process regarding the custody of Kenya’s historical documents.⁸⁶ Officials in the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Library and Records Department deliberated how best to respond to the Kenyan inquiry, deciding to answer that, ‘it was general practice for the administration of the Dependent Territories to withdraw, shortly before independence, certain documents, the property of HMG, which it was not possible to hand over.’⁸⁷ A few UK officials decided amongst themselves to refuse restoration, thereby establishing the origins of the UK’s custodial claim to Kenya’s (as well as 36 other former colonies’) archives.

The UK government first publicly acknowledged the existence of the Migrated Archives during a legal trial in 2011 thanks to a coalition of persistent survivors of Kenya’s colonial independence war, historians, lawyers and archivists. However, because the lawsuit was settled out of court, the UK government did not have to answer to the legal question of archival custody. In fact, to date, the UK government has provided no legal basis for these archives’ ongoing presence in England, nor has it acknowledged that the removal of certain documents from former colonies was an ongoing practice after independence.⁸⁸ The trial demonstrated how crucial access to these archives is to legally pursue injustices arising from the colonial context. The continued dislocation of these archives from their original location preserves British and corporate impunity.

In March 2019, Kenya’s National Land Commission ruled that the UK government and multinational tea companies, such as Unilever, had unlawfully seized lands belonging to the Kipsigi and Talai peoples in Kericho. Subsequently, a legal team representing a group of claimants filed a complaint to begin mediation with the UK, drawing attention to the use of rape, murder and arson in the process of dispossession. The complaint was refused outright. According to one of the lawyers representing the claimants, ‘The UK’s main argument has been to say it is unfair to hear these cases so long after the events because it is difficult to access the relevant evidence from the time … ’⁸⁹ The suggestion that the complaint occurred ‘so long after the events’ is at odds with the timeframe established by the 999-year colonial-issued leases. Additionally, missing from this argument was an acknowledgement that upon Kenyan independence, the UK government destroyed and removed thousands of official documents to London where they were inaccessibly stored under maximum security conditions until their gradual and partial release in 2011.

The FCO decided again and again to remove and keep inaccessible certain documents from former colonies precisely because of their possible use as evidence, thereby creating the very conditions cited by the UK government’s refusal to hear the Kericho land complaint. Just as records such as titles and deeds thinly veiled the use of force at the time of colonial dispossession, the inaccessibility of said records thinly veils the reluctance of the UK government to acknowledge the imperial past other than as a nostalgic source of pride. In this way, ‘Operation Legacy’ is ongoing. In 1933, Kobiro Arap Temurin from Buret asked the Kenya Land Commission, ‘Who got the profit of the farms sold, without our knowing? I wish to know before I die.’⁹⁰ In 2019, Kibore Cheruiyot Ngasura of Kericho echoed these words in an exchange with reporters, wishing for the UK to recognize and apologize for colonial injustice during his lifetime.⁹¹ The UK’s flimsy claim to the Migrated Archives not only resembles an imperial proprietary sense of entitlement but perpetuates racial exclusion to rights and privileges thereby maintaining an archival colour line. However, the persistence of peoples from across Britain’s former empire demanding acknowledgement of the past point the Migrated Archives in a different direction.

Conclusion: an archival colour line

The British Colonial Government constructed racial identity in Kenya as a means to protect the privileged access of White settlers to fertile lands and a lavish lifestyle through different forms of bureaucracy (provenance). These included the kipande system and legislation prohibiting the ownership by Africans of lands most promising for commercial agricultural development. Title-deeds provided a rational façade to dispossession, thus concealing processes of force and coercion that attempted to segregate Kenyan lands and peoples along racial and ethnic lines. Eventually, an uprising of Kenya’s landless toppled the exclusionary vision of ‘White Man’s Land,’ and amidst the uncertainty of decolonization, when it was not known what shape the independent nation would take, the UK government secreted thousands of records away to London where they sat out of public view until 2012 (appraisal). The British High Commissioner continued to send certain documents related to Kenya to London, where they joined the Migrated Archives. When pressed on the matter of record removal and secrecy, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office stated simply that they were the property of Her Majesty’s Government and that, despite decades of requests, the Kenya Government had no claim to them. Cheryl Harris’s notion that racial identity and property share a conceptual nucleus, the right to exclude, helps to explain the UK’s position (custody). By discussing an archival colour line, we bring into focus not only the ways in which record-creation assisted in allocating and/or denying racialized rights and privileges in the colonial context but also how that racialization in return impacts record use, access, and location today.

