The nuance of Kenya

On Remembrance Sunday in Nairobi nearly a decade ago, an ancient Kenyan veteran told Sam Mattock, a British ex-cavalry officer, that he had lost his second world war service medals. Could Sam help replace them? In a culmination of Sam’s personal efforts, King Charles III, on his visit to Kenya with Queen Camilla next week, will present medals to four veterans who fought for the empire in North Africa, Madagascar and Burma. The youngest of them, Kefa Chagira and Ezekiel Anyange, are 99. John Kavai is 101 and the eldest, Samweli Mburia, is 117 and served as a corporal in Burma.

One hundred thousand African troops fought the Japanese in Burma’s jungle, in a theatre that became known as the Forgotten War. In his superb memoir Warriors and Strangers, former King’s African Rifles officer Gerald Hanley told how he met an elderly Maasai many years later who produced a Japanese officer’s sword, which he had taken as a trophy in hand-to-hand combat. ‘We would follow Japanese tracks in the jungle and attack,’ remembers a very old Eusebiu Mbiuki Baikunyua today.

When the Kenyan soldiers returned from the fighting, some of them were fired up by their conversations with nationalists from India and other African countries, and they joined the Mau Mau guerrilla army that fought for independence from Britain in the 1950s. In that vicious insurgency, Sam learned that some war veterans feared they’d be seen as collaborators for having fought for the British, and so they threw their service medals away. Others simply lost them over time. Sam began tracking down surviving Kenyans who had served and checked their service numbers in the Commonwealth records. In the years since, he has been able to gather 135 names and he is still working on finding more – but they are dying as quickly as he discovers them.