As King Charles III travels to Kenya on his first visit to a Commonwealth nation since succeeding his late mother, Queen Elizabeth II last year, he will need to be alive to a number of issues pertinent to the trip which is full of symbolism.
Upon the death of Queen Elizabeth, King Charles took over as the symbolic head of the Commonwealth, a voluntary association of 56 independent countries most which have historical ties with the UK, among them Kenya.
The trip is particularly symbolic for King Charles as the late mother was in Kenya in 1952 on a similar royal visit with her husband Prince Philip when she ascended to the monarchy as queen upon news of the death of her father King George VI.
Besides his official itinerary, King Charles accompanied by his wife Camilla, will have to come to terms with the painful aspects of his nation’s shared history with Kenya as the country prepares to mark the 60th anniversary of independence from Britain on December 12 this year.
First and foremost, the monarch must brace himself to apologise for colonial-era atrocities by the British in the country during the struggle against colonial rule, in which thousands of Kenyans died, particularly the Mau Mau freedom fighters.
The Kenya Human Rights Commission estimates that 90,000 Kenyans were executed, tortured or maimed during the UK's counterinsurgency campaign to crush the Mau Mau rebellion which began in the early 1950s against the British colonial administration and the white settler farmers.
Although the UK government in 2013 expressed regret over the torture and other forms of ill-treatment perpetrated by the colonial administration from 1952 to 1960, such gestures have largely been superficial. Even the compensation the UK government paid out of 19.9 million pounds for human rights abuses was inadequate and did not reach all the families and other communities that suffered the ravages of the British colonialism.
King Charles will therefore need to revisit this sensitive issue and offer to pay adequate reparations for the misery, torture and deaths, that was visited upon the people of Kenya by the British colonialists; and essentially put a closure to this malignant issue.
Thousands of Kenyans suffered abuse and torture and died during the bloody Mau Mau insurgency, popularly known as the Kenyan Emergency, between 1952 -and 1961 as armed natives rebelled against the British demanding the return of their land and freedom.
Most of the events surrounding the rebellion have neither remained untold nor properly documented largely because the British colonial regime had destroyed most of its files before granting Kenya her independence.
But in her book - Britain’s Gulag, Harvard historian Caroline Elkins spent eight years of research to piece together the story of the draconian response of Britain's colonial government to the Mau Mau uprising after unearthing secret documents and interviewing several Mau Mau survivors.
The book reveals what happened inside the colonial detention camps, as well as the efforts to conceal the truth on the crushing of the rebellion; the war and the ruthless determination with which Britain sought to control its protectorate.
King Charles will equally need to commit the British government to assist Kenya identify the graves of the many freedom fighters killed during the freedom struggle among them Field Marshall Dedan Kimathi who was hanged in 1957 at Nairobi's Kamiti Maximum Security Prison but whose remains are yet to be located to date.
Essentially, King Charles has to take time during the visit to deepen his understanding of the historical wrongs suffered by the people of Kenya during the colonial period and offer pragmatic recourse to the same.
The author is the ODM executive director