King Charles's travel to Kenya is clouded by the Mau Mau revolt

 King Charles's travel to Kenya is clouded by the Mau Mau revolt

During his four-day official visit to Kenya with his wife Camilla, King Charles will address "painful aspects" of the UK's colonial history.

One of the worst insurgencies in the history of the British Empire, the Mau Mau revolt in the 1950s was brutally put down, with over 10,000 people slain and many more tortured. Britain apologized and gave more than 5,000 individuals £20 million ($24 million) in 2013, but some believe it wasn't enough.

Agnes Muthoni, 90, is one of them.

She guides us to the cemetery site at her house in Shamata, central Kenya, with a stooping gait.

She pulls weeds that have sprung up by her husband's tomb. 93-year-old Elijah Kinyua passed away two years ago. Known by another name, General Bahati, he, like his spouse, fought in the 1950s deadly rebellion against the colonial authorities of the British Empire.

In the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, sometimes referred to as the Mau Mau, she was a major.

As she shows us her wedding ring, Ms. Muthoni beams brightly. They never got together until the uprising was put a stop and he was freed from prison.

"He said if there were women combatants who survived, he would like to get married to one of them because she would comprehend his problems and not call him Mau Mau."

Struggle brought them together. However, like many former Mau Mau combatants, the couple remained in hiding long after Kenya was freed from British colonial power.

The resistance organization is still prohibited. The colonial authority labeled it a terrorist organization, and succeeding Kenyan governments did not reverse the prohibition. Paul Muite, a politician and lawyer from Kenya, states, "It was an offense that three Mau Mau members could not meet." "It was atrocious."

The legislation was not altered until 2003, at which point Mau Mau militants were acknowledged as independence fighters.

However, it also meant that generations born after independence had little knowledge of the past.

Historian Caroline Elkins, who interviewed people about the subject in the 1990s, claims that "so many children and grandchildren possessed no idea about the roots of the country's struggle that gave birth to independence."

Her views are still relevant in today's Nairobi streets. Few young people are aware of the Mau Mau's incarceration and torture practices. More worrying to them is the state of the economy, and they wonder what effect King Charles's visit will have.

Wachira Githui, Ms. Muthoni's 36-year-old grandson, is among the select handful who have firsthand knowledge of it. However, he also accepts a number of the lingering effects of colonialism on Kenya's political, social, and economic landscape. He declares, "I'm proud that I speak English," and he claims he supports the Chelsea football team.

When an important English Premier League match is underway, Kenyan social media comes to life. Fans engage in hours-long conversation.

Nairobi's imperial past is evident everywhere, from the streets to the buildings.

Paul Muite works from home in the Kilimani neighborhood. Behind his desk, he has a well ironed black robe and white neck bands. He also wears a wig when he goes to court. Not only did Kenya acquire much of the British legal, administrative, and educational systems, but a large portion of the previous empire did as well.

However, many of the details of the "more painful past" that the King is supposed to recognize have been kept secret from the public and seldom handed down through the generations.

Mr. Muite is requesting that a commission of inquiry be established by the governments of Kenya and the United Kingdom to visit every region of Kenya and thoroughly record the colonial era. He was a member of the legal team that, in 2009, brought a test case to the British courts, which resulted in an out-of-court settlement after four years.

The veterans of the Mau Mau were given compensation by the British administration, who also expressed sorrow.

However, Mr. Muite claims that compensation were only given to warriors who were still alive and could be verified as torture victims by medical examination. He claims that those who supported soldiers by providing services and keeping up supply routes, as well as Kenyans who battled against colonialism outside of the nation's center, were left out.

Members of the Talai clan are among them; they have lately stepped up their demands for the handover of their chieftain Koitalel arap Samoei's skull to the British authorities. He spearheaded the Nandi community's opposition to colonial colonization, upending the plans for a more than ten-year occupation of the Rift Valley's highlands. He was eventually seduced to a peace conference, where he met his demise in 1905.

According to Mr. Muite, it would be helpful to offer closure if "those who were killed, people who provided services including lunches to Mau Mau fighters and those who were raped, and to offer them a bit of compensation" were acknowledged.

The expected announcement by the monarch, according to historian Caroline Elkins, will be "an extraordinary moment." However, she also says that the government should "insist upon proper investigations, undertaken by the government, to change history books, to evolution museums in Britain and to provide supplying in Kenya to establish its own museums and cultural artefacts."

She claims that the crimes carried out in the monarch's name occurred under the state of emergency, which was proclaimed by the colonial authority in October 1952 in reaction to the Mau Mau uprising. Only eight months had passed since Queen Elizabeth II took the throne during a visit to central Kenya, the epicenter of the insurrection.

"It was Her Majesty the Queen with a photograph hung in detention camps, [and] while the prisoners were being tortured as well as forced to labour, that they had to sing God Save the Queen."

The Mau Mau assaults were often carried out at night and could be rather vicious. Newspapers overseas carried pictures of six-year-old Michael Ruck, who was killed by hacking, along with his parents and a farmhand. The pictures of his mangled teddy bears did not inspire compassion for the combatants.

The colonial administration launched a bloody assault on the Mau Mau using its air power and ground soldiers, which included numerous Kenyans known as the home guards.

Up to 320,000 individuals, according to Ms. Elkins' estimation, were incarcerated in detention or concentration camps. It has been stated that prisoners were burned, flogged to death, and even castrated.

During the emergency era, more over 1,000 people were executed by hanging. Thousands of people are said to have died in all. The actions to put down the uprising have been regarded by historians as the worst post-war struggle in which the UK was engaged in the previous century.

"There were no houses for us to live in," recalls forest veteran Agnes Muthoni of the emergency situation. "There were hyenas, hunger and rain."

She now resides in a blue-roofed home with a wood and corrugated iron roof that overlooks the Aberdare mountain range's rolling green slopes.

The "White Highlands" were the name given to the enormous area of lush land that stretched over central Kenya and into the Rift Valley. Farmers who were settlers owned almost all of it. To make room for European farmers to take up residence on the finest land, locals like Ms. Muthoni were forced to the periphery.

A large portion of it went to the home guards after independence since the Mau Mau was still regarded as a terrorist group.

Still, Ms. Muthoni is prepared to move on from the past. "We are not bitter in our hearts because the past is gone," she continues.

"Human beings forgive other people and continue living together, but I would love to be given land."