page_title: Esau Khamati Oriedo
section_title: Soldier — Veteran of Two World Wars
hierarchical_section_title: Esau Khamati Oriedo / Biography / Soldier — Veteran of Two World Wars
caption_attribution_description: English: King's African Riffles World War II monument, at Kenyatta Avenue, Nairobi, Kenya.
context_page_description: The Honorable Esau Khamati Sambayi Oriedo was a consummate founding Kenyan statesman, a freedom fighter, a Christian crusader, a philanthropist, an entrepreneur and a trade unionist, a veteran of World War I and World War II as a soldier in the King's African Rifles, a barrister, and an anti-colonialism activist. In 1923 he singlehandedly altered the Christian church landscape in Bunyore and the rest of North Nyanza region—in the present-day western and Nyanza regions of Kenya. He was an indomitable adept all-around crusader for a myriad of polygonal causes—the rights of the aboriginal peoples, a stalwart advocate for the syncretism of Christianity and traditional African cultural moralities, and a literacy champion—in the British East African Protectorate & Colony of Kenya, during the period that span more than five decades of the colonial and postcolonial epoch.
  In 1952 – 1957 he was detained at Kapenguria together with Mzee Jomo Kenyatta and other fellow Kenyan freedom fighters reminiscent of Chief Koinange Wa Mbiyu by the British colonial government in Kenya, under the so-called emergency rule.
context_section_description: He was a veteran of two world wars—the First and the Second World War (WWI and WWII, respectively).  He participated in the British Army's 1st King's African Rifles (KAR) operations in British East Africa 1914-1918 during the First World War (WWI); he was a porter and a mess hall cook, initially; but saw limited action at the close of the war.  Whereas, in 1939 he was a frontline soldier in the British Army's “King’s African Riffle” (KAR) during the Second World War (WWII).  In 1943 he assigned to the 11th (East Africa) Division of the KAR regiment which was formed the same year and sent to fight in Burma, present-day the Republic of the Union of Myanmar. He was a frontline infantryman in the Burma campaign.
  During WWII, he fought alongside British soldiers, and fellow recruits from the vast British colonial and imperial empire worldwide over.   The WWII experience was particularly edifying to Esau Khamati Oriedo; the experience augmented his functional tactical, operational, and strategic organisational leadership skills.  This battle-hardened soldier and a student of the British military strategies, developed a profound appreciation for and understanding of nationhood as a pan-ethnic cause of organising the different native African population in the British Colony and Protectorate of Kenya into a single nation by aggregating and embracing her diverse ethnicities.  He saw firsthand how soldiers from different races and ethnicities, and units fighting under the British banner were effectively leveraged accomplish common military outcomes.
caption: King's African Riffle (KAR) WWII monument at Nairobi, Kenya. Honouring Esau Khamati Oriedo and fellow native Kenyan soldiers who served in the British Army's KAR during the Second World War.
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