Forgotten Heroes
The People & Power episode that came from this conversation was to prove both disturbing and deeply moving. Though their numbers have been whittled down by the passing years, the survivors - mostly now in their late 90s - continue to endure great poverty and deprivation. In Kenya and Tanzania, we tracked some of them down - people like Eusebio Mbiuki. He’d fought the Japanese in the jungles of Burma (now Myanmar), losing many comrades over years of fierce fighting. He still had his campaign medals from the time, but had little else and lived in a dilapidated shack hidden at the end of a long, muddy track. “When I got out, they gave me nothing, we were abandoned just like that,” he said. We also heard from Grace Mbithe, a 94-year-old widow, whose husband Kondo had been forced into British ranks, despite an official ban against conscription, and sent off to fight in the Libyan desert. “When he eventually came home he was deeply traumatised,” she told us. Like many others, she said, they had lived out their post-war lives in considerable poverty.
We learned that many British army officers during and since the war had done their best to try and address these past wrongs - including some very senior members of the UK military establishment. Indeed, a former chief of the UK armed forces, General Lord Richards, told us, “We should be ashamed that veterans who fought for our country have been treated like this. We still can make amends.” The film, which we called The Forgotten Heroes of Empire, made something of a splash when it came out in February 2019. The story was picked up by the UK media and several leading British politicians weighed in. There were angry words in Parliament; some demanded an immediate official investigation; others urged the government ‘to make this right’. Then, some months later, it emerged that the UK defence minister, Tobias Ellwood, had privately written to one of his Conservative Party colleagues saying there were “no current plans to take forward any further investigations of this matter.” Once more, it seemed, Britain’s colonial-era African soldiers were being shamefully consigned to the dustbin of history - although veterans’ groups have vowed to fight on. The film may not have made the difference we hoped for. But Al Jazeera forced people to remember and to acknowledge, if not yet to compensate, the sacrifices so many made in the name of freedom. That has to be worth something.
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