Britain releases secret files from end of empire

19 Apr, 2012

Britain released thousands of classified colonial-era files Wednesday, including one that names Barack Obama's father and another that warns of "anti-white" Kenyans studying in the United States.
The papers - the existence of which was only revealed last year - cover controversial periods in Britain's post-imperial history including the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya and the Malayan emergency in the 1950s and 1960s.
British authorities brought the documents back to London at the time of those countries' independence due to their sensitivity, and the papers show they even planned to burn some of the other classified files.
The Foreign Office only admitted that it held the archives in January 2011 when four elderly Kenyans sued the British government over alleged abuses they suffered in British internment camps.
The cache of 8,800 files is being released in six batches starting Wednesday by Britain's National Archive and ending in November 2013.

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