The Rape of Kenya  

For nearly three decades British troops stationed in Kenya have been raping local women. Finally, the women are fighting back.
 
By Charles Wachira

"I was herding my husband's livestock one afternoon when I noticed two uniformed white soldiers coming towards me," says Selina Letowon Kisio, a 46-year-old woman from Kenya's Maasai community. "And since I was perennially afraid of government people and [was] alone, I started walking away from them. They quickened their steps and I fled when I heard them shouting at me. I could not hear what they were saying as I stumbled and fell, all of the time they continued running after me.
"They caught up with me and both got hold of me, one holding my arms as the other raped me. They did this in turns several times. I was scared. I screamed. There were no people around that place. When they were through, they left me crying and ran away."

"British troops have done terrible things to Kenyans," the women's lawyer says, "things they would never do in Germany, Canada or England."  
Afterwards, she says, she wearily trudged home where she relayed her ordeal to her mother-in-law. At the time her husband and father-in-law were not at home. The following morning Kisio visited the nearby Dol Dol Health Center, where she was treated. Upon returning home from the medical center, she found an unusually quiet husband.

"My mother-in-law had told him about the incident," she says. "He was furious. Not at the rapists who had defiled me but at me. I was devastated. He told me to my face that he could no longer live with a woman who had slept with majoni [the local parlance used derisively to describe collectively the British soldiers]. He then left the compound the same day and took all the livestock with him."

Vulnerable even to the local authorities, Kisio avoided reporting the matter to the police. She vividly relives the incident as if it took place only yesterday, but it happened 27 years ago. And she was not alone.

Earlier this summer a group of about 650 women won the right to sue the English Ministry of Defense for its failure to stop nearly three decades of systematic rape committed by British soldiers who trained in Kenya over a period of nearly 30 years. Today the women are beginning to retaliate, and they are using the tools of the British justice system to gain their day in court.

Martyn Day, a British attorney and a partner at the firm of Leigh Day and Company, is representing the women. He blames racism for the way the soldiers acted, and the way they were protected from prosecution.

"British troops have done terrible things to Kenyans," Day says. "Things they would never do in Germany, Canada or England where they train. But when it comes to Kenya, they seem to have thrown their rulebook away. I feel very strongly that it also behooves Kenyan authorities to conduct their own investigations into these claims of terrible treatment of Kenyan citizens."

The crimes left behind injuries physical as well as psychic, and often caused devastating financial and social consequences, as many raped women were discarded by their husbands after recounting the crimes committed against them. Hundreds of mixed-race children bear tangible witness to the legacy.

Such is the case with Elizabeth Naiku, now 50, whose 24-year-old son Maxwell Kabooi was fathered by a British rapist.

Through an interpreter, Naiku recalls the evening in 1978 when a gang of soldiers forced their way into her house in Dol Dol township.

"I was with a friend of mine called Gathambi," she says. "We heard knocks on the door. Gathambi went to check who it was, six men in military uniform got inside, as the door was not locked. We could not understand what they were saying in English, but we could tell they were offering us money that was in their hands in exchange of sex. But we declined and were afraid. But when we tried to run out, three of them got hold of me, and the other trio held Gathambi. They raped us in turns as they held our mouths so we could not scream. They appeared drunk."

Naiku explains why she kept quiet about the violation. "This is a shameful thing," she says. "Our people do not talk about such terrible things. Women keep it to themselves for fear of being isolated and scandalized. All the same, neighbors had heard the commotion in my house the previous night, and word soon went round that Gathambi together with my self had been gang-raped by majoni. I nearly committed suicide."

After the incident, she lived in horror of not knowing how her husband and father of her five children would react upon returning home.

"He could not bear the news that I had been raped by the majonis and things deteriorated when, nine months later, I gave birth to a boy of mixed race," she says. "He abandoned me with my children and has since remarried."

Finally, after years of official stonewalling, the English have mustered a four-man team representing the Special Investigations Branch of the Royal Military Police, which spent five days in Kenya this spring interviewing the victims. Quite a change from the meetings in 1983, when the army promised investigations — only to stand by while two more decades of rapes occurred.

Many of the interviews took place in the Mukogodo Division of Lakipia District, a sparsely populated enclave located 400 kilometers northeast of Nairobi, the country's capital. There, in a community that tends to treat sexuality as a taboo subject, many victims and witnesses still find it hard to speak of what happened.

The lawsuit would award each woman $20,000, a healthy windfall in a nation whose per capita income is just $375. But no amount of money will restore what these women lost.

"Personally I would want to see them punished for their beastly behaviour and the pain they inflicted on me," says Kisio. "If compensation is paid, it will alleviate the suffering the soldiers plunged me into, including being left to fend for my children. But it won't reverse what they did to me or erase the memories."

It is still pending.