Gitu Wa Kahengeri claims he is still waiting for justice more than six decades after he was imprisoned, tortured, and denied food at a British-run labor camp in Kenya.
Gitu, now in his nineties, has increased his demands for an apology and reparations from the British government as King Charles III visits East Africa.
Gitu dropped out of school as a teenager after a quarrel with the principal over his anti-colonial convictions, and eventually became a member of the feared Mau Mau insurgents as a young man.
For nearly eight years, the rebels terrorized white settlers from strongholds in isolated jungles, typically with dreadlocked hair and animal skins.
“We fought to be free because the colonial settlers had grabbed all the fertile land and made it their own,” Gitu told AFP during an interview at his home surrounded by pineapple farms outside the town of Thika.
“The cruel… ill-treatment that was meted to the Africans by the colonial administration, I was one to suffer that.”
The undulating green hills and lush woods of central Kenya, called the “white highlands” by colonial settlers, sowed profound anger among Gitu’s ethnic Kikuyu people who were driven off the land.
Months after the uprising began in 1952, then-British Prime Minister Winston Churchill proclaimed a state of emergency, laying the groundwork for a ruthless assault.
Tens of thousands of individuals were swept up and kept without trial in camps where there were tales of executions, torture, and brutal beatings.
A year into the slaughter, Gitu and his father were caught and detained on a secluded Indian Ocean island.
“We left our children at home, suffering, having no food, having no medical care and having no education,” Gitu said, recalling his seven-year detention in painstaking detail, his sharp memory belying his age.
Horrific abuses
More than 10,000 people died in the Mau Mau insurrection, which some historians believe is an underestimation.
Tens of thousands of Kenyans, many of whom had no ties to the Mau Mau, were subjected to atrocities by security forces, including torture and heinous genital mutilation.
Buckingham Palace said Charles and his wife Queen Camilla will “acknowledge the more painful aspects” of colonial history during their four-day state visit.
“His Majesty will take time during the visit to deepen his understanding of the wrongs suffered in this period by the people of Kenya,” the palace said.
But the symbolism of the visit — the first by Charles to a Commonwealth country since becoming king — is not lost on Gitu.
“If I were given a place and a chance to speak to the king… the first question I would ask him is why did you keep silent?”
Gitu, a former legislator elected to parliament in 1969, urged Charles to return any artifacts taken from Kenya “sincerely and voluntarily” and to move beyond the public proclamation of regret for the crimes perpetrated.
In an out-of-court deal worth approximately 20 million pounds (about $25 million at today’s exchange rates), Britain agreed to compensate over 5,000 Kenyans who had endured abuses during the insurrection in 2013.
After legal fees were removed, each claimant earned roughly £2,600.
In an unusual instance of former rulers remembering a colonial insurrection, Britain also financed a memorial to all the fatalities.
But Gitu said the “small settlement” had done little to alleviate the poverty endured by most Mau Mau veterans and urged the British government “to do more to cultivate the reconciliation we are looking for”.
‘Not begging’
He also accused the Kenyan authorities of failing to give former fighters their due.
“None of the governments has looked after the freedom fighters in the way they deserved,” said Gitu, who also heads a Mau Mau veterans’ association.
“We are not begging, we are asking for our rights.”
Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first president, opposed the Mau Mau’s violence, which caused profound splits among communities, particularly those who collaborated with colonial authority.
Surviving combatants have accused successive Kenyan governments of abandoning them, despite the fact that the group was legally illegal until 2003.
Half a century after his execution by colonial forces, the government dedicated a statue of top Mau Mau leader Dedan Kimathi in Nairobi in 2007.
Even while Gitu awaits a royal apology, Kenya’s treatment of the Mau Mau remains a source of pain.
“It is a great loss to have lost the education of our children, the good health of our children and in the end to have lost recognition.”