My last post was my 200th post on this blog. Wow! This milestone crept up on me, as did the fifth anniversary of this blog last August but now it is definitely time to reflect on these milestones.
Some posts have stood out for me. Sometimes I finish a post knowing that the writing is particularly strong. Generally this is when I have been particularly moved by the subject matter, whether it was a well-written book or an episode of history which has stuck an emotional chord within me.
It is the humble archive that has been the source of much of many of my posts. Archives are a crucial bulwark of human rights. The story over the last five years which demonstrated this with crystal clarity was the case of four elderly Kenyans who sued the British government for human rights abuses during the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s. For years the British government had denied their complaints and told historians and lawyers that no relevant documents existed about this issue. But the Kenyan’s legal team pushed and as I explained in ‘Archives are important, very important’, millions of colonial documents were found to have been illegally hidden from public view.
‘If… we are going to sin, we must sin quietly’, wrote the British Attorney-General to the Kenyan colonial authorities. This was the title of my second post about the issue in which I explored the troubling question of how such horrific crimes could have been ignored for so long. If you only have limited time to read this blog this is the one post I would like you to read. It demonstrates why historians and archivists are vital professions for any society professing to uphold human rights and democratic values, but it also shows how flawed archives can be and how historians sometimes fall short in their over-reliance on government archives. This post also seeks to understand why so many people do nothing when people in authority commit crime as part of their job. Continue reading →
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