Just a few days ago the British Commissioner to Kenya Neil Wigan, announced rather loudly why it is ‘difficult’ for Britain to apologize to Kenya for colonial atrocities and robbery of entire Kenyan fertile land all across the country.
Speaking on Spice FM on Tuesday, October 24, and later on the JKL Show, the UK High Commissioner said that Britain had expressed deep regret for what happened in the emergency period and had made an out-of-court settlement to some of the victims.
“We chose the language carefully and expressed regret in Parliament. We said it in the most public way. We have engaged very carefully with the Mau Mau veterans affected and paid compensation individually. We also helped arrange for the monument that sits in Uhuru Park, Nairobi,” he said.
The envoy said Britain has been very open about “those difficult bits of our history” and had acknowledged them, both to the country and to the individual communities.
“We made an out-of-court settlement. It showed our sincerity and our openness in recognising the abuses that had been committed. That is the route we chose and it was accepted by the Mau Mau Veterans Association,” he said.
Britain agreed in 2013 to compensate more than 5,000 Kenyans who had suffered abuse during the revolt, in a deal worth nearly £20 million (Sh3.65 billion).
Even that token money has not been paid as many of those supposed to get it are dying.
Commissioner Neil Wigan is still doing the work of the British colonial rulers in the 1950s ′ s and it is not acceptable. For example one of the issues that came at the Mau Mau veterans’ case in Britain which started in 2009 was the relentless efforts by the British government to lie and hide information from the court.
The Commissioner is lying when he says that the British made an out-of-court settlement as a sign of good faith. The agreement was reached when the British refused to release documents and any information regarding British activities killing Mau Mau fighters and civilians and grabbing their land.
The biggest exposure of the British colonial brutality in Kenya came in 1959 and it marked the end of the colonial rule in Kenya. This was the Hola massacre on March 3, 1959, which was brutal beyond belief even to the British people when they got wind of it. See how the British tried to conceal the Mau Mau camp atrocity death.
No one has ever been prosecuted for the deaths even though evidence showed the detainees at Hola detention camp were clubbed to death by prison warders after they refused to work. But attempts by British officials to blame their deaths on “drinking too much water” rather than violence, and refusals to identify individuals involved, are revealed in the documents.
The prison camp was one of many in which suspected rebels were detained by British colonial forces, often in dire conditions, according to the Foreign Office files released by the National Archives.
Shortly before the Hola deaths, a plan had been drawn up by colonial authorities allowing prison staff to use force to make detainees work if they refused, the files showed.
But one prison officer, Walter Coutts, told the inquest into the Hola deaths that the detainees either “willed themselves to death or had died because they drank too much water”.
That is Hola Massacre where the British thugs blew the heads of Mau Mau detainees into pieces using heavy wood brain basters. It horrified people because it somehow slipped into the news but the British colonial army had been doing that every day since 1952 and in that process, they had killed hundreds of thousands of Kenyans.
In a BBC report in 2011, the Kenya Human Rights Commission declared that 90,000 Kenyans were executed, tortured, or maimed during the crackdown and 160, 000 were detained in horrible conditions.
In the real world where Mau Mau fighters still live and die in misery as landless beggars even for health care services, the Sh. 2.8 billion has really never been paid even to the small number picked by the British. The case was in court last year (2022) when Mau Mau veterans went to court to block shady deals between the Kenya government and the British who had not even bothered to release the money 9 years after the forced negotiated deal which the British government achieved by blocking any information on what British Soldiers did in Kenya which is still top secret in the UK.
Mau Mau veterans have moved to the High Court to bar the government from interfering with ongoing negotiations for Sh2.8 billion compensation by the British government over torture during the colonial period.
The British government agreed in 2013 to pay Sh2.8 billion (£19.9 million) as compensation but Mau Mau Original Trust now says the government of Kenya has been reluctant or has refused to fully engage in talks and provide modalities for the compensation.
Through lawyer John Swaka, the group says the delays have seen many of the veterans die poor without receiving their share of the billions.
“Furthermore intended negotiations on the compensation of other Mau Mau have stalled for the past few years despite the best efforts of the Petitioner,” he said in the petition.
Justice Anthony Mrima certified the case as urgent and directed Mr Swaka to serve the Attorney general with the court papers and respond within 21 days.
In 2012, three Mau Mau veterans were allowed by the High Court in Britain to pursue damages for abuses they suffered during the rebellion in the 1950s.
A year later, the British government agreed to compensate the victims and apologized for the atrocities.
The then foreign secretary William Hague even made a statement to the House of Commons, expressing that the government “sincerely regrets that these abuses took place”.
The veterans claim that the government has instead chosen to remain silent on their sufferings despite the expression of willingness by the British government to compensate them.
“As a result of the foregoing the Mau Mau victims and their families continue to wallow in poverty years after the independence,” Mr Sakwa said in the petition.
Mr Joseph Ngacha Karani, a Mau Mau veteran, says he has continuously sought the government’s assistance as they try to get the funds to cover what they lost ages ago.
“The Petitioner posits that they have been consistent and vigilant in asking for restitution and compensation all through since independence was achieved and should therefore be granted the orders they seek,” Mr Karani said.
The veterans also want the court to further provide the process by which the compensation will be distributed directly to the Mau Mau fighters and their families.
“We are hoping that he will bring a national apology,” Evelyn Wanjugu Kimathi, the daughter of top resistance leader Dedan Kimathi, recently told AFP, saying she hoped the visit would lead to “closure”.
“Once we have the goodwill from the UK government, everything else will be okay,” said Kimathi, who heads a foundation that looks after the interests of veterans of the independence war as well as campaigning on environmental issues.
She also voiced hope that Britain would help Kenya identify graves of the “freedom fighters” including her father, who was hanged in 1957 at Nairobi’s Kamiti Maximum Security Prison but whose remains have yet to be located
See: Kenya at 60 Years of Age. Why are we Still Such a Sick Country? But Yes, We Are Indeed a Nation.
