Operation Legacy

Overview

State archives in Britain are thought of as being a pristine area in which we preserve, conserve and utilise the nation’s history. The Public Records acts of 1958 and 1967 require government departments to conserve any information that tells us about our shared past, and how we came to know it. Most members of the public assume their reliability. But are they telling us the truth? In 2009, 5 elderly Kenyan war veterans filed a case against the British government in which they claimed that thousands of Kenyan nationals had been subjected to severe acts of inhumane and degrading treatment, torture and arbitrary killings in the 1950s - all at the hands of the British colonial administration. The case would come to upend all our assumptions about archives’ reliability, and about the way that we write British history itself.

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