State House in Nairobi via REUTERS
King Charles Tuesday expressed “deepest regret” for “the wrongs of the past” at a state banquet in Nairobi, but stopped short of outright apologizing for Britain’s brutal and bloody repression of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya between 1952 and 1960.
Thousands of people were killed by British forces during the “Kenya emergency” and Charles had been under intense pressure to make a full and unambiguous apology to the people of Kenya ever since it emerged that Kenya would be the first Commonwealth country he would visit as king.
At the state banquet on Tuesday, he came closer to doing so than many had imagined he might, but seemed unwilling to go all the way, or to open a conversation about reparations, as many campaigners had demanded.