In November 1983, during the reign of President Daniel arap Moi, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II made a state visit to Kenya.
She was accompanied by her husband, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh.
Although she had previously been to the country twice – briefly in March 1972 and, of course, the world-famous sojourn of 1952 during which she came as a princess and departed as a queen – the 1983 trip was an elaborate state visit.
This included re-enacting the 1952 trip to the Treetops Hotel, where she was staying when news came through that her father, King George VI, had died and as heir apparent, she was now queen.
Unlike 1952 when she travelled by road, this time she went to Nyeri on board a Royal train.
Along the entire route, school children had been mobilised to wave the Kenyan and Union Jack flags.
They did so with great enthusiasm. That shouldn’t have been surprising, seeing as it was that it was just innocent children having a field day from the rigours of classwork.
What was remarkable, however, was the enthusiasm of the adults, all of whom had living memory of Britain’s colonial past in Kenya.
They waved at the Royal train with great happiness, too. They didn’t need to be paid as political mobs often are to do the bidding of the paymaster, in this case, to show their love for the British sovereign.
At that time, I was a reporter/deputy sports editor with the Nation . The Korean ambassador to Kenya had invited me for lunch at a nice restaurant called the Koreana.
It was situated at the Kenindia Building in Nairobi. The stock in trade of diplomats is to mine information from knowledgeable locals about their country. Journalists, too.
Their work is to mine information from everybody, including knowledgeable foreigners. So the lunch was going to be for our mutual benefit, as they would say in diplomatic language.
In fact, I wasn’t sure that he wasn’t a little breathless. It was as if somebody was also breathing his oxygen. He barely waited for us to place our orders when he asked me: “England colonised Kenya?”
“Yes, of course,” I replied, wondering where this was headed.
The ambassador paused. He looked down at the table and then straight into my eyes. And then searching for words that seemed excruciatingly hard to come, he asked me: “And Kenya people are waving England’s flag? Happy?”
He looked out of the window thoughtfully as if to contemplate whether what he had just said was true.
To say he was flabbergasted is to put it too mildly. He could have been speechless if he didn’t have a guest to entertain.
To cut a long story short, it was an early lesson on the different kind of relationships that free people forge with their erstwhile colonial masters.
Korea had been colonised by Japan and to many Koreans, colonisation was an unforgivable crime.
Even if, of necessity, the two countries could normalise their formal relations, there was no love lost between them.
The fastest way to get a Korean hot under the collar, I learned, was to say something nice about Japan.
As for waving the Japanese flag in homage to a visiting Japanese emperor, I’m sure a Korean would have preferred dying a thousand times to doing that.
On Thursday this week, Queen Elizabeth II died in her Balrmoral Castle, Scotland. Reflections on her 70-year reign began immediately, and for Kenyans, the years in which she was our monarch and Head of State.
She died as the longest-reigning female monarch in world history. Her reign transcended times of very consequential world crises and saw her superintend over 15 different United Kingdom prime ministers, five of whom were born after she had assumed power.
The Queen made two visits to Kenya during the reign of President Moi. The first was in 1983 when she toured Sagana Lodge – the place her tour was cut shot in 1952. The last visit was in 1991 as a guest of President Moi.
Photo credit: File | Nation Media Group
As the world says its farewells, Kenya won’t be far from many lips. This is because of Kenya’s historical connections to royalty.
By virtue of her colonial history, Kenya is a member of the Commonwealth, a grouping of former British colonies that as free countries came together under the patronage of the Queen.
Of the entire African continent’s Commonwealth membership, Kenya occupies a special spot.
This, obviously, is because of the fateful events of 1952. On January 31, that year, King George IV, who was the reigning king of the United Kingdom, put his daughter and her husband, Prince Philip, on a plane.
Since the then 56-year-old king was too ill to travel, he tasked the two to take a month-long tour of the Commonwealth, in the twilight of the British Empire.
Even though it was a working tour, the trip doubled as a short respite for the two from their tight royalty engagements.
When they arrived in Nairobi, the princess and her husband travelled by road to Sagana Lodge, a farmhouse in Nyeri that the colonial government had gifted her on her wedding day.
