Kikuyu Land review: the misery steeped into Britain's tea

Kikuyu Land, a documentary by Andrew Harrison Brown and Bea Wangondu, opens with a televised speech by Evelyn Baring, the colonial governor of Kenya during the 1950s. The choice is deliberate. In a few minutes of archival footage, the film lays out the imperialist impetus behind Britain's agricultural development of the country — and the dispossession that made it possible.

The setting is the central highlands of Kenya, a region renowned for lush tea plantations that stretch as far as the eye can see. Most of the field workers there come from the Kikuyu community, whose farming traditions span centuries. In this sobering documentary, those resplendent vistas are also enshrouded in misery. The Kikuyu people were stripped of their ancestral lands, their labour extracted to enrich their colonisers. That system of inequality continues today, with multinational corporations taking up the playbook of exploitation left behind by colonial control.

Wangondu, an investigative journalist who also co-directed, appears on screen and weaves together a multitude of narratives. The strongest of them belongs to Mr Mungai, a pastor and activist who has fought numerous court cases over decades to reclaim his family land. His struggle gives the film its spine: one family's claim against a history of seizure, measured in hearings, delays and refusals.

Around Mungai's story, Wangondu assembles testimony from plantation workers past and present. Their accounts include harrowing ordeals of physical and sexual violence, which the film shows have been swept under the carpet by both corporate indifference and government corruption. The documentary does not treat these as isolated incidents; it frames them as structural features of an industry built on unequal land and labour from the start.

The film's darkest testimony comes from an officer in the national intelligence service, who reveals the gruesome methods the state has used to dispose of its critics. The interview broadens the film's scope beyond agriculture into state violence. Together, these conversations conjure a menacing atmosphere of intimidation and retaliation, from which — as the film presents it — there seems no way out.

The review notes that the documentary takes a dramatic turn when a family secret is discovered. That turn transforms the film from an investigation into colonial and corporate exploitation into something more personal, binding the filmmakers' inquiry to a private reckoning.

Kikuyu Land arrives at a moment when the provenance of everyday commodities faces growing scrutiny. By connecting a televised colonial speech from the 1950s to the multinational tea operations of the present, Brown and Wangondu make the case that the misery behind the morning cup of tea is not a closed chapter but a continuing arrangement — one that their documentary, and the legal battles it records, are only beginning to unravel.