Dispossessed Kenyans demand compensation ahead of King Charles’ visit

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KERICHO, Kenya — When the then-Princess Elizabeth visited Kenya in 1952, Kibore Cheruiyot Ngasura was among a group of young men chosen to sing for her at an event near Lake Victoria.

The men planned to use the occasion to petition Elizabeth to relocate their parents from a detention camp in the barren, mosquito-infested town of Gwassi, where members of the Talai clan had been held for nearly two decades on suspicion of fomenting resistance to British colonial rule.

The event never happened. Before Elizabeth could make it to Lake Victoria, word came that her father, King George VI, had died. The new queen hurried back to London.

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More than 70 years later, Elizabeth’s son, King Charles, will visit Kenya this week on a state visit. And Ngasura, now about 100 years old, again has a message for the royal visitor.

“I wish to inform him that we should be compensated for the hardship that we went through,” Ngasura told Reuters outside his house, a small wooden and iron structure on a grassy hill with two lightbulbs and no running water.

Buckingham Palace has said Charles’ visit, which begins on Tuesday, will acknowledge “painful aspects of the UK and Kenya’s shared history”. The British ruled for more than six decades before Kenyan won its independence in 1963.

But for some communities in western Kenya’s fertile highlands, the injustices caused by British colonization are as much present-day realities as historical memories.

A U.N. report in 2021 said more than half a million Kenyans around the western town of Kericho suffered gross human rights violations including unlawful killings and land expropriation during British colonial rule.

The colonial administration took hundreds of square kilometers of land that communities in western Kenya had lived on for generations and handed it to British settlers. Much of it became tea plantations that today belong to multinational companies, the U.N. report said.

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