The Foreign and Commonwealth Office Migrated Archives are a collection of about 20,000 files and other records created by the governments of 37 British colonial dependencies, removed to the UK at independence, and held clandestinely for decades in various repositories in and around London.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) was finally forced to admit the existence of the 'migrated archives' in 2011 during the course of the 'Mau Mau litigation', a case brought against the British government by veterans of the 1952–1960 struggle for independence in Kenya who claimed compensation for ill-treatment and torture.
The emphasis of the Colonial Office was not primarily on destruction of documents or their transfer to London, but on avoiding passing them to incoming independent governments and peoples who might find information that prejudiced the interests of the departing imperial power.
David Anderson's article, 'Guilty Secrets' describes the anecdotal account of a woman who spent the last weeks as a clerk in Nairobi's Government House in Kenya "taking bundles of documents onto the governor's lawn and stuffing them into a brazier.
Cahal Milmo describes the now 'infamous' bonfire of documents as British authorities left India, describing a note found in TNA documents for officials to "carefully control any bonfires of secrets" to "avoid a situation similar to Indian in 1947 when the local press was filled with reports about the "pall of smoke" ...over Delhi at the end of the Raj as British officials burnt their papers.".
Between 1963 and 1994 the migrated archives were physically stored in Hayes repository; in 1994 they were moved to Hanslope Park, home of Her Majesty's Government Communications Centre, to save on storage costs.
[citation needed] While these discussions were ongoing, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office only acknowledged the custody of the 'migrated archives' in 2011 in conjunction with legal inquiry into the Kenya 'Mau Mau' Emergency of the 1950s.
The FCO refused to provide details of the 2011 legal opinion, citing section 42(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 which protects confidential communications between lawyers and their clients.
It also showed the British government were rounding up thousands of civilians into mass detention camps all across Kenya and subjecting them to terrible mistreatment, culminating in the Hola Massacre in 1959.
[33] In 2011 the FCO commissioned Anthony Cary, a former British High Commissioner to Canada (2007–2010) to 'conduct a short investigation into the circumstances surrounding holdings of colonial administration files based at Hanslope Park' and particularly to examine 'what went wrong and what lessons should we draw?
As well as addressing the specific questions asked in his terms of reference, Cary suggested that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office should compile an inventory of all its other archival holdings, that is both those awaiting transfer to TNA and the many thousands remaining in a type of limbo.
Foreign Office Minister David Livington made a series of announcements on plans to transfer the colonial administration files to The National Archives.
[48] Professor Anthony Badger spoke about his role in an article from Sept 2012 saying: 'It is difficult to overestimate the legacy of suspicion among historians, lawyers, and journalists about the migrated archive that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) collected between the 1950s and 1979.
[52] On Wednesday 21 September 2022, TNA released a public statement that access had been reinstated with new guidelines for reading room users to prevent any potential transfer of substances'.
[57][58][59][60] A July 2011, Guardian piece sums up the tone of this early reporting which gave visibility to the experience of the plaintiffs as the victims of torture and abuse: In Kenya there has long been indignation at British cant in refusing to acknowledge that such things happened.
[61]The piece offers speculation around what 'further horrors' of 'colonial misdeeds' this wider 'hidden history' may reveal and ask broader questions of whether Britain is willing to admit to 'our imperial wrongs' and in the process 'admit that other have rights we may have infringed' calling for a need for a 'post-imperial maturity'.
[61] Cary's report and the documents initially released had shown that, on 3 December 1963, nine days before Kenya formally declared independence, three wooden packing crates containing 1,500 highly sensitive government files were loaded on to a British United Airways flight bound for Gatwick.
On the eve of Kenya's independence, Colonial Secretary Iain Macleod ordered that sensitive colonial-government documentation be destroyed or flown out of the country because its disclosure "might embarrass Her Majesty's Government".
[21][62][63] "Embarrassment hardly covers it," remarked a Times editorial, noting that "the covert history of colonial administration in Kenya bears comparison to the methods of torture and summary execution in the French war in Algeria.
Press attention in relation to Britain's concealment of colonial records was heightened again in the period from April 2012 and November 2013 when FCO 141 was released at The National Archives.
[65]More recent Guardian articles have included a piece by Ian Cobain, author of The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation in which the concealment of the 'migrated archives' is placed within the context of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 including the toppling of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston into the harbour in Bristol, which prompted then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson to state that "to tear [these statues] down would be to lie about our history".
[66]A 2020 article in the Guardian by Kojo Koram entitled "Britain needs a truth and reconciliation commission, not another racism inquiry" also places the concealment of the 'migrated archives' into the context of a long-standing and ongoing reluctance to confront Britain's imperial legacies or link this legacy to inequalities in the present, when many of the problems being highlighted by Black Lives Matter protestors "from the public monuments celebrating slave traders to the institutional racism of the police, have their roots in empire".
[71]In May 2018 the then Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, wrote to a member of parliament setting out the position of his department vis-a-vis claims for the return of the 'migrated archives' to the countries from which they were removed or the free provision of digital copies.
For those unable to visit The National Archives, digital and paper copies of documents can be ordered with the charges (at cost recovery) agreed with HM Treasury and approved by Parliament.
They not only document the historical, cultural and economic development of a country and provide a basis for a national identity, they are also a basic source of evidence needed to assert the rights of individual citizens.
[79] Numerous allegations of murder and rape by British military personnel are recorded in the files, including an incident where an African baby was "burnt to death", the "defilement of a young girl", and a soldier in Royal Irish Fusiliers who killed "in cold blood two people who had been his captives for over 12 hours".
[80] Baring himself was aware of the "extreme brutality" of the sometimes-lethal torture meted out—which included "most drastic" beatings, solitary confinement, starvation, castration, whipping, burning, rape, sodomy, and forceful insertion of objects into orifices—but took no action.
[78][81] Baring's inaction was despite the urging of people like Arthur Young, Commissioner of Police for Kenya for less than eight months of 1954 before he resigned in protest, that "the horror of some of the [camps] should be investigated without delay".
[83] Huw Bennett of King's College London, who had worked with Anderson on the Chuka massacre, said in a witness statement to the court that the new documents "considerably strengthen" the knowledge that the British Army were "intimately involved" with the colonial security forces, whom they knew were "systematically abusing and torturing detainees in screening centres and detention camps".
[92][93] David French also utilised the FCO files on Cyprus from the Migrated Archives to prove that the British did not intentionally use a colonial policy of 'Divide and Rule' to flare up Community Tensions on the Island.