King Charles and Queen Camilla generally received an overwhelmingly positive response during their royal tour to Kenya, according to Daily Express royal correspondent Richard Palmer, however the question of reparations has hung over the trip ever since they landed in Nairobi.
At a state banquet held in their honour by President William Ruto on Tuesday night, the King gave an address during which he acknowledged the atrocities of British colonial rule in Kenya, particularly during the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s.
He said: “It is the intimacy of our shared history that has brought our people together. However, we must also acknowledge the most painful times of our long and complex relationship.
“The wrongdoings of the past are a cause of the greatest sorrow and the deepest regret. There were abhorrent and unjustifiable acts of violence committed against Kenyans as they waged, as you said at the United Nations, a painful struggle for independence and sovereignty – and for that, there can be no excuse.
“In coming back to Kenya, it matters greatly to me that I should deepen my own understanding of these wrongs, and that I meet some of those whose lives and communities were so grievously affected.”
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But the King noticeably stopped short of an outright apology, and shied away from addressing calls from the Commonwealth country for the UK to pay reparations.
If the Government does eventually agree to pay Kenya more reparations, it will not come from the King’s personal funds, Mr Palmer confirmed on this week’s Royal Round Up.
Kenyan President Ruto raised the question in his own speech at the banquet, saying: “Your Majesty, although it has been indicated that Kenya and the United Kingdom are celebrating 60 years of diplomatic relations, this by no means implies that our peoples were total strangers before that.
“Neither does it mean that we live in denial of history. We cannot live as prisoners of the past. Neither can we go far into the future if we turn our backs on historical actions and omissions whose legacies encumber our present.
“If colonialism was brutal and atrocious to African people, colonial reaction to African struggles for sovereignty and self-rule was monstrous in its cruelty. It culminated in the Emergency, which intensified the worst excesses of colonial impunity and the indiscriminate victimization of Africans.
“While there have been efforts to atone for the death, injury and suffering inflicted on Kenyan Africans by the colonial government, much remains to be done in order to achieve full reparations.”
Back in 2013 then-Foreign Secretary William Hague announced that payments totalling £19.9million would be awarded to over 5,000 Kenyan victims of torture and abuses at the hands of the colonialist government following a High Court ruling, however some have felt this does not go far enough.