Aims and objectives
This project digitised recently discovered records of African soldiers serving in the King's African rifles during the First World War. These rare records potentially present the only surviving material that can document this African military heritage and help tell the stories of these men, whose service is otherwise largely forgotten. The records were lost following independence and have not been stored under archival conditions. As a result, there was no inventory and their condition was deteriorating. Working in collaboration with the Kenya Defence Force (KDF), this project documented and digitally preserved these important records for future generations.
Outcomes
Few of the KDF personnel supporting the project had archival experience and none had been involved in a collection enhancement or digitisation project before. In the process of re-ordering, re-boxing, cataloguing and photographing this collection, the KDF has built a reservoir of knowledge that can support similar projects in the future. This capacity building has allowed the team to continue their endeavours beyond the initial EAP phase of this work, and they are hoping to complete the whole collection of pre-independence records in time. Although the EAP phase did not quite manage to cover all the records associated with soldiers of the Great War, the legacy of this support is the continuation of the project. As a result, it is hoped that the 651 new casualties identified during that phase will be greatly expanded upon.
Perhaps most importantly, this project has preserved an important sample of a vulnerable and rare collection of material that was thought to have been long destroyed. This sample, alongside the continuation of the project that it has inspired, will mean that these important records are properly preserved for future generations, allowing Kenyans and others to explore and learn from this lost history.
Project achievements
- Reordered and repackaged the collection to understand its full extent.
- Analysed the collection to understand what it is and why it was produced.
- Identified a sample to form the basis of the digitisation project.
- Digitised the files and recorded metadata.
- Extracted information from relevant files to commemorate those currently not commemorated.
- Built capacity and understanding of digitisation and archival practices within the KDF.
Project outcomes in numbers
- Total number of individual personnel records digitised: 8,556
- Total number of TIF images captured: 94,531
- Total disk size of project data: c.2.8TB
- Total number of new First World War casualties identified: 651
- Earliest recorded enlistment: 1887 (Sakhir Ahmed Aga, KAR/1899/1/229/2748)
- Longest service: 28 years (Juma Bakari, 1 July 1895 to 25 October 1923, KAR/1902/1/75/591)
