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 lived a very simple life,” Piro, now in her 40s, recalls, sitting outside her small home made of tin sheets and sticks, topped with a patchwork roof of plastic bags in Archer’s Post, a rural settlement in Samburu County.
“I remember we used to stand some distance away from each other, and then one of us would start singing, and the other would answer. 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.
“I felt scared and started running,” she tells Al Jazeera, staring at the thickets across the arid landscape. “One of them chased me and hit me on the back of my head.”
“I fell down, and the soldier stood on my arm until it snapped and broke.” She holds up the arm, still visibly indented where the bone broke.
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.
Piro staggered home. “She was just shouting ‘problem, problem,’ and I could see she was having trouble walking,” her father, the late Kaunda Lekoloi, later told ITV. “She said the white men had attacked them.”
He went out to search for Mantoi.
“I found Mantoi covered in blood. 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.
“There was no one to tell,” Piro says.
Click here to read the full essay: Britain’s military in Kenya: Allegations, immunity and a fight for justice | Human Rights | Al Jazeera
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