Operation Legacy
20th Century • 27m
State archives in Britain are thought of as being a pristine area in which we preserve, conserve and utilise the nation’s history. The Public Records acts of 1958 and 1967 require government departments to conserve any information that tells us about our shared past, and how we came to know it. Most members of the public assume their reliability. But are they telling us the truth? In 2009, 5 elderly Kenyan war veterans filed a case against the British government in which they claimed that thousands of Kenyan nationals had been subjected to severe acts of inhumane and degrading treatment, torture and arbitrary killings in the 1950s - all at the hands of the British colonial administration. The case would come to upend all our assumptions about archives’ reliability, and about the way that we write British history itself. This fascinating and important documentary tells their incredible story, exposing the depth of the cover up that rocked the establishment and changed the way we view colonial history forever.
Up Next in 20th Century
-
🎧 Flu Pandemics: Then and Now
We are very very vulnerable' says the brilliant science author and journalist Laura Spinney. Her fantastic book 'Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World' is a shocking account of the flu pandemic that killed tens of millions of people a century ago. What was Spanish Flu a...
-
🎧 Foreign Interference: Ronald Dahl a...
Jennet Conant is the author of Man of the Hour: James B. Conant, Navigating a Dangerous Era and the New York Times bestsellers The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington and Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course o...
-
🎧 Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern F...
During the Second World War, from 1941 onwards, Stalin's Soviet Union was joined in a close but awkward coalition with the Western allies. Military aid and intelligence flowed to the Soviets but virtually no troops. The exception was a small group of US airmen who were sent to Russia to set up an...
