[This is an excerpt from an article in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs and Policy Studies.]

Introduction

On 19 October every year in Nandi County, western Kenya, a popular ceremony is held to remember the resistance mounted by the Nandi community to British colonialism. At the centre of the commemorations is the story of the Nandi Oorgoiyoot Koitaleel Samoei, who was killed on 19 October 1905. For 10 years prior to this, Samoei had led a guerrilla-war-like struggle against British forces, hindering efforts at colonial settlement in Nandi territory, and threatening the viability of the Kenya–Uganda railway – at that time conceived as key to securing British imperial interests in the region (Matson, Citation1972, p. 74; Wolf, Citation1974). In September 1905 the British assembled what was at that time the second‑largest military force in the history of colonial Kenya to contain the resistance movement (Moyse-Bartlett, Citation1956). Richard Meinertzhagen, an English soldier captaining a unit of the ‘Nandi Field Force’, invited Samoei to a meeting to discuss a possible truce. The meeting was a ruse, and Samoei and dozens of his ministers were ambushed and killed. Most contemporary Kenyan accounts suggest that Meinertzhagen then removed Samoei’s head from his dead body and took it as a trophy (Chomu & Humphry, Citation2012).

The prominent historian of colonial Kenya, David Anderson, has called into question the veracity of this latter claim, describing it as an ‘exaggerated trope of colonial atrocity’ (Anderson, Citation2023, Citation2025). Yet calls for the return of Koitaleel Samoei’s remains feature prominently in contemporary Nandi and Talai reparations claims, and his symbolic grave at the Koitaleel Samoei Museum in Nandi includes missing tiles to symbolise his missing head. In September 2022, representatives from Samoei’s ‘Talai’ clan sent a message addressed to the newly crowned King Charles III. The message renewed their demands for an apology for Samoei’s assassination; for a return of land lost during the Nandi and Talai’s enforced banishment to dedicated ‘reservations’ after 1905; and for the repatriation of Samoei’s remains (Citation2022; Kenya News Agency, Citation2022). Whilst King Charles III has since expressed ‘regret’ regarding atrocities committed by British colonial forces in Kenya during the 1950s–1960s (Lonsdale, Citation2023), neither the King nor the United Kingdom government has ever acknowledged the specificity of Nandi, Talai and Kipsigiis reparation claims.

This paper aims to both summarise and contextualise the reparation claims made by Nandi, Talai and Kipsigiis activists following British colonial rule in Kenya. Most international discussion of demands for reparations in Kenya have, understandably, focused on the landmark out-of-court settlement paid by the British government in the Ndiku Mutua and Others v. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Citation2012) case. Five Kenyan ‘Mau Mau’ veterans sued the UK government for human‑rights abuses, including rape and systematic torture, experienced while interned by counter insurgency forces attempting to contain the rebellion against colonial rule (Anderson & Weis, Citation2018). The UK government initially argued that it was not responsible for the actions of the colonial administration, and that too much time had passed since the events of 1952–1960 to reasonably litigate the issue in court. The High Court rejected this defence, and the UK government subsequently proposed an out of court settlement, paying out £19.9 million in compensation to 5,228 affected individuals, and issuing a statement recognising that Kenyans suffered ‘torture and other forms of ill-treatment’ at the hands of the colonial administration, although stopping short of admitting legal liability (Leigh Day, Citation2026).

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As Catherine Lu points out, the Mau Mau settlement helped catalyse similar litigation efforts and reparation movements, culminating in the development of the comprehensive plan put forward by a coalition of Caribbean states (CARICOM) calling upon ‘the former slave-owning nations of Europe – principally Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Denmark – to engage Caribbean governments in reparatory dialogue to address the living legacies of these crimes’ (Lu, Citation2017, p. 5; see also Ogwezzy, Citation2025, p. 557). In socio-legal studies, the settlement has prompted discussion concerning the limitations of existing legal frameworks for securing justice, drawing attention to the way the Mau Mau reparation claims probed the spatial and temporal frameworks and limits of national and international law (Mogesa Ongiri, Citation2025; Nesiah, Citation2026). Moreover, as Vasuki Neisha points out, whilst the out-of-court settlement in the Mau Mau case represented a significant victory, it was also employed as a tactic by the UK government to avoid a potentially precedent setting case that could have expanded the temporal reach and juridical geography of legal rulings in future reparation claims (Nesiah, Citation2026).

The high-profile nature of the Mau Mau settlement has, furthermore, been used by the UK government to suggest that the question of Kenyan reparations is now resolved (Miller, Citation2022). Indeed, in 2021, an official complaint was submitted to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Promotion of Truth, Justice, Reparation and Guarantees of Non-Recurrence, highlighting the enduring impact of colonial‑era policies on the Talai and Kipsigiis. Five United Nations Special Rapporteurs co-authored a report in response, urging the UK government to take steps to ‘provide reparations to victims, including restitution of confiscated land, compensation, psychosocial and physical rehabilitation’; to ‘ensure the participation of indigenous peoples and internally displaced persons, in the establishment of such measures’; and to ‘provide public apologies to the Kipsigiis and Talai peoples in connection to the violations they have suffered’ (United Nations, Citation2021a, p. 6). The UK government met its obligation to respond to the report but did not comment on any of the substantive claims or suggestions; noting instead that it had already reached a settlement and admitted regret for colonial‑era atrocities via an out‑of‑court settlement in the ‘Mau Mau’ case in 2013 (United Nations, Citation2021b).

It is in this context that Nandi, Talai and Kipsigiis activists continue to fight to raise the profile of their plight and demand for reparations. Their reparation claims address questions of culpability for colonial violence; the need for the repatriation of stolen heritage and missing remains; land rights and ownership; and financial compensation. This article will discuss each of these features of the reparation claims, showing how they address different dimensions of the ‘coloniality of power’ (Fasakin, Citation2021; Quijano, Citation2000) in post-colonial Kenya. The article begins with a short introduction to the traditional organisation of Nandi society and the role of the Talai Oorgooik in both Nandi and Kipsigiis history, before moving on to discuss the resistance of the Nandi, Talai and Kipsigiis to British colonisation and rule. This history is important for understanding both the historically misrepresented relationship between the Nandi, Talai and Kipsigiis during British colonial rule, and how contemporary reparations claims seek redress for the dispossession and oppression endured during the colonial period and afterwards. The article then considers some of the ways in which reparation claims can help create new ‘geographies of responsibility’ (Massey, Citation2004), focusing on the way Nandi, Talai and Kipsigiis reparation claims brought the two authors of this paper together, and have inspired a cultural restitution project connecting communities in western Kenya and northwest England. Far from being directed at purely historic events and injustices, the article argues Nandi, Talai and Kipsigiis reparation claims have a potentially ‘worldmaking’ power (Getachew, Citation2019) as they call into question the enduring spatial, ecological and temporal frameworks of colonial power in the present.

Joe Rigby, Social and Political Science, University of Chester, Nandi Hills, UK and Kipchoge Araap Chomu, Koitaleel Samoei Nandi Foundation, Nandi, Kenya.