Operation Legacy Painting

This canvas symbolises the obscuring of the migrating archives in operation legacy. On the latch of the door you will see the number 52A, symbolic of the initial storage place for a vast quantity of sensitive records. You will also note the year 2011 on the key which is the year when a 10-year legal battle successfully ruled that the Kenyans tortured by colonial authorities could sue the British government and the truth would finally be revealed. At the end of the British Empire in the mid-twentieth century a large-scale rearrangement was made to obscure the sensitive colonial records worldwide. A huge number of these records were destroyed and many more colonial archives were sent to Britain. A collection of 170 boxes of documents were flown to Britain as part of ‘Operation Legacy’ and these were stored in London, marked ‘Top Secret Independence Records 1953 to 1963’. According to remaining records, they took up 79 feet of shelf space in the room 52A of Admiralty Arch, and included files on Kenya, Singapore, Malaya, Palestine, Uganda, Malta, and fifteen other colonies. A surviving partial inventory notes that the Kenyan files included documents about the abuse of prisoners and about psychological warfare. One batch, entitled ‘Situation in Kenya – Employment of Witch Doctors by CO [Colonial Office]’, carried the warning, ‘This file to be processed and received only by a male clerical officer.’ In 1992, perhaps afraid that a Labour victory in the upcoming general election would lead to a new period of openness and disclosure, the Foreign Office ordered thousands of documents shipped to Hanslope Park, and locked away in the secretive government research facility to be kept obscured. Operation Legacy was a deliberate and knowing effort to obscure the violence and coercion that enabled British imperialism, and its manipulation of history prevents us from reckoning with the British Empire’s legacy of racism, covert power, and inequality today. In 2011, after a legal fight that lasted more than ten years, a group of Kenyans tortured by colonial authorities won the right to sue the British government. Reference material: How the British government destroyed its history | MANDEM (March 1 2019)

Painting:Acrylic on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:11.8 W x 39.4 H x 1.2 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.