![]() ![]() ![]() “When I got out, they gave me nothing,” said veteran Eusebio Mbiuki, now 100 years old and living in poverty in rural Kenya. “There must be an urgent inquiry into Britain having paid its African and Asian soldiers according to the color of their skin,” said Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party leader, following the revelations. The revelations have led senior opposition politicians to call on the British government to make an official apology, to launch an investigation, and to compensate the last surviving veterans affected by this controversial policy. Some Africans were forcibly and secretly conscripted, while others were beaten by their superiors. ![]() But even as the young Kenyan put his life on the line for Britain, he-and more than half a million other African soldiers drawn from the empire-faced harsh discrimination from his own side.īritain paid its soldiers not only according to their rank and length of service but also their ethnicity, a new documentary for Al Jazeera English has found, with black troops receiving a third of the pay of their white contemporaries of the same rank. By the end of World War II, Eusebio Mbiuki had faced deadly combat in the jungles of Burma and survived fearful ocean crossings stalked by submarines. ![]()
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