What if there was no Operation Legacy?
- cepmurphywrites
- 14 hours ago
- 7 min read
By Gary Oswald.
If you spend any time at all online looking for people talking about the British Empire (and honestly if you're reading this, you probably do), you'll have heard about Operation Legacy which is a relatively obscure part of British history that has begun to cut through in certain demographics and is now pretty much guaranteed to be mentioned in any online discussion about the British Empire.
Essentially British civil servants kept extensive records of their meetings, the complaints they received, and their responses. When the colonies began to gain independence, there were worries that not all of these records should be handed over, as they could be used by the new governments to embarrass the British. In the Second World War, with the Germans approaching Egypt, British civil servants burned records in Cairo; in the wake of Indian independence, the same happened in New Delhi.
In 1948, when Ceylon became independent, these actions first became an official policy, with the governor asking London what files they should leave to Ceylon and what should instead be transferred to London, which happened to multiple potentially embarrassing files (without the Ceylonese government ever commenting on the missing material). Around the time of the independence of Ghana, the rules would be codified that any files that were deemed to a) be of no use to a future government of the independent country and b) might embarrass a member of the British Government, armed forces or civil servant if seen by a newly independent country's Minister; or might compromise sources; or might be used unethically by the newly independent country's ministers, were to be either taken to London or destroyed.
By the time of the independence of Kenya and Uganda this was an official instruction from London called Operation Legacy and orders were given that only white civil servants be trusted with this job, that no non white official, no matter how trusted, could be allowed to sort the records in this way. Records were removed from thirty-seven colonies in this way, thus reducing the information the new governments had on what happened during British rule.
These records were left mostly secret until 2011, wherein Kenyan rebels who had been tortured during the Mau Mau Rebellion forced the government to produce these previously hidden records during a court case. These records proved that the British knew that rape and torture were common punishments inflicted on detained Kenyans and choose to ignore this, and thus condone it, not even removing a man from service who had set a prisoner on fire. As a result, the government was made to pay compensation to the detained Kenyans and, almost incidentally, a whole bunch of new sources was made public to historians.
By November 2013 some 20,000 files had been declassified and are currently available to be viewed at Kew in London.
This was something of a smoking gun for those who felt there had been an official attempt to whitewash the crimes of the British Empire. Whenever people talk about the way the British education system talks about the empire or the way public opinion of the empire is still broadly positive or the way the National Trust has had a civil war about how critical of the empire it should be in its educational signs, you will often find someone saying 'ah, yes, see how Operation Legacy has worked'.
So what if, for whatever reason, Whitehall simply never enforces those rules? There is no Operation Legacy and the complete archives are handed over to the new governments. How does this transparency effect how the British Empire is viewed?
Well, first of all, most of the documents aren't particularly interesting. Some historians have been quite disappointed with what they've found, certainly compared to the seismic result of the opening of the Soviet archives. Often nothing new is found in these files that existing sources don't already cover in more detail. They were hidden because an overworked civil servant just went 'better safe than sorry' and didn't want the new government to see that a Tanzanian policeman had taken money as an informer or a Maltese trade union leader had been insulted by a British governor. The files removed from Nigeria are mostly records of Black Nigerian politicians debating the formation of a bank for the new country and were removed so they couldn't use that against each other when in government.
What people mostly mean is the minority of files that directly deal with British war crimes. These are mostly files from around five countries where the British fought post-WW2 colonial wars – Kenya, Malaysia, Yemen, Guyana and Cyprus – plus the details of the ethnic cleansing of the Chagos Islands.
The reports from Malaysia include Britain's role in aiding Suharto's rise to power in Indonesia, and the mass killings that resulted from that, and Britain's cover up of massacres conducted by British officers during the Malayan Emergency (a guerrilla war fought by Malayan communists against the British government). The reports from Yemen, Cyprus and Kenya are about war crimes committed during the wars of independence in those countries, and the reports from Guyana are primarily about British attempts to prevent Cheddi Jagan becoming leader of an independent Guyana.
