In 2009, five Kenyan people took a petition to the British Prime Minister’s office, claiming they had endured human rights abuses while Kenya was under British colonial rule in the 1950s and demanding reparations. Despite having vivid accounts and physical scars from their experiences, their testimonies were undermined due to a lack of documentary evidence. However, in 2010 a historian joined the trial as an expert witness and attested to having seen references to missing documents. The court then ordered the release of any relevant documents, leading to the discovery of thousands of secret files.
It soon became clear that these were just a small sample of documents Britain had hidden between the 1950s and 70s, as part of a widespread colonial British policy called Operation Legacy. The policy was for British colonial officers to destroy or remove documentation that might incriminate Britain and be of strategic value to the new governments. Documents slated for destruction were to be burnt to ashes or sunk in weighted crates far from shore.
Between 2010 and 2013, an independent historian revealed they had located more than 20,000 previously hidden Operation Legacy files from 37 former colonies, as well as an estimated 1.2 million colonial files spanning kilometers in the archive’s “Special Collections”. It is unknown how many documents were destroyed, and what information they contained.
Beginning in 1895, the British administration had forcibly removed people from their traditional lands, giving the most fertile areas to European settlers to establish large-scale farms. They mandated forced labor systems, implemented reservations for Indigenous African peoples, and restricted their movement. In response to these incursions, Kenyan people had resisted and grown increasingly organized over time. When the British declared a state of emergency in 1952, they were giving themselves permission to take otherwise illegal special measures to regain control.
The newly revealed Operation Legacy documents confirmed that people suspected of participating in the resistance were subjected to horrible abuses. Between 1952 and 1959, the British imprisoned over 80,000 people without trial, sentenced over 1,000 people convicted as terrorists to death, and imposed extreme surveillance and interrogation tactics. People were beaten to death, raped, castrated, shackled at the wrist for years, and children were even killed. One person was burnt alive.
Ultimately, Operation Legacy’s objective was to obscure critical aspects of the truth. In the words of Britain’s attorney-general in Kenya, “If we are going to sin, we must sin quietly.” The British government issued a formal apology and reached an out-of-court financial settlement with the 5,228 Kenyan claimants in response to the new evidence. The original five claimants made history, challenging the fundamental myths about British colonialism as a benevolent institution. The uncovered files confirmed what many people already knew from their own experiences, and rescued history from the ashes.