'Mourning bones' stopping family from using land

Mau Mau fighters’ skulls and bones discovered on a land in Ndeiya, Kiambu County. [Photo: James Mwangi]

A family in Kiambu County has threatened to exhume and dispose of the remains of purported Mau Mau freedom fighters to enable them utilise their land which was turned into a mass grave for those killed by imperial forces during the struggle for independence in the 1950s and 1960s. 

Teresia Gacheri, 96 (pictured right), from Thigio village in Ndeiya, owns the land and has since subdivided it. She swore that nothing will stop her planned mass exhumation and disposal of the skulls and bones since “we are always promised compensation or relocation by the authorities. But as soon as they walk out of my home, they go silent. We are told to identify land but they decline to pay for it. We have been to the Ministry of Lands but we are ever taken round in circles. They have done this for over 10 years but now we are now tired.”