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Paper short abstract

This paper explores the burning of British child migrant records as archival silencing within colonial governmentality. It argues that while imperial power was embedded into individual lives through erasure, the lost archive emerges not only as absence but also as a productive force shaping memory.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the deliberate destruction of personal records of former British child migrants as a form of archival silencing, through which colonial knowledge management is experienced by former migrants as a profound “writing out of history.” The research focuses on British child migrants—removed from their families and permanently resettled in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) between 1946 and 1962. Shortly before the closure of the migration scheme, the children’s archive was allegedly set on fire. This violent erasure epitomizes what Das (2007) terms a “cancellation of context”: an emptying of the past and an obscuring of identity already fractured by forced displacement. While record-keeping and archiving were fundamental aspects of colonial governmentality, colonial archives were themselves constituted by fragments, broken traces, and silences—some negligent, others purposeful. Archival silencing thus emerges as an inherent force of colonization, intensified during moments of political transition, such as the end of British colonial rule, when documents liable to embarrass the British state were systematically destroyed. I argue that the burning of the child migrant archive exemplifies a form of knowledge management by purge, through which the structures of colonial power are inscribed into individual lives via the distortion and elimination of personal histories. Paradoxically, however, repressive erasure does not simply suppress history but rather draws even more attention to it. In its absence, the lost archive acquires a haunting presence within former migrants’ social memory work, becoming a potent symbol of loss of legitimate sources of identity and a sense of rootedness.