Eusebio Mbiuki fought in the second world war but was paid three times less than white soldiers

Long before the outbreak of the second world war swept him into Britain’s colonial ranks, Eusebio Mbiuki grew up in the tiny highland village of Mwema, surrounded by plantations of Kenyan tea.

Born in 1918, much of his childhood was spent looking after his family’s small herd of goats, having been forced to abandon school due to lack of money. In his early 20s, Mbiuki heard that a distant war had broken out and men like him were being recruited to fight.

Hungering for adventure, and with few economic opportunities on offer, he quickly signed up. “We had nothing – it was tough living back then,” he told film-makers in a documentary for Al Jazeera English’s People & Power series. “I wanted to have money like other people.”

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As European powers drew on their colonies for more personnel in the 1940s, Mbiuki’s wartime recruitment and subsequent deployment would form part of the largest single movement of African men overseas since the transatlantic slave trade. But he had little idea of where he would end up or, indeed, what was at stake. “We didn’t know what we were fighting for,” he said. “We were just like their boys.”

Following basic training with the King’s African Rifles (KAR), Mbiuki was among thousands of Africans whom Britain shipped off to Burma in 1944 to recapture the country from Japanese forces. Embarking from Mombasa, and crammed into overcrowded cabins below deck, he faced rough seas and miserable conditions. “There were a lot of people vomiting – it was really bad,” he said.

Once ashore, pushing deeper into enemy territory with minimal rations, Mbiuki went through hell, coming up against tropical disease, thick jungle and regular ambushes. “We started fighting the Japanese straight away,” said Mbiuki. “While we were looking for each other there would be gunfire. Then we would run towards it. It was really rough.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Eusebio Mbiuki (left) in a photo taken in the 1940s. Photograph: Jack Losh

Among Burma’s battlegrounds was the infamous Kabaw Valley, which, in the words of one KAR historian, was a “depression of thick teak forest and seething mud, continuously drenched with perpetual downpours of torrential rain”. In this hostile land, thousands of miles from home, Mbiuki witnessed many of his countrymen killed in action.

“You see one soldier fall down, then another fall down,” he said. “You get scared and know things are getting bad. But you can’t go back. You can’t go back.”

Mbiuki fell ill and was briefly hospitalised, his body covered in boils. “Most of the time, when you thought of what had happened, you’d want to run away,” he said. “But you would just say, ‘God help me. God help me. One day I’ll go home.’”

But Mbiuki’s eventual return to Kenya hardly brought a hero’s welcome. As with all demobilised soldiers, he was eligible for a service payment known as a war gratuity – but British policy ruled that his ethnicity and colonial origins should earn him less than his white counterparts.

As a private, he could receive three and a half shillings for each month that he had fought for Britain. But a white soldier of the same rank would get 10 shillings – almost three times more.

The decades since his wartime service have not dimmed the acute sense of betrayal that this flagrant inequality fostered in Mbiuki and in other elderly African veterans like him.

“They should have known how much we had helped them,” said Mbiuki, speaking in his dilapidated shack where he now lives alone. “We were abandoned, just like that.”

• Forgotten Heroes of Empire, a film by Jack Losh and Alessandro Pavone, will air on Al Jazeera English on Wednesday at 10.30pm