“It is a moment of pain, a moment of nostalgia,” he said. Timothy Kalyegira, a political analyst in Uganda, said there is a lingering “spiritual connection” in some African countries, from the colonial experience to the Commonwealth. “We cannot blame the queen for all the sufferings that we had at that particular time,” Kahindi said. “The most iconic figure of the 20th and 21st centuries,” Uhuru Kenyatta called her. “I cannot mourn.”īut Kenya’s outgoing president, Uhuru Kenyatta, whose father, Jomo Kenyatta, was imprisoned during the queen’s rule before becoming the country’s first president in 1964, overlooked past troubles, as did other African heads of state. “Most of our grandparents were oppressed,” Mugo tweeted hours after the queen’s death Thursday. While over 100,000 Kenyans were rounded up in camps under grim conditions, others, like Mugo’s grandmother, were forced to request British permission to go from place to place. It was issued four years into the queen’s reign, and well into Britain’s harsh response to the Mau Mau rebellion against colonial rule. In Kenya, where decades ago a young Elizabeth learned of her father’s death and her enormous new role as queen, a lawyer named Alice Mugo shared online a photograph of a fading document from 1956. For many, the queen came to represent all of that during her seven decades on the throne. Talk has turned to the legacies of colonialism, from slavery to corporal punishment in African schools to looted artifacts held in British institutions. Today, in the British Empire’s former colonies, her death brings complicated feelings, including anger.īeyond official condolences praising the queen’s longevity and service, there is some bitterness about the past in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and elsewhere. NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) - Upon taking the throne in 1952, Queen Elizabeth II inherited millions of subjects around the world, many of them unwilling.
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