Britain STOLE their land to plant tea. Now they want it back

[FBInCIAnNSATerroristSlayer]

POC MUST understand that they have the SELF DEFENSE RIGHT to MERCILESSLY
KILL the EVIL BARBARIC RACIST GENOCIDAL THIEVES like fucking pigs and TAKE
BACK their LAND and WEALTH.

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Britain stole their land to plant tea. Now they want it back

https://declassifieduk.org/britain-stole-their-land-to-plant-tea-now-they-
want-it-back/


A colonial-era land grab in Kenya saw Britain evict half a million people.
Now survivors are confronting some of the UK’s most powerful institutions,
from Unilever to King Charles, in a bid to reclaim their land.

PHIL MILLER

1 December 2022

“After independence our property was not given back to us. So it
wasn’t real independence. We’re still fighting for it,” a campaigner tells
Declassified
“I was young when the British came and started forcibly taking our
ancestral land. They burned down our houses and chased us away,” a
survivor recalls
British tea companies and the UK government are still trying to
prevent displaced Kenyans from getting justice

Wilson Kiget’s mother Lydia was just 13 years old when she was first raped
by a white farmer in Kenya. The assault came during British colonial rule
in the 1930s, after the settler helped himself to the family’s fertile
land.

“My mother worked on his tea plantation for ten years,” Wilson explains
nervously. “She was raped continuously. Three of us were conceived by him.
But when he wanted to marry a European woman, we were chased away and had
to live in an abandoned hut.

“The horrible thing was whenever she went out with my siblings, who were
lighter skinned than me, other children would run away because they were
scared of their appearance. My mother died a miserable death.”

Wilson’s family languished in poverty for decades, while the tea planted
on their land made a fortune for its British growers, Brooke Bond. The
company would be acquired by UK food giant Unilever in 1984, who marketed
the tea to millions of customers under the brands PG Tips and Lipton.

When Unilever sold its Kenyan tea investments to a private equity group in
Luxembourg earlier this year, the deal was worth €4.5 billion. But now in
an extraordinary twist, Wilson’s community – the Kipsigis tribal group –
believe they could be about to reclaim around 200,000 acres of lost land,
and a century of profits.

The change in fortune is thanks to a recent ruling by Kenya’s National
Land Commission, which found the tea estates should have been returned to
their original owners when the country became independent from Britain in
1963. Although the tea companies will challenge the decision at Nairobi
High Court next year, for now there is hope among the defiant Kipsigis.

“Our land was stolen during colonialism,” James Biy tells me, as we sit
outside his father’s cabin on the outskirts of Kericho, western Kenya.
Behind us lie thousands of hectares of rolling green hills, verdant with
tea leaves – on land which should belong to his family.

“After independence our property was not given back to us,” James remarks.
“So it wasn’t real independence. We’re still fighting for it.”

His father, Tito Arap Mitei, now in his nineties, can still vividly recall
the community’s ordeal. “I was young when the British came and started
forcibly taking our ancestral land. They burned down our houses and chased
us away several times,” Tito says hoarsely, holding a wooden walking
stick.

“Three of my sisters died because they caught strange diseases when we
moved into uninhabitable areas. Eventually we were so hungry we tried to
come back here, but the tea companies said we were trespassers.”

James finishes translating for his father before adding: “Between me and
the British, who is supposed to be a trespasser?” He produces a document
to prove he was taken to court – for collecting drinking water from his
ancestral streams.

The family now lives on a scrap of land across the river from the tea
plantations, with barely enough grass to graze a single cow. “We use
firewood for heating, but we don’t have enough land to collect the wood
from,” James’ mother laments. “If I go on the tea estate, I’m not even
allowed to take a twig.”
The missing skull

The Kipsigis are the victims of one of the British empire’s most brazen
and enduring land grabs. It began in the late nineteenth century, when the
imperial power built a railroad from the port of Mombasa towards Kisumu on
the shores of Lake Victoria.

Near the end of the track it passed the lush slopes of Kericho, where
Britain ran into resistance from the Kipsigis and the Nandis – a closely
related community based on a mountain ridge to the north. Although they
knew the ground far better than the British, they were completely
outgunned.

“In June 1905, 2,000 Kipsigis were lined up and killed by the British.
They were massacred,” historian David Ngasura Tuei tells me. Crown forces
fired more than 15,000 bullets on the punitive expedition to Sotik, in
which they lost just one man. “The enemy was defeated with trifling loss
to the column,” an official account notes dryly.

A few months after the massacre at Sotik, the Nandi’s leader Koitalel
Samoei was killed by a British officer, Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen. His
body was mutilated and belongings pillaged. A century later in 2006, the
Colonel’s conscience-stricken son would return these artefacts to Kenya.

