David Mwangi grew up in Nanyuki with a nickname that followed him everywhere: "British".
The name stuck because of his light skin, inherited from a white soldier father who left Kenya and disappeared into British bureaucratic silence before he was old enough to remember.
"When they call me that, I wonder what kind of world I am living in. The UK doesn't even know I exist, let alone give me citizenship," he says.
Mwangi is one among hundreds of mixed-race children fathered and abandoned by white soldiers who trained in Kenya as part of the infamous British Army Training Unit Kenya (BATUK).
Established on June 3, 1964, BATUK operates under an agreement that allows six British infantry battalions to conduct eight-week training exercises annually. Its operational bases are Kifaru Barracks in Nairobi and Nyati Barracks within the Laikipia Air Base, a $92.8 million facility located about 200 km north of the capital city.
The British military's footprint extends far beyond these training grounds. Thousands of soldiers from the UK have trained in Kenya over the past 60 years, and allegations of unpunished crimes by visiting soldiers have persisted throughout this period.
In communities where soldiers spend their rotations, relationships bloom and fade as quickly, leaving women to raise mixed-race children whose fathers inevitably disappear once their stints are over. Some of these children are born to survivors of alleged sexual assault by British soldiers.
Weight of identities
These children don't just suffer abandonment; they live with daily discrimination and the constant question of where they belong.
Louise Gitonga of Laikipia carries the burden of fair skin that marks him as different from others in a way he isn’t proud of.
"My dad is black – the one who raised me – but I want to know who my real father is and why he abandoned me," he says, his words heavy with years of unanswered questions.
The institutional indifference is equally crushing.
"Whenever I visit BATUK offices, it's always in vain. The commander there is Scottish, and the father of my child is also Scottish, so I don't get an audience. Sometimes, I am not even allowed in," says Jenerica Namoru, a mother fighting for her child’s rights.
Her experience echoes the stories of dozens of other women whose children have been denied recognition by fathers whose identities and whereabouts the British authorities refuse to reveal.
Living in a vacuum
Mwangi’s nickname "British" carries all the complexities that children fathered by BATUK personnel and abandoned have to live with – too foreign for acceptance as a native, too distant to be recognised by the UK as its own.
These children exist in the space between nations, claimed by neither.
Their demands are straightforward: acknowledgement from their fathers, recognition from the British state, and the citizenship rights that should be theirs by birth.
Prof Marion Mutugi, commissioner of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR), sees this pattern of abandonment as both systematic and actionable.
"We believe there's a conspiracy to ensure nobody is held accountable. We must keep on shaming them…The British government owes these families, the mothers who were sexually assaulted, and the children who are offspring of British soldiers and, by law, are British," she tells TRT Afrika.
An unfinished story
The wounds run deeper than individual abandonment. They speak to colonialism's enduring legacy, to power exercised without accountability, and to the hundreds of children paying the price for their fathers' choices and the British government's silence.
As these voices grow louder and their stories reach international audiences, Britain faces a reckoning it has long avoided.
Many of these mixed-race children are now adults, some of whom have children of their own. Their demands for justice are also a collective call to the UK to confront the human cost of its military presence abroad.
So, will the British government finally acknowledge these children or continue to look away from the consequences of its soldiers’ actions?
For now, the victims wait, caught between two worlds.
