When Noldonyo Piro and her older sister were growing up, they were inseparable. Just a year apart, Piro, then about 15, and Mantoi Lekoloi Kaunda, 16, spent most days grazing the family’s herd of about 250 goats and sheep across the vast plains that stretch for miles around their home in northern Kenya. We loved to play with each other and tell stories.” As teenagers in the mid-1990s, their biggest fears involved the wildlife roaming the area — lions, cheetahs and elephants.
The sisters had no reason to fear the British soldiers who had long trained on the outskirts of Archer’s Post. In fact, neither had ever seen a white man before — until, on one afternoon, everything changed. Piro and Mantoi, who was about six months pregnant, were out herding livestock when Piro saw white soldiers approaching from behind.
Piro says the soldier then raped her until she passed out. When she regained consciousness, she was covered in blood. Nearby, her sister Mantoi lay with her eyes closed, lifeless.
I could see that she was dead. There were two sets of soldiers’ boot prints in the dust.” He carried his daughter’s body home on a donkey and buried her the next morning. No police post was within reach, and for a Samburu pastoralist in the 1990s, reporting an attack by men in foreign uniforms was unlikely to lead anywhere.
For years the family lived with the horror in silence, only whispered from household to household. Her case is among decades of allegations against soldiers from the British Army Training Unit Kenya, or BATUK, that include rape, murder, abandoned children fathered by soldiers, deaths and severe injuries from unexploded ordnance, environmental destruction and fatal vehicle collisions. The military arrangement dates back to a 1964 defence agreement, signed months after Kenya’s independence, that allowed United Kingdom forces to keep training on Kenyan soil.
Six decades later, BATUK remains embedded in northern Kenya, training around 10,000 soldiers a year in Laikipia and Samburu. There has been no known case in which British personnel accused in the cases documented by Kenyan communities and investigators have faced prosecution in Kenya. The UK has repeatedly invoked sovereign immunity — the principle that one state cannot be sued in another’s courts — a claim that went untested for decades, keeping cases from reaching Kenyan judges.
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