Secrecy provisions actively prevented colonial commissions from gathering evidence.

Evidence

A striking feature of the royal commission was not its secret nature but that its confidentiality thwarted any systematic investigation. At its first gathering in June 1872, its appointed Chairman convened the group to ask if an actual investigation should be made concerning the education, lifestyle, and attitudes of the Inlandsche kinderen (one of the key questions the Governor-General had asked that they address.) None of the commissioners supported doing so, on the argument that it would countermand their order to work in secrecy, signal the commission’s existence to those “outside,” and thus undermine their goal. It took another twenty-five years for the European Pauperism Commission of 1901 to ask about what its members, too, assumed they knew. As we shall see, this new commission was quicker to learn—from the vehement intensity of the response to their queries—that what they feigned not to know was dangerous and that what they thought they knew, they did not. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 836

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘public secret’ and willed ignorance recall Ann Stoler’s work on colonial archives and ‘not knowing’ as imperial practice.