Is Mau Mau compensation lawsuit worth the trouble?

Another aspect is a procedural one.

Though the lawyers can hardly hope to get their claims through the courts, one main first step for them would be to impugn the existing statute of limitations, lest the suit be dismissed .

About the only viable way to do so, would be to demonstrate that the many and often atrocious injustices and injuries suffered, were not simply “rough means in rough times” as only a few surviving myopic colonial apologists might still hold, but could constitute “crimes against humanity” in the modern legal sense. Such a procedural recognition would doubtlessly already be considered an important triumph.

Yet what Kenya needs, is not historical window-dressing nor legal tourism; but historical understanding.

This lawsuit, as it is presented and intended, does nothing to further and to promote such understanding, nor to support and encourage the — often painful and soul-searching —query for the truth that could set us free.

It is, as it is done now, the very opposite of “transitional justice.

Whatever its outcome will be, it will have squandered immense financial resources, in a blatant attempt to falsify and forge history.

But the time for hypocrisy is over: the victims of the emergency on either side, both the dead and the surviving, deserve better.

Because, as Muthoni Wanyeki wrote: “our past can still kill us”.

And it will continue to do so, until such sham lawsuits finally yield the place for the recognition of historical truth.

Mr Eichener is a Germany-based lawyer with roots in Kenya.