But Samoei’s skull is believed to still reside in England, although its
exact location is unknown. The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford strongly
denied a report that it housed the skull when I contacted them for
comment, and it is not listed on their database of human remains.

While the Nandis’ resistance had been literally decapitated, the Kipsigis
held out, forcing the British to try charming their royal family, the
Talai. In 1906, their leader Kipchomber Arap Koilegen was invited to
Mombasa to attend King Edward VII’s birthday celebrations. The British
gave him an outfit to wear that emulated the style of the Sultan of
Zanzibar, a powerful Arab ruler, denoting high status.

David Tuei, who is related to the Talai royal family and has written two
books about their ordeal, says the British tried to get a treaty signed in
Mombasa. “Kipchomber was told the King wanted peace and didn’t want the
resistance to continue,” he outlines. “The settlers wanted the land and
for the Kipsigis to be moved to what is now Tanzania.”

Unsurprisingly, these demands were rejected and resistance continued for
another decade. Kipchomber and his two brothers were eventually detained
and exiled to a distant part of Kenya, where they would spend their final
days.

After the first world war, Britain’s land grab of the Kipsigis’ territory
accelerated with the introduction of the British East Africa Disabled
Officers Colony (BEADOC). It was a scheme for injured white war veterans
to acquire 25,000 acres of farm land in Kenya.

While some Kipsigis had fought for Britain in WWI and received medals,
that sacrifice was not enough to stop their ancestral soil being
designated crown land. British agricultural companies then received 99
year leases: firms like Brooke Bond (bought by Unilever), James Finlay
(now owned by Swire) and Williamson Tea. None of the tea companies
responded to my requests for comment.

Kipsigis were retained as cheap labour or relegated to native reserves,
where the ground was far less fertile.
Targeting the Talai

The most draconian treatment was handed out to the Kipsigis’ ruling
family, the Talai. Fearing armed rebellion in 1934, King George V passed a
removal ordnance banishing them to Gwassi on the shores of Lake Victoria,
more than 80 miles from Kericho.

“When the Talai were rounded up, the British registered all 698 names,”
David explains. “Then they trekked all the way to Gwassi – it took two
weeks. The European escorts were pulled by ox and cart that carried their
tents and food. But the Talai were on foot.

“My father was about 12 years old. He was carrying baby goats and sheep
that had been born on route. Once they arrived there, 14 women had
miscarriages. It was a harsh area, there were lots of snakes, mosquitos
and flies. Most of the people in Gwassi died. That’s what the British
wanted.”

When I ask David for proof of this chilling allegation, he calmly recalls
a visit to the UK National Archives in London, where he unearthed a memo
written by a British colonial official. It revealed a plan, “brutal as it
may seem [to] leave the old men to die out gradually in Gwassi.”

The officer added: “I have little sympathy for the actual age group who
made life so difficult for the government.”

“I was so shocked when I found this document,” David confessed. “I used to
cry.” He lays out a sheet of paper in front of me, showing how the British
carefully tabulated his community’s men, women and children before their
deportation to Gwassi. The Talai’s birth and death rates were then
recorded annually, instead of once a decade as was the norm for censuses
in the rest of Kenya.

After wiping out the Talai elders, the next generation was to be tightly
controlled. In 1945, a group of young Talai men were allowed to return to
Kericho to marry Kipsigis women. “My father was among them,” David notes
with some pride. “He is the only survivor who is alive – that trekked to
Gwassi and came back. I was born in that detention camp in 1952.”

Those married in the camp were given a place in Kericho to await
resettlement. “The life here in town was terrible. You weren’t allowed to
keep cows or have enough land to plough. We used to go to Kericho Tea
Hotel, which was for whites only, to scavenge for food. We ate the
leftovers from the night before. We’d take it to our mothers who would re-
cook it for the whole family.”

“Some young women started to sell their bodies to make money. That’s why
when HIV came, it really hit Kipsigis Talai,” he adds.

David is not the only person I meet in Kericho who grew up in a detention
camp. Wearing a mustard suit jacket and with a clipped moustache, Stephen
Kimeli Laboso describes how his family were driven from their land and
detained in the 1950s when he was around ten years old.

“It was surrounded by barbed wire,” he recalls. His schooling finished at
age eleven, after which he was used as cheap labour. “I had to work
removing moles from tea plantations. They paid me only five cents a day,”
Stephen says. “The coin had a hole in it with a symbol of the Queen.”

He then reveals an even darker episode. “There were old men who used to
work as cooks at the camp. Sometimes they were sodomised by white men –
Boers brought from South Africa,” he alleges. When the camp closed down in
1960, “eight elderly men decided to take their own lives by hanging
themselves, because they didn’t have anywhere to go.”