They trooped to St Peters and Paul Hall at Manunga Catholic
Parish in Kipipiri District of Kenya, their faces nothing but masks of
pain and bitter memories, memories they would rather put behind forever.
But on this day, the former Mau Mau fighters and
collaborators were forced to exhume and re-live the suffering to British
lawyers representing them in an epic case against the British
government.
“My three sons tried to stop four white soldiers
from raping me. They were shot dead on the spot before I was subjected
to a horrendous ordeal that resulted in a miscarriage,” recalled
89-year-old Milkah Wanja last Friday, her voice eerily weak with
emotion.
The octogenarian, who today walks with a slight
stoop, then gathered herself to explain to the gathered crowd that she
was embarrassed to narrate her ordeal to her ‘grandchildren’, referring
to the youngish lawyers and journalists listening quietly as she
painstakingly justified why she is now demanding an apology from the
British government over the loss of her three sons and the heinous act
committed on her as her other 10 children watched in disbelief.
“It is rewarding that 60 years later someone has
given me a chance to pour out the pain in my heart,” she said later,
happy that she had guided the solicitors from Leigh Day & Co lawyers
through her life after the May 22, 1953 incident.
After the rape ordeal, she was taken to Athi River
Detention Camp, 20 kilometres outside Nairobi, where her breasts, she
says, were squeezed with a pair of pliers to compel her to disclose the
locations of Mau Mau fighters.
But she was not alone.
At the hall in Kipipiri were 150 other aging
survivors of the brutality, each waiting to narrate their tales to the
team of lawyers touring the country to gather evidence for their case in
which they are demanding compensation for the torture victims from the
British government.
At the hall, Wanja shared a tearful moment with Hannah Wanjiku Njogu, 82, with whom she had been incarcerated at Athi River.
Detention camps
But they hold not grudge. “Although we are bitter
for what happened, our hearts have long forgiven our torturers,”
recalled Hannah. “They killed our husbands, maimed our children and
burnt our homes, but here we are.”
The height of the colonial brutality occurred
during what has been referred to as one of the darkest periods of
Kenya’s political and social scenes — between 1952 and 1959 — and the
events ended up shaping the destiny and mood of the nation for the next
decade and beyond.
“We vowed to die fighting to save our children
from further woes as the colonial government had entrenched itself in
all parts of the country and ruled with an iron fist,” recalls Wanja.
But the settler and the British soldiers weren’t
the only villains of the piece. Wanja is bitter that African
collaborators’ children got an opportunity to attend school but the
diehard Mau Mau followers’ offspring were denied education and herded
into concentration camps.
The white settlers preferred employing women who
had many children since the children would be allowed to work in
pyrethrum farms while their mothers did heavier duties; ferrying stones
to construction sites, for instance.
“They knew a mother could not flee and leave her
children behind and that the children couldn’t run away from their
mothers. Any woman without children was treated like a Mau Mau fighter,”
says Wanja.
Chege wa Gathogo, aged 86; Mwangi Ng’ang’a wa
Gatua (89) and Ndung’u wa Gicheru (83) dug moats from Tebere River to
various farms that are now known for producing the aromatic Mwea rice
while incarcerated at the Gathigiriri Detention Camp.
“We prepared nurseries in groups of 50 and
transplanted rice in water-logged soils. Our hands would swell while
many contracted Malaria and other water-borne diseases,” recalls Gatua.
Once ill, the workers would be returned to
Kirigiti Stadium in Kiambu and a fresh group of chained strong men
transported in lorries to Mwea.
Wamaria Wanjiku, 93, declined to be interviewed on
camera, saying her woes at the hands of the colonists inflicted a wound
that is still festering in her heart.
She has never understood why she was arrested and
held in different detention camps for seven years, during which she was
subjected to severe beating.
“In 1953, we were rounded up in Wanjohi and
escorted to the colonists’ Nyahururu camp, where we were held
incommunicado while our husbands were taken elsewhere. The
interrogations went on for years, especially when we were moved to
Kiamtui Village in Murang’a,” she recalls.
And it is here that wished for death.
“I was tired but walked in a line with other women
in chains and trudged on while carrying a huge 9-by-9-inch block when a
white soldier hit my leg with a gun butt. As if taking the cue from the
soldier, a homeguard also hit my left foot with a dry piece of wood,”
she remembers, pain enveloping her every word.
After a long pause while biting her left thumb to
suppress her emotions, Wanjiku says that the settlers forced detainees
to dig trenches and clear pathways from dawn to dusk. Because of such
memories, she hates Murang’a. Upon her release in 1958, she moved to
Kipipiri, never to return to Murang’a.
“I never identify my home as Kigumo in Murang’a.
The memories are very bitter. Wanjohi is my home and will always be,”
she intones, gazing at the distant Aberdare Mountains.
The colonial policemen, she says, were
particularly hard on her because her ears bore fresh piercings,
confirming she had taken an oath to support the Mau Mau fighters.
“All our secrets had been revealed to the colonial
administrators by traitors who were rewarded with jobs and had their
children educated free of charge. I do not blame the homeguards
(Njaguti) since they did all they had to do to safeguard their lives,”
she says.
And the present still rubs it on a biter past.
Beneficiaries
“Today their (homeguards’) children hold senior
jobs in government, drive nice cars and can afford to take good care of
their elderly parents, unlike our children who have to work on
unproductive farms. We just watch them sink into deeper and deeper
poverty day by day,” she laments.
Speaker after speaker criticised successive
post-independence regimes for ignoring the plight of Mau Mau fighters
and their children.
“We die poor while our children cannot compete
with children educated by their homeguard parents. Some of us continue
to experience illnesses associated with the torture we were subjected to
but cannot afford medical treatment,” she says.
The solicitors’ team leader Ms May Groves says the
evidence collected will bolster their case against the UK government,
but adds that not all claimants will be considered for compensation
since there was a clear criteria on how to select beneficiaries.
“We have a good case owing to the first two
victories in the High Court. We have a list of 40,280 people claiming to
have been tortured and these are the ones we are going to interview,”
she told the eager listeners.
Sadly, the process locks out those who too sick or
too old to present their cases in a coherent manner since one-on-one
interviews must be conducted to authenticate claims.
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