By Our Correspondent, NAIROBI Kenya
Kibore Cheruiyot Ngasura was
just a small boy when his family was violently expelled from their ancestral
land in Kenya's lush tea-growing western highlands by British colonisers, and
banished never to return.
Eighty-five years later he
still bristles at the memory, recalling the fear and confusion as his community
was marched to a distant, unfamiliar place, and people around him begged their
white overseer for answers.
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| A tea plantation in Kenya's Kericho highlands in Kericho county. The Kipsigis community says it was forcefully evicted from the land in 1934 to pave way for the plantations owned by multinationals and are is demanding a return to its home and reparations from the United Kingdom. British and Kenyan lawyers who have filed a complaint with the UN on behalf of the community were to visit the region on October 30, 2017 on a fact-finding mission. |
"They asked him, 'What
wrong did we do? Why are you punishing us like this?" said 94-year-old
Ngasura, the only living survivor of a mass deportation in 1934 from Kericho,
where rolling green hillsides ripple with Kenya's world-famous tea.
It is a question those forced
off their land over decades in Kericho have been asking ever since.
Fed up with being ignored, the
Kipsigis and Talai peoples have urged a United Nations special investigator to
open an inquiry into their plight.
British and Kenyan lawyers
representing the victims will on Wednesday make their first visit to Kericho
since filing an official complaint with the UN, accusing the UK government of
failing to account for this colonial-era injustice.
They allege that the British
army and colonial administrators deployed rape, murder and arson to seize
swathes of arable land in Kericho from its traditional owners - rights
violations for which nobody has ever answered.
The victims - more than
100,000 are signatories to the UN complaint - want an apology, and reparations
for their homeland being usurped and reallocated to white settlers, who turned
the fertile soils to cultivating tea.
Kericho boasts some of Kenya's
most profitable agricultural land - but the Kipsigis and Talai say they reap
none of the benefit.
The land today is largely
owned by corporate giants such as Unilever, which sources tea from Kericho for
some of its best-selling global brands like Lipton.
The alleged expropriation of
land began in the early 20th century but accelerated from the 1920s, after
Kericho's exceptional suitability for tea was realised.
"There is blood in the
tea," said Godfrey Sang, a historian whose grandfather's land was doled
out to white farmers.
"People were killed.
Livestock was stolen. Land was taken. Women were raped... And a crop was
planted."
Lawyers pushing for UN special
rapporteur Fabian Salvioli to launch an inquiry say the intentional
displacement and resettlement of Kipsigis and Talai occurred when Kenya was
under the Crown, making the UK responsible under international law.
The UK Foreign Office, in a
statement, said it supported the work of UN special rapporteurs, and would
"respond accordingly" if contacted by Salvioli, the independent expert
for the promotion of justice.
Those thrown out of their land
were herded into so-called "native reserves", marginal areas where
conditions were often appalling.
In an extreme case, the entire
Talai clan - hundreds of families, including that of 10-year-old Ngasura - was
deported by decree in 1934 and interned in Gwasi, a barren land two-weeks walk
to the west near Lake Victoria, where malaria was endemic and water scarce.
"Life was so difficult.
People were dying," said Ngasura, speaking through a translator,
surrounded by his extended family.
Today, many Kipsigis and Talai
live as squatters, humiliated and landless, generations after their forebears
were exiled from Kericho's verdant slopes, land known locally as the
"White Highlands".
Most possess nothing more of
their past than chunks of pottery and other fragments, unearthed
surreptitiously from beneath the tea fields: proof, they say, that their people
once lived there.
"It is very bitter, to
see where you used to live, and (know) you were chased away," said Joel
Kimutai Kimetto, staring wistfully at distant hills where his father's land was
razed, and tea planted in its place.
A spokesman for Unilever Kenya
Ltd said by email they would not comment on colonial-era claims against the UK.
Williamson Fine Tea, and James
Finlay Limited, two other multinationals with major tea estates in Kericho, did
not reply to requests for comment.
"First of all, they need
to acknowledge that it is stolen property," said Kericho County Governor
Paul Chepkwony, who has fought for reparations for years.
In March, they scored a rare
victory when Kenya's National Land Commission ruled that the Kipsigis and Talai
did suffer injustices, and recommended the UK apologise.
But efforts to broker dialogue
have not been successful, said Joel Kimutai Bosek, a Kipsigis lawyer
representing the community.
The UK has faced a slew of
compensation claims from across its former empire, including from Kenya.
In 2013, the government paid
reparations to victims of its bloody crackdown on the 1950s Mau Mau rebellion
against colonial rule in Kenya.
But similar appeals have
failed.
Rodney Dixon QC, a British lawyer
representing the Kipsigis and Talai who is visiting Kericho this week, said the
UN special rapporteur could assist in mediating a settlement.
Mr Salvioli has vast
experience investigating long-past historic abuses.
"This is a precedent that
could equally apply here," Dixon told reporters in Geneva in September.
Ngasura, reaching the end of
his years, just wants an apology before he dies.
"After that, we would
shake the hands of the British, and forget the past," he said.
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