Nelson Njao Munyaka witnessed two companions being shot dead by British soldiers; he carried their corpses to a white settler’s farm in Kenya’s Rift Valley. Both victims had taken the Mau Mau oath and been trying to escape.
More than 60 years later, speaking over a crackly videolink, Munyaka, sat in a Nairobi lawyer’s office explaining his testimony about the independence struggle to Foreign Office-instructed lawyers in London who probed its credibility.
Wearing a turquoise jacket, the 94-year-old farmer, with close-cropped white hair, sank deep into an armchair. He rested a long index finger on his temple as he recalled traumatic events from early 1950s colonial British rule.
Munyaka is one of 40,000 Kenyans who are suing the UK government for compensation over the injuries and losses suffered during official repression of the Mau Mau insurgency. Despite paying out £19.9m to 5,228 Kenyans who suffered abuse in and torture in a settlement in 2013, the government has refused to recompense this larger claim.
Speaking through a translator on Thursday, Munyaka explained how, on another occasion, he had been beaten and had his leg badly cut by home guard soldiers.
Were the men carrying “sharpened sticks” as his written evidence stated, he was asked, or was it, as he now seemed to imply, from a club that had splintered? The club had broken, he insisted.
For three weeks, counsel for the FCO, sitting in an artificially-lit basement court at the Royal Courts of Justice, have been cross-examining 27 claimants in a sample of cases intended to assess the reliability of their accounts.
Unable to strike out the claims on the grounds that UK courts have no jurisdiction to decide the issue or that too much time has expired – a previous case ruled out both objections – the government is questioning the legitimacy of individual test complaints. But how do you challenge a man of 94 without inflicting too much personal indignity? Cross-examinations have been delicate but laborious, conducted at a distance of more than 4,000 miles and through translators.
Next month, a separate group of survivors, represented by Tandem Law, a Manchester-based firm of solicitors, will fly to London to appear in court to give evidence about their claims.
In his written statement to the court, Munyaka said he had been cutting timber at a white settler’s farm in 1952 when he took the Mau Mau oath to oppose the British. Shortly afterwards, he recalled: “Two British soldiers who wore trousers and berets and three Kenyan police shot dead two of my workmates named Kabiru and Kahiga.
“I witnessed the shooting at around 6pm. They were told to stand up, because they had taken an oath, they resisted, and once they resisted they tried to escape and that’s when the British shot them.
“After they were shot, six of us were chosen to carry their corpses to a house on the settler’s farm. We slept outside in the farm compound and we were threatened by the British soldiers that if we tried to escape we would be shot.”
Munyaka was later detained in Githunguri Camp for nearly a year. “The camp was surrounded by a big trench which had spikes,” he said. “The houses were for the people who had been forcibly removed. In my room there were five people. I used to cook for myself, and then in the morning I would be taken to dig terraces. I was not paid for any of the work that I did.”
He was later moved to other camps and on another occasion hospitalised following beatings. “I suffer flashbacks and always recall how I was physically assaulted during the state of emergency,” Munyaka concluded.
“I was also verbally abused by the home guards. They called me names such as dog and donkey in presence of others. It was really shameful at my age being called such names by younger men who were home guards.”
Guy Mansfield QC, representing the Foreign Office, acknowledged last month that those alleged to have inflicted the violence were now dead or untraceable. Litigation on such a scale should not be “a historical inquiry into the events that occurred in Kenya at the end of the colonial era”, he stressed, but required “each of the claimants [to] prove their claims to the satisfaction of the court.
“All of the senior politicians and civil servants who worked in the colonial office in the UK or the colonial government in Kenya are now dead. The British army generals who advised and assisted the colonial government are all dead. None of them can explain what happened during the emergency. They too cannot now answer the grave allegations made against them.”
Without their testimony, Mansfield said, there is no “safe foundation for judgment”, adding: “These cases have simply been brought too late and it is now impossible for them to be determined fairly.”
Peter Skelton QC, also for the Foreign Office, told the court: “As this litigation has progressed, the [government] has become more and more troubled by the way the claimants’ evidence has been produced. There’s a risk that the test case evidence has been irremediably tainted by the way they were [questioned].” He said there were also doubts over the translation process.
