Kenyan museum, Mau Mau fighter shed light on British colonial abuses

Chao Tayiana, a digital historian, and her grandfather Daniel Sindiyo, whose mother was in the British detention camps of the pre-independence Mau Mau rebellion, look at the reconstructed 3D models of the detention camps, during a Reuters interview in Ngong, outside Nairobi, Kenya June 29, 2020. Picture taken June 29, 2020. [Photo: REUTERS/Edwin Waita]

Nearing 100, Gitu Wa Kahengeri clearly remembers the day when, as a prisoner of Kenya’s colonial occupier Britain, he wanted to die.

“I was beaten the whole day until I did not feel pain any longer,” he said, of one episode of abuse during the seven years he spent in the camps that the British ran in the decade before Kenyan independence in 1963.