It was from there that they would venture further into the forest to a game-viewing lodge known as Treetops Hotel.
Those days, to get into the 3-bed cabin perched on the branches of a huge Mugumo tree, one had to endure the discomfort of a rickety ladder.
Nevertheless, back in the day, the lodge was widely acclaimed as the only one of its kind across the world.
It was at Treetops Hotel that the princess and her husband spent the night on February 5, 1952.
It was on that night when, unknown to her, her father King George IV passed away in his sleep, thereby, in accordance with British traditions, paving the way for the commencement of her reign.
Due to delayed communications, she would remain unaware of these developments until the following day.
When the news of her father’s death was finally broken to her and its implications clarified, she cancelled the remaining leg of her tour and, under the royal security befitting her new status, was driven to Nanyuki Airbase from where she took a flight to Uganda, en route to the UK.
Even though the news of her father’s death was shared with her after she had returned to Sagana Lodge, to date Treetops Hotel proudly dons the coveted badge of the spot where a princess became a queen, and for decades was to become a top tourist destination.
In her declaration of the beginning of her reign, Queen Elizabeth not only promised to walk in her father’s footsteps insofar as leadership goes but to also ensure the happiness of “her people” wherever they were all over the world.
It is to the memory of her coronation as Queen that the world-famous Kenyan motorsport event, the Safari Rally, owes its beginnings in 1953. Its first name was the Coronation Rally.
Among Kenyans, there are two faces of the country that the Queen’s reign first as head of state and later as head of the Commonwealth produced.
There was the fawning, romantic world of aristocracy where natives tried to emulate everything upper-class British, sometimes going to ridiculous extremes to do so.
Some of the country’s new overseers in business and politics were semi-illiterate but street smart people, who happened to be at the right place at the right time when British colonial rule was ending.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, in his book Devil on the Cross , made a full meal of satire of these people.
They took over huge tracts of prime settler land, and the money that came with it, but lacked the class they sought to belong to.
They understood little English, much less the meaning of the names they fancied as long as they were English.
As an example, one such character in the book, Gitutu wa Gatanguru, gleefully tells a gathering of elite thieves and robbers that his baptismal is Rottenburg Shitland Narrow Isthmus Joint Stock Brown.
He triumphantly says that mzungus (white people) shake their heads and stare at him in wonderment when he tells them his name.
These are the people who comprise the tragic chapters of David Anderson’s Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire and Caroline Elkins’ Britain’s Gulag: the Brutal End of Empire in Kenya.
To read these books is to hate colonialism, especially of the British variety. The atrocities are mind-boggling.
Once I took a boat ride to Mageta Island on Lake Victoria. Mageta was Kenya’s version of Robben Island.
Once there, you were there; the probability of escape was non-existent. But I noticed that, like other colonial detention camps, nothing is preserved to remind successor generations of the atrocities that took place.
It is now just a windswept, enchantingly beautiful but poor place. In any case Mau Mau, the freedom movement, remained banned in Kenya until the advent of the Narc government in 2002.
In 1982, the Nation sent me to Australia to cover the 12th Commonwealth Games in the southeastern city of Brisbane.
In those days, security was nowhere near what it is today where tall, dark-suited men sporting swimming goggles and wearing looks harder than the rocks of Batian, Nelion and Lenana on Mt Kenya make you feel that you are standing near them by mistake.
At the unsurprisingly named Queen Elizabeth II Stadium and outside it, things were very relaxed and I had a reasonably close-up view of this tender-looking monarch who reigned by force of arms over my homeland and in whose name much innocent blood was shed.
The memory of the hundreds of thousands of people who were put to death in the brutal but ultimately futile campaign to sustain her empire so that the sun may never set on it won’t allow me to forget her.
Many of the well-documented atrocities took place in my Nyeri birthplace, which also produced the legendary Mau Mau leader that her government put to death by hanging in 1957, Dedan Kimathi.
I have no emotion at all about her passing, but in homage to the memory of so many innocent dead not just in Nyeri, Kenya and around the world, wherever the Union Jack flew in the 1950s, I should.
