‘A brutal legacy’: Queen’s death met with anger as well as grief in Kenya

Politicians pay warm tributes but memories of colonial atrocities prompt fierce criticism too

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In 1952, the then Princess Elizabeth was on a royal tour with Prince Philip at Kenya’s Treetops lodge. Unknown to them at the time, she would receive news of her father’s death during that visit, and the forest lodge would long be remembered as the place where Britain’s longest-serving monarch “went to sleep a princess and awoke a queen”.

Just two years after her visit, the Mau Mau, Kenyan freedom fighters opposed to British colonial rule, burned the lodge down. It was rebuilt in 1954, and older residents who live along the long and winding path to the lodge remembered her second visit to the area in 1983 fondly, saying it had placed their neighbourhood on the map. But Treetops was not open for the end of the Queen’s life. It closed its doors last year after a dive in tourism during the pandemic forced it out of business.

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