The Kenyan freedom Fighters, the Mau Mau veterans, filed a suit against the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in London for the inhumane treatment during the British colonial rule seeking an apology and compensation for damages suffered a result.
The British government is however trying to strike off the action on grounds “that they are not liable for the actions and omissions of the British Colonial Administration”. How convenient! To understand the basis for the claim, one needs to understand the History of Kenya’s struggle for Independence.
The History of Kenya, and indeed most colonized states, have for a long time been told from a Europeans perspective distorting the truth in the process. But as time goes by and a new generation hungry for truth emerges, the truth is finally being exposed. Kenya like most African countries was forcefully colonized by the British from the early part of the 19th Century.
Before colonization, Kenyan Africans had traded with Europeans without incidence until the arrival of the Imperial British East Africa company which started the process of colonisation. Kenya became British East African protectorate in 1895. The colonizers settling in brutalized Africans attacking villages with their modern weapons. They murdered Africans in groves as they stole their cattle and sheep pushing people out of their land and forcing them into reserves.
From early 1900, White settlers started arriving in Kenya and started forcefully occupying the highlands, then kikuyu land. These highlands became known then as the white highlands. As time went by, more and more rights of the people were taken away including forced labor and forced land tax. It is for this reasons that Africans started rising against such oppression and different movements were formed by various groups advocating for independence and clamoring for their land.
The Mau Mau movement by the Kikuyus, from the central province of kenya, greatly affected by land loss, was formed. The movement advocated for independence from the colonial masters as well as getting back their land from the foreigners. Those involved in the movement had to take an oath of allegiance which was what bound them together.
The Mau Mau Movement
The British referred to Freedom fighters, like the Mau Mau as terrorist which goes to show that to one man a person is a terrorist while to another the person is a liberator. For along time the British version of events regarding Kenya’s struggle for Independence was what was taught in schools even after independence. In fact it is only recently that Kenya has started acknowledging and recognizing some of her freedom fighters.
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