More candid than his mother, he is likely to acknowledge the monarchy’s brutal colonial history but avoid inviting calls for reparations.
When King Charles III travels to Kenya this week, it will be a journey steeped in family memory for Britain’s new monarch: In 1952, his mother, Elizabeth, had just spent the night at Treetops, a remote Kenyan game-viewing lodge, when she learned of the death of her father, George VI, which thrust her onto the throne.
But Charles has no plans for a sentimental pilgrimage to Treetops. The hotel has fallen into disrepair in recent years, and it is redolent of the kind of white, colonial, safari glamour that the king would do well to avoid on his first visit to a former British colony since he succeeded his mother last year.
History will hang heavily over the king’s visit, in any event. Buckingham Palace said Charles “would acknowledge the more painful aspects of the U.K. and Kenya’s shared history,” specifically Britain’s brutal suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion from 1952 to 1960, which left tens of thousands of people dead.
Royal visits to former colonies have long been delicate, but in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement, they have become fraught. Protesters and local government officials regularly demand apologies and sometimes reparations for colonial-era abuses, including economic exploitation and Britain’s role in the slave trade.
The palace has declined to say whether Charles will apologize for Britain’s crackdown on the Mau Mau rebellion, and such a gesture would be complicated because it could open the British government to calls for compensation. But even a less formal expression of regret would reverberate widely, not only in Kenya but also across other countries that once formed the necklace of Britain’s empire.
“He’s walking a tightrope,” said Nic Cheeseman, a professor of democracy at the University of Birmingham. “He wants to say something strong enough to show that he gets it, but not so strong that it opens him to calls for more reparations.”
The words used by Charles could be a template for royal visits to other former colonies. “A lot of the tensions and challenges the king will face will be replicated in other countries,” Professor Cheesman said.
Above all, the palace is trying to avoid the public relations donnybrook of last year’s Caribbean tour by Prince William and his wife, Catherine. The lingering image was one of William, in a white dress uniform, riding in the same open-top Land Rover that had carried the queen and Prince Philip in 1962. To some Jamaicans, it was a caricature of a colonial proconsul inspecting his troops.
In trips to Barbados and Canada when he was the Prince of Wales, Charles spoke candidly and regretfully about the injustices of Britain’s colonial rule. He has struck a tone of equanimity about the fact that former colonies, like Barbados, have thrown off the British monarch as their head of state.
“The benefit of long life brings me the experience that arrangements such as these can change, calmly and without rancor,” Charles said last year at a gathering of leaders of Commonwealth countries in Rwanda.
The palace moved swiftly last November when a former lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth repeatedly queried a guest at a royal reception, who was Black and was born in Britain, about where she came from. The lady-in-waiting, Susan Hussey, was removed from the staff, and the palace arranged a meeting with the guest, Ngozi Fulani, at which Ms. Hussey apologized to her face-to-face.