So what if those records are not hidden?
Well, will they be made public or remain hidden? We are not talking about the British government posting these records online, we are talking about them handing them over to the new governments. Is it in the interest of Forbes Burnham of Guyana to reveal the British dirty tricks that ensured he got into power and not Jagan? Almost certainly Burnham does not publicly reveal those files.
Is it in the interest of the Malaysian government to publicly reveal things that justified the communist insurgency they are still fighting and risk their new good relations with Indonesia?
Is it in the interest of Kenyatta, a man who repeatedly disowned the Mau Mau and emphasised his commitment to forgiving and forgetting the Empire, to bring up the worse crimes of the British at that point?
Those governments might well use the files to quietly blackmail or sack collaborators or to put pressure on the British in secret, but would they actually out it?
Maybe not, but also maybe so. It's almost certain that the main reason for Operation Legacy was to allow good relations to form between them and the newly independent colonies without the awkwardness of 'that time your governor called me an uppity racial slur' or 'how you let that military officer who committed war crimes go and retire in Kent' getting in the way of things. With that on the table, the newly independent countries have a pretty strong weapon to threaten to reveal if the UK cools on them, as it often did. And that threat only works if you are actually prepared to do it.
And those governments absolutely knew that the files handed over to them were incomplete. Kenya repeatedly asked London for the missing files and Malaysia was even told upfront by the British that not all files would be handed over (though they minimised what that meant). The 1983 Vienna Convention on Succession of States in Respect of State Property, Archives and Debts spent a lot of time talking about the French and British Empires holding onto files from their former colonies, a thing that was wildly acknowledged to have happened and yet no resolution about was reached.
None of the information in those files will be shocking to these governments or even the public of these new countries. Kenyatta was imprisoned himself during the Mau Mau Rebellion, he must have heard what other detainees were saying happened to them. Everybody knew in OTL that the Chagos Islands were ethnically cleansed, that the British ran torture camps in Kenya and Yemen (you can find Hansard debates of it being talked about in the House of Commons), and that British intelligence agents ran propaganda campaigns against communists leaders and supported anti-communist dictators. All of those events were already assumed to have happened. It's worth noting that the British Government's defence in the court case that revealed the hidden archives wasn't that they hadn't tortured Kenyan rebels (nobody would have believed that) but simply that reparations for that would be the responsibility of the Kenyan Government and not the British one.
But unlike OTL, in this timeline those countries have written proof from British civil servants that these things, that everyone knew happened, happened. An unpopular government, challenged within their country, might be tempted to release that proof to shift anger towards the British instead.
But it is key that any information that is released will be released by African and Asian governments. It will not be released in the UK. Those files will be less examined that those held at Kew because most historians are not based in Nairobi. They probably won't be referred to in journals or books anywhere near as much as you'd think.
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It will certainly not have a significant effect on how the British public view the Empire because the British media will probably not cover it and the British government will not add it to the national curriculum.
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There will not be Nuremburg trials of the officers involved for that matter. Britain would have no reason to cooperate and would not be able to be forced to do so. The International Criminal Court did not exist and would not for many decades more, and the UK has a veto at the United Nations. The problem that prevented justice for the crimes of colonialism was not lack of information, it was lack of ability to enforce judgement and that does not change here. The same forces that repeatedly led to failure in the newly independent countries attempts to gain access to these documents in OTL, would prevent them from doing much with them in a timeline where they had that access.
Operation Legacy is an interesting part of British history in what it tells us about how British governments perceived their reputation and their desire to not be embarrassed by the truth of how they treated their colonies. But ultimately it's hard to see what concrete difference it actually made.
After all there were plenty of other crimes committed by the British Empire that were never hid but still never made it into the public consciousness in the west because information that is theoretically publicly available is not the same thing as information which is wildly known.
Gary Oswald is the editor of the Grapeshot and Guillotines, Emerald Isles, and If We'd Just Got That Penalty anthologies.