A British Minister of Justice, Eric Griffith-Jones, compared the colonial abuses in Kenya (murders, rapes, land expropriations, detentions in concentration camps...) with the barbarities committed by the Nazis and by Stalin's Russia. To, then and as if nothing, authorize the imperial governor in Nairobi to go ahead with the repression as long as it was carried out in secret. Indeed, before independence was granted to the African country, millions of documents were destroyed.
King Charles III began a four-day official visit to Kenya yesterday, his first in a Commonwealth country since he ascended the throne just over a year ago. It was there that in 1952, while on safari, her mother Elizabeth received the news that her father had died and she would become queen. That same year, the brutal repression of the Mau-Mau began, in a desperate – and ultimately futile – attempt to prevent independence. More than ten thousand people died in the clashes with the army or were executed.
Elizabeth II "regretted" in her day what happened and the consequences of the colonial legacy, but she did not ask for forgiveness. Despite the pressure, it is not planned for Carles to do so now either, who according to the pre-written script will limit himself to "acknowledging" the damage suffered by the native population and saying that he "deeply understands" their feelings. But many of those who suffered the scourge of the empire, and their descendants, consider that saying "I'm sorry" is not enough, and what would be up to it are material reparations.
A decade ago, the United Kingdom paid 25 million euros in compensation to just over five thousand Kenyans who had filed a lawsuit for damages and abuses suffered during the colonial mandate, hoping to close the issue. But he did not succeed, and more and more voices are being raised in the East African country (strategically and militarily important for London) calling for it to leave the Commonwealth. Kenya has been an independent republic since 1963, when British rule that began in 1895 ended.
President William Ruto received Charles III yesterday, accompanied him on a tour of the Museum of the History of Kenya (at the place where independence was declared 60 years ago), and offered him a gala dinner at his residence. The English monarch, during his stay, will visit a naval base in Mombasa, the country's second city, and Nairobi National Park (the largest urban safari in the world, with lions, rhinos and giraffes camping in its air in the middle of the city, surrounded by motorways). He will also interview the daughter of the missing activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai to talk about issues of climate change, the environment and sustainability, a topic that particularly interests him.
During the Mau-Mau rebellion, between 1952 and 1960, colonial authorities locked tens of thousands of people in concentration camps surrounded by barbed wire, tortured, raped and expropriated land to devote to the cultivation of pineapple and tea by British companies. The vast majority of the victims belonged to the Kikuyu ethnic group, the majority in Kenya, which suffered strong internal divisions between the rebels and those more tolerant of the imperial presence. The United Kingdom currently has four hundred soldiers stationed in the country, whom the natives accuse of committing sexual abuse, polluting the water with chemicals and killing a prostitute. But the guilty cannot be prosecuted because they have immunity, as if they were diplomatic personnel.
Of the 56 countries that make up the Commonwealth, Kenya is one of the most important to London, and a key military and strategic ally. The British Government wants to prevent, yes or no, the departure of an organization of limited political importance, but of high symbolic value, which feeds nostalgia and allows many to continue dreaming that they still lead an empire. For this reason, King Charles III is ready to insist on how he regrets the declaration of the state of emergency in 1952 and the subsequent repression to stifle the independence movement. But not to ask for forgiveness as God commands.