Record-making co-constructed the empire, and the record-keeping apparatus of the state today sustains the global racist order inaugurated by colonial expansion, dispossession and documentation. We can add to the growing list of principles, instruments and precedents that support the full repatriation of the Migrated Archives, the incongruity between TNA’s break with Jenkinsonian ideals of the chain of custody, and its ambivalence towards human-centred post-custodialism. Neither entrenched in the lofty principles of its positivistic past nor affected by the human-centred practices of today, TNA must find its guiding principle elsewhere — a facetious supposition, because the guiding principle is in the directives of the state, issued in the apprehension of loss. The guiding principle is the colour line.

The case study shows that imperial territorialization had land as its object and records and violence as its two foremost instruments. As such, records should be understood as a kind of force — the record-as-command⁹² — because they are able to achieve things in the world, as well as to represent things in the world, through what they say, if they endure and where they exist. The evolution of post-custodialism towards models that assume that records will remain with their owners recognizes that records are material artefacts of a power that may belong in particular hands. As our case study shows, the entanglements between land and records in the colonial project are such that Ghaddar’s assertion that ‘ … the archives cannot be decolonized so long as the land is colonized’ arguably also holds true when reformulated: the land cannot be decolonized so long as the archive is colonized.⁹³ Among many other abuses that call for redress, we will not have reached a time of true post-coloniality until what was taken has been returned.

The archival colour line demarcates a large scale and deeply historical racism through the dis/possession of records beyond the British imperial context, as the ICA survey data shows, with open claims against France, Spain, Belgium and Germany. What these claims represent is an archival colour line that reflects in records ‘the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men,’ where custodianship is with ‘white men’s countries.’ Enduring archival displacement is made possible by the archival colour line, just as it reinscribes that line on the world map, day after day.

Archival sources

The UK’s National Archives (TNA), FCO 12/278, Letter, J D Edgerton to E M Garland, 26 January 1981;

evidence suggests that the British High Commission continued to send documents related to

land transfer after 1981, see TNA, FCO 12/344, ‘Kenya Land Transfer Files,’ 1982-1985.

TNA, FCO 141/19,839; 141/19,821; 141/19,693; 141/19,788; 141/19,803; 141/19,520; 141/19,794; 141/

19,494; 141/19,392; 141/19,672.

TNA, FCO 12/278, Summary of the Land Transfer Programme by the British High Commissioner at

Nairobi to the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, 7 May 1979.

Kenya National Archives (KNA), AR/12/30, ‘Lands and Settlement,’ Letter, P W Kariuki to Kukubo, 26

March 1973.

KNA 1/77; KNA 2/81; KNA 2/76.

TNA, CO 822/3199, Letter, W T Wright to E H Jones, 11 November 1963

TNA, FCO 141/19,934, ‘Kenya: Migrated Records,’ Foreign and Commonwealth Office Library and

Records Department, 7 July 1982.

Acknowledgments

In this work, we are indebted to many scholars, but principally to W.E.B. Du Bois, for naming the colour line, Nathan Mnjama and Mandy Banton for their long and continuing work for the repatriation of the Migrated Archives, and Jamila Ghaddar, for calling attention to land in archival discourse.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Riley Linebaugh

Riley Linebaugh is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Giessen, Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture. She is currently a doctoral fellow at the Leibniz Institute for European History in Mainz. She holds an MA in Archives and Records Management from University College London.

James Lowry

James Lowry is Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, Queens College, City University of New York, where he is director of the Archival Technologies Lab. Formerly co-Director of the Liverpool University Centre for Archive Studies, James is an honorary research fellow at Liverpool, where he conducted the international survey of disputed archival claims for the International Council on Archives. He is editor of the forthcoming volume Disputed Archival Heritage, with Routledge.

Notes

1. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk; Mnjama, “Migrated Archives”; Banton, “British Strategies ”; Ghaddar, “Total Archives”. We use the term Migrated Archives to refer specifically to records removed by British colonial administrations from former colonies that the UK National Archives have since made public, i.e. the FCO 141 series. We use this term in this way to make the records in this series more discoverable, although we object to the passive ‘migrated’ euphemism. This text points to how record removal functioned partly to secure White privileges and property upon decolonization.

2. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 15.

