Should Charles apologise to Kenya for Britain’s colonial past?

It was no coincidence that Kenya was chosen for King Charles’s first state visit as monarch outside Europe. After all, it was at the Treetops hotel in Aberdare National Park on 6 February 1952 that his mother acceded to the throne. As the politician and diarist Harold Nicholson quipped, ‘She became Queen while perched in a tree in Africa watching the rhinoceros come down to the pool to drink.’

Such symbolism, and historical resonance, will have dearly appealed to Charles, as he acknowledged in his speech after a state banquet on the first day of his trip. He stated, ‘It is well known, I think, that my dear mother, the late Queen, had a particular affection for Kenya and the Kenyan people. She arrived here in 1952 a princess, but left as Queen’, before proudly noting that it was in the country that Prince William proposed to ‘my beloved daughter-in-law’, the Princess of Wales.