Moments & Musings — African History
They Called It a Handshake.
It Was a Gun.
He knew. That is the part nobody talks about. Not the killing, not the skull, not the museum in London. The part that sits in my chest every time I return to this story is simpler and far more devastating than any of that.
He knew what was going to happen. And he went anyway.
Koitalel Arap Samoei dressed in his finest regalia on the morning of October 19, 1905. He gathered his five most trusted advisers. He walked to the meeting point at Ketbarak, a place that today hosts a golf club called the Nandi Bears Club, where well-fed people in polo shirts drink sundowners on the same ground where a great man was murdered in cold blood.
He extended his hand.
The British colonel shot him through it.
And then they took his head.
Before I tell you the full story, I need you to understand something about the land this happened on, because it matters.
The Nandi Hills of western Kenya are not just beautiful, though they are extraordinarily beautiful. They are fertile in a way that made British settlers' eyes go wide the moment they saw them. Rich volcanic soil. Reliable rainfall. Sweeping altitude. The kind of land that grows things abundantly and keeps cattle fat through the dry season.
The Nandi knew what they had. They had lived on it for generations and defended it for generations. Arab slavers who tried to push into Nandi territory in the 19th century turned back. Fortune hunters and adventurers wrote in their own journals about a community that could not be penetrated. The British themselves described Nandi land as a “closed country.”
Not primitive. Not isolated. Closed. By choice. By force. By a people who understood exactly what strangers with guns usually wanted.
Into this country, in the 1890s, came the Uganda Railway.
The railway is the thing you have to understand if you want to understand Koitalel.
The British needed a rail line from Mombasa to Kampala. It was about economics and control, the ability to move troops, supplies, and extracted wealth across the interior of East Africa quickly. They called it an engineering marvel. The Indian labourers who died building it called it something else. The families of the estimated 12,000 people killed in the Nandi resistance alone called it something else entirely.
The route the surveyors chose cut directly through Nandi land.
Koitalel’s father Kimnyole, the previous Orkoiyot, had already seen this coming. He prophesied the arrival of white strangers and a fire-breathing iron snake that would cut through their land. Kimnyole did not live to see the prophecy fulfilled. His son did.
When Koitalel succeeded his father as Orkoiyot at around twenty-five years old, he inherited both the sacred spiritual authority of the Talai clan and a war already in motion. His answer to the railway was not negotiation. It was not prayer.
It was guerrilla warfare.
For twelve years.
Twelve years. Let that number sit for a moment.
The British brought professional soldiers. They brought guns. They assembled what they called the Nandi Field Force, the largest punitive expedition British occupation forces mounted in Kenya at that time, a military mobilisation they would not match again until the Mau Mau emergency of the 1950s.
Against all of this, Koitalel fought. And did not lose.
He was a strategist of real intelligence. He organised surprise attacks on railway construction crews. He planned ambushes when the British least expected them. He kept his fighters moving through terrain they knew and the British did not. He stole railway construction materials and had his people melt them down and reshape them into ornaments and weapons. This was not just practical. It was a statement: Your iron snake, reforged into our tools. Your empire, dismantled and worn as jewellery.
The British could not catch him. Officer after officer was rotated in, each one confident he would be the one to break the Nandi. Each one failed. Koitalel remained in the hills, undefeated, a living refusal.
And so they tried something different.
His name was Richard Henry Meinertzhagen.
Wealthy English family. Educated at Harrow alongside the future Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Oscar Wilde and Charles Darwin were close family friends. By every external measure, a distinguished man: soldier, intelligence officer, celebrated ornithologist.
Elspeth Huxley, who knew him personally, described him differently: “A killer. He killed abundantly and he killed for pleasure.”
In 1902, three years before he murdered Koitalel, Meinertzhagen ordered every living thing in a Kenyan village killed, sparing only the children, in retaliation for the death of a European settler. He later shot his own second wife. He claimed it was an accident. Those who knew him well had their doubts.
This is the man the British sent to end the Nandi resistance.
In October 1905, Meinertzhagen sent word through an interpreter to Koitalel: he wanted to talk. A peace meeting. Neutral ground. Five men on each side. No weapons. He framed it, according to multiple accounts, as Britain coming to discuss terms of withdrawal. Koitalel had fought them to a point where they were apparently willing to negotiate.
Koitalel had a premonition. His father had told him this day would come. His own instincts were shouting. He told his people what he feared. Some begged him not to go.
He went.
A leader who asks his people to trust his word cannot refuse to extend his own.
Meinertzhagen marched from the fort at Kaptumo with eighty armed men. Seventy-five of them hid near the meeting point at Ketbarak before Koitalel arrived. Five stood visible, as agreed. Koitalel arrived with his five advisers, unarmed, dressed in his traditional regalia.
He walked forward.
He extended his hand.
Meinertzhagen raised his rifle and shot him point blank.
