The killing of Agnes Wanjiru in Kenya is not an “isolated crime,” nor is it a matter of individual moral failing. It is the inevitable expression of the class interests that dominate imperialism.
Agnes was a 21-year-old mother in Nanyuki, a Kenyan town where the British Army maintains a permanent training base. Like so many of the poor, she struggled to survive. She earned a pittance braiding hair and working in salons, and sometimes by getting men to buy her drinks before exchanging them for money. On a good day she made £1, and on a bad day nothing. With no financial support from the father of her child, and living under the weight of poverty, she was left in a position where interaction with the foreign soldiers, who had long been known to exploit local women, was a risk she couldn’t always avoid.
In March 2012, Agnes went out with friends to a hotel bar frequented by British soldiers. Witnesses saw her in the company of white men that night. By morning she had vanished. For months her friends searched for her. At the hotel, a guard spoke of “a big fight” and a broken window. Three months later, Agnes’s body was discovered in a septic tank near the hotel. She had been stabbed.
From the start, suspicion fell on British soldiers. An inquest in 2019 concluded she had been murdered by one or two of them. Her death, it was later revealed, was widely known among the troops in Nanyuki. Yet the alleged killer was merely struck off the army rolls and allowed to live freely in Britain. For years, her family and her child — left orphaned and impoverished — waited in vain for justice.
What does this case reveal? First, it shows how the bodies of poor women are treated as expendable under imperialism. Agnes was a young, working mother compelled by circumstances to hustle for survival. The soldiers — nicknamed “Johnnies” by locals — were known for mistreating Kenyan women, yet their power and impunity rested on the permanent military presence of Britain in Kenya.
Second, the cover-up by the British Army, where many soldiers knew what happened but remained silent, exposes the solidarity of the ruling class and its armed hirelings. The life of a poor African woman meant nothing compared to the reputation of the British Army. The class line couldn’t be more stark: the imperialist state shields its own, while the working poor of other countries are denied even the dignity of justice.
Third, the so-called “investigations,” “condolences,” and “commitments” offered by British ministers are nothing more than manoeuvres to preserve the legitimacy of imperialist domination. Only in September 2025, more than a decade after the crime, did a Kenyan High Court issue an arrest warrant for a British national suspected of her murder. Even now, extradition is uncertain, and the British government speaks only in cautious legalisms.
Meanwhile, reports continue to emerge: even after new rules were introduced in 2022 banning soldiers from paying for sex, an internal investigation in 2025 confirmed that British troops in Kenya still engaged in transactional sex, often with women who were vulnerable, coerced, or trafficked. The same patterns of exploitation that led to Agnes’s death remain alive.
We must be clear: the issue here is not merely one soldier, nor one crime. It is the entire system of imperialist militarism, which stations armed men across the globe not to “defend freedom,” but to enforce exploitation, to discipline the poor, and to secure profits. The same class interests that drive the City of London to drain wealth from Africa also drive the British Army to protect its own killers in uniform.
The memory of Agnes Wanjiru should not be reduced to charity appeals and polite diplomatic words. Her murder must serve as a rallying cry for workers and oppressed peoples: to demand the expulsion of imperialist troops from African soil, to expose the hypocrisy of the capitalist class that talks of “human rights” while covering up murder, and to strengthen solidarity between the exploited masses in Britain and in Kenya against the ruling class that profits from their suffering.
For British workers, her murder should spur calls to end our military occupation of countries around the world and adopt a policy of peaceful, win-win cooperation. British militarism upholds the capitalist system that exploits us all and must be stopped.
Justice for Agnes means not simply extradition, not simply one soldier on trial, but the overthrow of the system which makes such crimes inevitable.
