Archer’s Post, Kenya — Seventeen-year-old Marian Pannalossy cuts a striking figure wherever she goes in Archer’s Post, a small town 200 miles north of Nairobi. She lives alone and is light-skinned in a place where mixed-race people are a rarity and therefore ostracized.
“They call me ‘mzungu maskini,’ or a poor white girl,” at her single-room house, a tremor in her voice. “They always say ‘Why are you here? Just look for connections so that you can go to your own people. You don’t belong here. You’re not supposed to be here suffering.’”
Marian believes that her father was a British soldier, but she has never met him. She does not even know his name.
Marian is among a group of mixed-race children whose mothers say they were conceived after rape by British soldiers training in Kenya. Her mother, Lydia Juma, was among hundreds of Kenyan women who filed complaints with the UK military over the years, as documented by Kenya’s human rights body.
“I don’t know why God is punishing me. I don’t understand,” Juma said through tears in a powerful 2011 documentary, ‘The Rape of the Samburu Women.’
Marian, aged four at the time, sat on her lap, sometimes hugging her mother as she wept and recounted how she was violated and the suffering she had endured since. Juma’s live-in boyfriend, with whom she had two older children, left her after she gave birth to Marian, a mixed-race child, because rape is a taboo in their culture. “The moment he saw that the child is ‘white,’ he went, and he went forever,” she said in the film.
Juma died two years after that interview without ever finding the man she says raped her.
Mixed-race children continue to be born in the remote villages where the British Army trains its soldiers in Kenya. The British Army Training Unit, Kenya (BATUK), is headquartered in the town of Nanyuki, about 70 miles southwest of Archer’s Post.
BATUK is currently under investigation by the Defense, Intelligence and Foreign Relations committee of Kenya’s National Assembly.
It has held public hearings in several areas where British troops train and heard a litany of complaints about abuse, exploitation, and sexual assaults from communities around them.
It intends to hear from BATUK officials and the British High Commissioner to Kenya at the end of its work later this month.
One of the more contentious accusations against British soldiers involves the case of Agnes Wanjiru.
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