Prince William “loves” Kenya. He loves parts of Kenya, like Jecca Craig’s family estate and some of the British conservation sites. He notably does not love Kenyans. He thinks they are having too many babies, and he just wishes Africans, on the whole, would stop reproducing. The Kenyan Talai clan never got William’s memo that he does not care for Africans. The Talai clan has made a direct plea to William, asking him to apologize for centuries of British colonialism in Kenya. They also want him to recognize the human rights violations committed against the Talai community.
A group of more than 100,000 Kenyans from the Talai clan has written to Prince William to seek an apology, and his support for reparations for human rights abuses they say they suffered during the British colonial settlement. The letter, a copy of which the BBC has seen, says the British government has declined to engage with the clan’s representatives and they’re therefore reaching out to the prince “because Kenya is special to him”. A request for comment has been sent to both the Royal Family and the British Foreign Office.
The Talai say the British government has declined to recognise the suffering of its members during the colonial era. A UN inquiry determined last year that gross human rights violations were committed particularly against the clan, including unlawful killing, sexual violence, torture, and arbitrary detention and displacement.
Five UN Special Rapporteurs then wrote to the British government regarding public apologies, reparations and remedy. In response, the UK said it had already issued a public apology and settlement in 2013 of claims made by Kenyans who lived through the emergency period and the Mau Mau insurgency, from 1952 to 1963 when Kenya gained independence. The Talai however insist that the case the British government referred to in its response is a separate case.
“Despite our immense suffering under British rule, the British Government has refused to acknowledge this fact or meet any of us, let alone apologise,” the group says. So they’ve turned to Prince William for help because of his personal connection to the country. “You proposed to your wife there and when your Grandmother became Queen, she was visiting Kenya – which at the time was one of the colonies.”
“We inherited the pain, you inherited the profit,” reads their letter to the prince. “Many of our group are very elderly so the urgency of this is paramount. We cannot let another victim of this time pass away still longing for their dignity to be restored.”
The clan says its members were forcefully evicted from fertile land in the highlands of the Rift Valley to pave the way for tea plantations, some of which still exist and are owned by UK-based multinationals. The Talai held a leadership role among the Kipsigis ethnic group in Kenya and led the resistance against European settlement. To quash it, every member of the Talai clan was forcefully moved to detention in a tse-tse fly and mosquito infested valley near present day Lake Victoria. The conditions there are recorded to have been so harsh that many of them died and women suffered miscarriages. They also lost their livestock in large numbers.
[From BBC]
During the Cambridges’ Flop Tour, there were conversations from right-wing British figures, arguing that the royals can’t be expected to apologize for reprehensible colonialist acts committed several generations ago. Like, colonialism is a thing of the past and how dare anyone act as if the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are responsible for it. Nevermind that the Windsors have always benefited from their ancestors’ colonialism, and that they still wear those jewels and collect interest on their hundreds of millions of pounds and decorate their castles with the ivory they stole. This is a reminder that there are still people living who have been screwed over politically, financially, medically and racially by recent colonialism. This sh-t wasn’t just happening in the 18th and 19th centuries. This tribe has been living through it in real time. And no, William doesn’t give a sh-t. He hasn’t said anything.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
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