His men opened fire on Koitalel’s advisers. Twenty-five Nandi warriors were killed at the meeting. Then Meinertzhagen and his soldiers left and killed men, women, and children along the road as they went. At least 250 Nandi people died that day. Koitalel’s headless corpse was found later under a sacred fig tree, where he had staggered nearly 100 metres after being shot before he fell.
They had decapitated him.
His head was sent to London.
Meinertzhagen claimed self-defence.
Three separate courts of inquiry were convened. Three times, he was cleared. He was eventually sent back to England — not as punishment, but because the Colonial Office had decided he had “become a negative symbol.” He was posted to South Africa, then India, then the Middle East. He rose through the ranks. He became a celebrated war strategist. His ornithological collection was donated to major museums. He was decorated. Respected.
But he could not stop thinking about Ketbarak.
In his memoir, Kenya Diary 1902–1906, published in 1957 — over fifty years after the killing — he wrote it plainly. No euphemism. No legal framing. Just this:
My drastic action on this occasion haunted me for many years. I, Richard Meinertzhagen, murdered Koitalel Samoei, the Nandi Orkoiyot on October 19, 1905.
He used the word murdered. In print. In a book still available today.
He confessed to murder in a published memoir. Britain read it. Filed it. Did nothing.
Two days after Koitalel’s killing, the British launched what they called the “final Nandi campaign.” Hundreds of Nandi men of fighting age were slaughtered. The Nandi were expelled from their hills. Their land — the same fertile volcanic land that had made British settlers hungry from the moment they first saw it — was allocated to European settlement. White farmers established tea plantations and colonial estates across the Nandi Hills. The Talai clan, Koitalel’s own sacred lineage, was forcibly displaced to mosquito-infested swampland at Kapsisiywa.
The clan numbered 300 at the time of displacement. They were forbidden from returning to their ancestral land. They remained in the swamp. Their numbers eventually grew to over 10,000 people, living for generations on land their bodies were not built for — because a British colonel murdered their leader during a handshake.
The Kenya-Uganda Railway was completed through Nandi land the same year.
Today it is a tourist attraction. Heritage rides are offered. People take photographs.
There is a mausoleum at Nandi Hills town now. A statue was unveiled at Uhuru Gardens in Nairobi in 2012. Schools are named after Koitalel. A museum stands in the Nandi Hills. President after President has received blessings from the Talai elders before assuming office, a tradition that acknowledges what was taken and what remains sacred.
But the grave at Nandi Hills is a headless grave.
It has been headless for 120 years.
In 2006, three leadership batons were recovered from a military museum in London and returned to the Nandi community. They sit in a wooden box with a glass top at the mausoleum. Visitors come to see them.
The skull has not been returned.
Nandi elders believe it is held at the Pitt Rivers Museum in London. They have been asking for it back since at least 2006. When King Charles III visited Kenya in October 2023, the elders presented their demand again: the skull, for a decent burial in accordance with Nandi custom, and 20 billion Kenyan shillings in compensation for the land, the lives, the displacement.
King Charles came. He gave a warm speech about the relationship between Kenya and Britain. He left.
The skull is still in London.
Here is what I want you to walk away with.
Not the railway. Not the dates. Not even Meinertzhagen’s name, though I want you to remember it.
I want you to think about the handshake.
Koitalel Arap Samoei fought the most powerful colonial army in East Africa for twelve years without ever being captured. Twelve years of outrunning, outsmarting, outfighting men with better equipment, more soldiers, and the full machinery of the British Empire behind them. He could plan an ambush in his sleep. He understood betrayal as a military tactic. He had spent his entire adult life reading the moves of an enemy that did not fight with honour.
And on the morning of October 19, 1905, he dressed in his finest clothes, walked toward a man who had invited him to talk, and extended his hand.
Because some things are supposed to mean something.
A peace truce is supposed to mean something. An agreement between men is supposed to mean something. An open hand is supposed to mean something.
Meinertzhagen understood that perfectly. That is exactly why he used it.
The British could not defeat Koitalel by fighting. So they used the one thing they knew he would respect: his own honour. They made him a promise and aimed a gun at the moment he chose to believe it.
He was not naive. He was not foolish. He was a man who believed that some covenants must be kept, even by your enemy, or the whole world loses its meaning.
He was wrong about that. And it killed him.
His skull sits in a museum in London.
A king visited Kenya two years ago and left without it.
They never taught you his name.
Ask yourself why not.
Sources
Africans Rising, Al Jazeera, Daily Nation, The East African, Standard Media Kenya, Tuko.co.ke, Wikipedia (Koitalel Arap Samoei and Nandi Resistance). Richard Meinertzhagen, Kenya Diary 1902–1906 (Oliver & Boyd, 1957). Kipchoge araap Chomu et al., Unyielding Hope: The Life and Times of Koitaleel Somoei.
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