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Mau Mau fighters’ skulls and bones discovered on a land in Ndeiya, Kiambu County [Photo: James Mwangi]
Mau Mau war lasted from 1952 to 1960. The war claimed thousands of indigenous people. Many were massacred in detention camps far from home.
In Hola, colonialists killed 11 fighters in 1959 then proceeded to bury them in mass graves.
In their remembrance is a tombstone bearing their names at the entrance of Mau Mau Memorial Girls Secondary School in Tana River.
There are however many unidentified fighters whose bones are stumbled on decades later. David Anderson, author of “Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire” describes the massacre thus; “Most of those exhumed had been victims of Mau Mau assassinations, their bodies pushed down latrines or buried in shallow graves, to be found in subsequent police investigations.
As evidence was gathered, some of the murders came to trial. But after the cases were heard, no one asked the relatives to collect the remains,” he says.
About 475 human skeletons of indigenous fighters were exhumed by police and kept at the National Museum of Kenya. They were however used against Mau Mau in trials.
Recently, a family in Ndeiya, Kiambu County has been stumbling on human skeletons on their farm on what is said was one of Mau Mau mass graves.
The family showed The Nairobian human skulls covered in shallow graves. They have no idea what to do with them.
They claim National Museums of Kenya and Kiambu county government have not shown interest in preserving them.
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