Demand to get riot leader’s skull to Kenya

Demand to get riot leaders skull to Kenya

Published: Just now

full screen A Kenyan people’s group wants the remains of a rebel leader back, a question they say can only be asked after the death of Queen Elizabeth. Archive image. Photo: Felipe Dana/AP/TT

Demands are being raised in Kenya for the skull of a prominent resistance leader to be returned from Britain to Kenya.

Koitalel Arap Samoei led an insurgent movement that opposed the construction of a railway between the Kenyan port city of Mombasa, through the country and to Lake Victoria in Uganda.

Several thousand people are believed to have been killed in the armed struggle that began in 1895 and continued for more than a decade.

Historians in Kenya blaspheme that the leader Samoei was tricked into a meeting by the colonial rulers in 1905. Instead of negotiations, Samoei and several of his companions were shot to death.

The Samoei’s head was severed from its body and sent to England as a war trophy, according to Kenyan representatives of the vulnerable ethnic group.

Samoei was the so-called Orkoiyot, spiritual leader within the Nandi people group.

The proposal to get the leader’s skull back is seen as possible only now, after Queen Elizabeth’s death.

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