Britain’s King Charles and Queen Camilla started the second day of a state visit to Kenya on Wednesday as survivors of colonial-era abuses criticised his unsuccessful attempt to issue a detailed apology or appeal reparations. During a state dinner on Tuesday Charles talked about his ” prominent regret” for what he called abhorrent and unjustifiable activities of violence committed in opposition to Kenyans during the nation’s independence struggle. President William Ruto remarked the monarch’s first step toward going beyond the “tentative and equivocal half-measures of past years”, but said much remained to be done.
During the 1952-1960 Mau Mau revolt in central Kenya, some 90,000 Kenyans were killed or maimed and 160,000 detained, the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) has estimated. British colonialists also committed gross human rights violations, including land expropriation, killings, torture and sexual violence, against hundreds of thousands of people in western Kenya over decades, U.N. investigators have said. Charles’ visit comes at a time when former colonies are demanding that Britain do more to recognise the abuses of its colonial past. Some – notably Barbados and Jamaica – have been re-evaluating their ties to the monarchy.
Britain agreed to a 20 million pound ($24 million) out-of-court settlement in 2013 to more than 5,200 survivors of abuses during the Mau Mau conflict, but it has refused to issue an apology and has rebuffed claims by other communities. Britain’s High Commissioner to Kenya, Neil Wigan, told a local radio station previous week that an apology would take his nation into “tough legal territory”. “Recognition alone is not enough,” said David Ngasura, a historian from the Talai clan in western Kenya, whose members were forced from their land in the 1930s and sent to detention camps. Today, much of that land belongs to multinational tea companies.
“I am yet to hear him regarding compensation and reparations by the British government to the victims of historical injustices meted by the British colonial government.” Kipchoge araap Chomu, the great-grandson of King Koitalel Arap Samoei, who led a decade-long rebellion by the Nandi people before he was murdered by a British colonel in 1905, said Charles’ speech fell short of his aim for an apology, reparations and the return of his ancestor’s remains. “(Charles) just talked about everything but the most important topic was not touched by him at all, went round, round saying ‘we recognise the pain, we can’t change the past’,” Chomu revealed.