A farmer harvests tea leaves using shears at a plantation in Kenya’s Kericho highlands. AFP

KERICHO, Kenya (AFP) — Kibore Cheruiyot Ngasura was just a small boy when his family was violently expelled from their ancestral land in Kenya’s lush tea-growing western highlands by British colonizers and banished never to return.

Eighty-five years later he still bristles at the memory, recalling the fear and confusion as his community was marched to a distant, unfamiliar place, and people around him begged their white overseer for answers.

“They asked him, ‘What wrong did we do? Why are you punishing us like this?” said 94-year-old Ngasura, the only living survivor of a mass deportation in 1934 from Kericho, where rolling green hillsides ripple with Kenya’s world-famous tea.

It is a question those forced off their land over decades in Kericho have been asking ever since.

Fed up with being ignored, the Kipsigis and Talai peoples have urged a United Nations (UN) special investigator to open an inquiry into their plight.

British and Kenyan lawyers representing the victims will make their first visit to Kericho on Wednesday since filing an official complaint with the UN, accusing the United Kingdom (UK) government of failing to account for this colonial-era injustice.

They allege that the British army and colonial administrators deployed rape, murder and arson to seize swathes of arable land in Kericho from its traditional owners’ — rights violations for which nobody has ever answered.

The victims — more than 100,000 are signatories to the UN complaint — want an apology, and reparations for their homeland being usurped and reallocated to white settlers, who turned the fertile soils to cultivating tea.

Kericho boasts some of Kenya’s most profitable agricultural land — but the Kipsigis and Talai say they reap none of the benefit. The land today is largely owned by corporate giants such as Unilever, which sources tea from Kericho for some of its best-selling brands like Lipton.

The alleged expropriation of land began in the early 20th century but accelerated from the 1920s, after Kericho’s exceptional suitability for tea was realized.

“There is blood in the tea,” said Godfrey Sang, a historian whose grandfather’s land was doled out to white farmers.

“People were killed. Livestock was stolen. Land was taken. Women were raped… And a crop was planted.”

Lawyers pushing for UN special rapporteur Fabian Salvioli to launch an inquiry say the intentional displacement and resettlement of Kipsigis and Talai occurred when Kenya was under the Crown, making the UK responsible under international law.

The UK Foreign Office, in a statement to AFP, said it supported the work of UN special rapporteurs, and would “respond accordingly” if contacted by Salvioli, the independent expert for the promotion of justice.