Thu, Oct 31, 2019 page6

• Kenyans say UK stole land for tea, urge UN probe

  • AFP, KERICHO, Kenya
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  Kibore Cheruiyot Ngasura was just a boy when his family was expelled from their ancestral land in Kenya’s tea-growing western highlands by British colonizers 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.

  “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.

  

  Godfrey Sang, a researcher who hails from the Kipsigis community, holds up an artifact recovered from a tea plantation in Kericho County, Kenya, on Oct. 2.

  Photo: AFP

  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 communities have urged a UN special investigator to open an inquiry into their plight.

  British and Kenyan lawyers representing the victims were yesterday to make their first visit to Kericho since filing an official complaint with the UN, accusing the British government of failing to account for the colonial-era injustice.

  They say 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 hosts some of Kenya’s most profitable agricultural land — but the Kipsigis and Talai say that they reap none of the benefit.

  The land is largely owned by corporate giants such as Unilever, which sources tea from Kericho for some of its best-selling brands such as 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 realized.

  “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... A crop was planted.”

  Lawyers pushing for UN Special Rapporteur Fabian Salvioli to launch an inquiry said that the intentional displacement and resettlement of Kipsigis and Talai occurred when Kenya was under the Crown, making Britain responsible under international law.

  The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office said in a statement that it would “respond accordingly” if contacted by Salvioli.

  Those thrown off their land were herded into so-called “native reserves,” marginal areas where conditions were often appalling.

  In an extreme case, the entire Talai community — 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, where malaria was endemic and water scarce.

  “Life was so difficult. People were dying,” said Ngasura, who was surrounded by his extended family and speaking through a translator.

  Today, many Kipsigis and Talai live as squatters, generations after their forebears were exiled from Kericho’s slopes, land known locally as the “White Highlands.”

  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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