Reports have surfaced over the years of British soldiers stationed in Kenya committing sexual assault and abandoning children they fathered. These allegations have sparked outrage and calls for accountability.
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,” she told CNN 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 Pannalossy pictured at her home. Her mother was one of many Kenyan women who accused British soldiers of rape. Festo Lang/CNN
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.
Generica Namoru pictured with her five-year old daughter Nicole. Namoru says she was in a consensual relationship with a UK soldier but he has abandoned her and their child since leaving Kenya
