Colonial archive practices and the politics of historical silence in British West Africa: Erasure, classification, and the governance of knowledge in Nigeria, Ghana, and Sierra Leone, 1850–1960

Background: Colonial archives constitute foundational instruments through which British imperial administrations in West Africa constructed, organised, and selectively preserved historical records. The governance of colonial knowledge production involved systematic decisions about what was documented, classified, withheld, or destroyed, producing historiographical silences that continue to distort contemporary understandings of precolonial and colonial African societies.

Aim: This study examined how British colonial archive practices in Nigeria, Ghana, and Sierra Leone produced structured historical silences through selective record-keeping, classification regimes, and document destruction policies, and how postcolonial archival scholarship has sought to recover suppressed histories.

Methodology: The study employed a qualitative historical methodology drawing on primary source analysis of colonial administrative correspondence, dispatch registers, and inventory records held at the National Archives of Nigeria, Public Records Office of Ghana, and the Sierra Leone Public Archives, supplemented by analysis of secondary literature and postcolonial archival theory from 2022 to 2026.

Findings: Colonial archival governance systematically privileged administrative utility over historical completeness, resulting in the suppression of African-authored records, the reclassification of indigenous political documents, and the destruction of materials deemed security risks during decolonisation. Postcolonial archival scholarship has partially recovered these silences through oral history integration, diaspora archive collaboration, and digital repatriation projects.

Contributions: The study contributes to colonial historiography and archival theory by providing comparative evidence of silence-production mechanisms across three West African contexts, and by theorising the political economy of historical knowledge governance under British colonialism.