Preserving Kenya's Past in the Digital Age: A History of Archives and Public Memory

Abstract

The article covers the historical evolution of archival preservation and public memory in Kenya, from the record keeping system during colonial rule, to the formation of the Kenya National Archives and Documentation Service (KENADS) in 1965 to the present digital archive. It suggests that three related ruptures have influenced Kenya's documentary record: the willful destruction and removal of colonial documents at independence, termed Operation Legacy (Anderson, 2011; Linebaugh, 2022). Secondly, the chronic under-resourcing of the national archive, in relation to the scope of its mandate (Kenya National Archives and Documentation Service, n.d.-a); and most recently, the increasing mismatch between the speed of government business going digital and the speed of development of systems to preserve born-digital records (Musandu, 2022). The article, based on insights gained from institutional records, legal documents, journalistic representations and published research, demonstrates that the process of digitisation, which has been proposed as a simple solution to the issue of 'fragile' paper archives, has in practice simply re-proliferated older inequalities of access whilst beginning to tackle others. The analysis is supported by three original diagrams – the structural model of archival erosion and recovery; the timeline of the archival history of Kenya; and the conceptual illustration of the digitisation to preservation gap.