3. Du Bois, “Worlds of Color,” 423, 442.

4. Anievas, et al., Race and Racism.

5. Arondekar, For the Record, 110.

6. In capitalizing ‘White’ we are following Nell Irvin Painter and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s arguments for making Whiteness visible. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/22/why-white-should-be-capitalized/

7. The notion of ‘white men’s countries’ is examined in Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 3.

8. See ACARM Position Paper, “The ‘Migrated Archives,’ 2; Banton, “ ‘Lost’ and ‘Found’ ”; Banton, ‘History Concealed, History Withheld’; Lowry, ‘Radical Empathy’; Mnjama, ‘Migrated Archives’”; Mnjama and Lowry, “A Proposal for Action”.

9. Lowry, Disputed Archival Claims.

10. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 127.

11. See Somerville, Queering the Colour Line; Tonwer, Faulkner on the Color Line; Milewski, Litigating Across the Colour Line; Mills, Cutting Along the Color Line; Chambers, Madison Avenue and the Colour Line; Raleigh, Selling Transracial Adoption; Miller and Wiggins, Sport and the Colour Line.

12. Gillman and Weinbaum (eds.), Next to the Colour Line; Gerteis, Class and the Colour Line.

13. Nunn, Sounding the Colour Line; Stoever, The Sonic Colour Line, 257.

14. See note 4 above.

15. Koram, The War on Drugs; and Ray, Crossing the Colour Line.

16. Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line.

17. Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 2; W.E.B. Du Bois quoted in Lake and Reynolds, 2.

18. The UK National Archives’ Catalogue, FCO 141. For a fuller discussion on the disputed nature of the ‘migrated archives’ legal status, see Linebaugh, “Joint Heritage.”

19. Duranti, “Archives as Place.”

20. Head, “Documents, Archives and Proof,” 919, quoting Ahasver Fritsch, Tractatus de iure archivi et cancellarie (Jena, 1664, pp. 38–9). ‘The tract was republished in 1690 and again in Jacob Wencker, ed., Collecta archivi et cancellariae jura (Strasbourg, 1715), pp. 13–49, to which all citations refer.’

21. Muller, Feith, and Fruin, Manual for the Arrangement.

22. Jenkinson, A Manual of Archives Administration, 41.

23. Ibid.

24. Schellenberg, Modern Archives: Principles and Techniques.

25. Bastian, “Mine, Yours, Ours.”

26. Ham, “Archival Strategies.”

27. Bearman, “An Indefensible Bastion.”

28. Cunningham, “Archives as a Place.”

29. Duranti, “Archives as Place.”

30. Lowry, “El archivo invertido.”

31. Cunningham, “Archives as a Place”; Bastian, “Mine, Yours, Ours.”

32. Caswell, “Seeing Yourself in History,” 33.

33. The Rohingya Project and the Refugee Rights in Records Initiative.

34. See note 9 above.

35. Bastian, “Mine, Yours, Ours,” 26.

36. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office was a third party custodian because the creating agencies are in the 37 former dependencies, according to the concepts of functional pertinence and state succession.

37. Lowry, Displaced Archives.

38. See Bautier’s report for the 1961 International Conference of the Round Table on Archives, Warsaw, Poland, and Auer, “Displaced Archives.”

39. See the bibliography compiled by Banton, et al., for the ICA’s Expert Group on Shared Archival Heritage: Banton, Jaman, and Ratcliff, “Displaced Archives.”

40. Lowry, Disputed Archival Claims; and Auer, “Disputed Archival Claims: Analysis.”

41. See note 9 above.

42. Laureano de Macedo, EGSAH feedback (personal correspondence) on Lowry, Disputed Archival Claims

43. Lowry, Disputed Archival Claims.

44. The records removed during decolonization had intelligence value that the metropolitan countries wanted to retain, and keep from incoming governments, as Banton’s discussion of the WATCH appraisal system makes clear. Banton, “ ‘Lost’ and ‘Found.’ ” A forthcoming book chapter by Stanley Griffin called “Value Displaced, Value Re/Claimed: Reparations, Shared Heritage and Caribbean Archival Records” vividly illustrates how colonialists extracted value from colonized lands and peoples, and how administrative records both document these extractions and are themselves extracted value when they are displaced.

45. Auer, “Disputed Archival claims: Analysis.”

46. Ghaddar and Caswell, “To Go Beyond.”

47. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1714.

48. Elkins, “Pax Britannica,” 1–30.

49. Kosgei, “Commodity Production,” 24–53.

50. For a more extensive description of precolonial land use and social organization in the lands west of the Rift, see Lonsdale, “The Conquest State of Kenya,” 20. For an overview of land alienation in Kenya’s Rift Valley, see Shanguhyia and Koster, “Land and Conflict”.

51. Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley, 13.

52. Kinyatti, History of Resistance; Anderson, Black Mischief

53. Nyabola, “Africa is Not Waiting.”

54. Kosgei, “Commodity Production,” 36.

55. Leo, Land and Class, 41.

56. Parveen, “How Kenyans are Seeking Amends.”

57. Letete and Sarr, “Evolution and Measurement of Institutions,” 12.

58. This is a reformulation of Harris’s discussion of the construction of race in the context of U.S. American slavery and conquest: Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1715.

59. See note 55 above.

60. Kinyatti, History of Resistance, 30.

61. Peterson and Macola, “Homespun Historiography,” 8.

62. For scholarship on the ethnic composition of Whiteness in Kenya, see Khan, “Kenya’s South Africans”; McIntosh, Unsettled: Denial and Belonging.

63. Kosgei, “Commodity Production,” 7.

64. Erikson, Between Monopoly and Free Trade.

65. Kenya Human Rights Commission, A Comparative Study, 3.

66. Bishnupriya, “History of the International Tea Market.”

67. Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire, 266.

68. Kosgei, “Commodity Production,” 66–71.

69. Colonial coercion into wage labour (creating the need to earn money) is explained by the introduction and enforcement of taxation and the development of financial exchange for commodities such as salt, sugar, cloth, etc. See Gardner, Taxing Colonial Africa.

70. The ‘Emergency,’ referred to as the Mau Mau Rebellion or Kenya Land and Freedom Uprising, has been the subject of much scholarship. For a fuller picture, see Wunyabari O. Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya: An Analysis of a Peasant Revolt, Indiana University Press, 1998; David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005; Elkins, Britain’s Gulag.

71. Saeteurn, “Brewing Inequalities,”238.

72. ‘Operation Legacy’ is broadly understood as the process by which British Colonial Governments, in cooperation with the Colonial Office in London, tidied up their paperwork in the early 1960s so as not to leave undesirable traces of their rule in the hands of newly independent regimes across the fallen empire. ‘Operation Legacy’ is an appealing shorthand for this process, but was not in fact the name used in Kenya. In Kenya, administrators referred to the ‘Watch System,’ which had a nearly synonymous meaning. See Sato, “Operation Legacy.”

73. “Britain’s Colonial Files to be released,” The Times.

74. For example, see Anderson, “Guilty Secrets,” 142–160.

75. Ogot, “The Decisive Years,” 64.

76. UK National Archives (TNA), FCO 12/278, Letter, J D Edgerton to E M Garland, 26 January 1981; evidence suggests that the British High Commission continued to send documents related to land transfer after 1981, see TNA, FCO 12/344, ‘Kenya Land Transfer Files,’ 1982–1985.

77. Such as, TNA, FCO 141/19,839; 141/19,821; 141/19,693; 141/19,788; 141/19,803; 141/19,520; 141/19,794; 141/19,494; 141/19,392; 141/19,672.

78. TNA, FCO 12/278, Summary of the Land Transfer Programme by the British High Commissioner at Nairobi to the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, 7 May 1979.

79. Ochieng’, “Structural and Political Changes,” 83–110.

80. Kenya National Archives (KNA), AR/12/30, ‘Lands and Settlement,’ Letter, P W Kariuki to Kukubo, 26 March 1973.

81. For example, KNA 1/77; KNA 2/81; KNA 2/76.

82. Musembi, Archives Management, 77.

83. TNA, CO 822/3199, Letter, W T Wright to E H Jones, 11 November 1963; emphasis ours.

84. National Council for Law Reporting, “Public Archives and Documentation.”

85. See Banton, “Destroy, Migrate, Conceal,” 321–335.

86. See Mnjama, “Migrated Archives”; and Mnjama and Lowry, “A Proposal for Action,” 101–114.

87. TNA, FCO 141/19,934, ‘Kenya: Migrated Records,’ Foreign and Commonwealth Office Library and Records Department, 7 July 1982.

88. ACARM Position Paper, “The ‘Migrated Archives,” 2.

89. Parveen, The Guardian. My emphasis added.

90. As quoted by Kosgei, “Commodity Production,” 49.

91. Parveen, The Guardian.

92. Lowry, “The Record-as-Command.”

93. Ghaddar, “Total Archives.”