The UK government must take responsibility for the torture of Kenyans under the 1950s British colonial government, one of the survivors, 82-year-old Wambugu Wa Nyingi, told News Line outside the High Court yesterday.
Nyingi said: ‘You can’t have a baby, then kill it and say you are not responsible.’
He and three other Mau Mau freedom fighters – Ndiku Mutua, Paulo Nzili and Jane Muthoni Mara – are test case claimants now in their 70s and 80s, who have flown 4,000 miles from their rural homes for the hearing, which will also consider whether the claim was brought outside the legal time limit.
Before entering the court, their solicitor Martin Day read out a statement, saying his clients ‘were subjected to unspeakable acts of torture and abuse at the hands of British officials in the 1950s and early 1960s, including castrations, sexual abuse and repeated beatings’.
He continued: ‘The treatment they endured has left them all with devastating and lifelong injuries.
‘These four people represent the wider community of hundreds of elderly Kenyans who are still alive and who were subjected to systematic violence and abuse in colonial Kenya which was sanctioned at the very highest level in London.
‘It has taken years for the full facts to come to light as a result of recent exhaustive historical research by Professors at Oxford and Harvard which revealed, for the first time, the scale and the brutality of the abuse against detainees and the fact that the paper trail went all the way up to the Colonial Secretary in London.’
He added: ‘The claims are also being supported by the Kenya Human Rights Commission and the Kenyan government.’
He said the case ‘is about individuals who are alive and who have endured terrible suffering because of the policies of a previous British government.’
He stressed the four ‘are not looking for enormous sums’ in compensation but ‘recognition in the form of an apology that what was done to them was so wrong, and a welfare fund that would enable them to see out their years with some element of dignity’.
He warned: ‘Instead, the government claims that they are not legally responsible for British colonial atrocities and that any liability was transferred to the Kenya Republic.
‘To seek to pin the liability for British torture onto the Kenyan government is an appalling stance for the government to take and one which we hope and trust that the Judge will reject.’
