‘I cannot mourn’ - Former British colonies conflicted over the death Queen Elizabeth II

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Upon taking the throne in 1952, Queen Elizabeth II inherited millions of subjects around the world, many of them unwilling. Today, in the British Empire's former colonies, her death brings complicated feelings, including anger.

Beyond official condolences praising the queen's longevity and service, there is some bitterness about the past in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and elsewhere. Talk has turned to the legacies of colonialism, from slavery to corporal punishment in African schools to looted artifacts held in British institutions. For many, the queen came to represent all of that during her seven decades on the throne.

In Kenya, where decades ago a young Elizabeth learned of her father's death and her enormous new role as queen, a lawyer named Alice Mugo shared online a photograph of a fading document from 1956. It was issued four years into the queen's reign, and well into Britain's harsh response to the Mau Mau rebellion against colonial rule.

“Movement permit,” the document says. While over 100,000 Kenyans were rounded up in camps under grim conditions, others, like Mugo's grandmother, were forced to request British permission to go from place to place.

“Most of our grandparents were oppressed,” Mugo tweeted in the hours after the queen's death Thursday. “I cannot mourn.”

Guarded by members of the Lancashire Fusiliers, police and loyal Kikuyu spearmen, suspected members of the Mau Mau are questioned about the murder of two Europeans near Gilgil, Kenya, on Jan. 8, 1953. (AP Photo, File)

Some of the many Kikuyu tribesmen who were detained as Mau Mau suspects after the forced evacuation of Kikuyus accused of squatting on European farms in the Thomson's Falls area, Kenya, wait to be transported on Nov. 30, 1952. The enclosure is surrounded by barbed wire. The tall structure seen in center background is one of the portable gallows brought from Nairobi for hangings. (AP Photo, File)

Members of the Lancashire Fusiliers, King's African Rifles, Kenya Police and Kenya Police Reserve and Government Officers, force the evacuation of Kikuyu men, women and children who are accused of squatting on European farms in the Thomson's Falls area of Kenya on Nov. 30, 1952. Goods and chattel are being loaded into one of the 40 lorries that will take them to the Kikuyu reserve. (AP Photo, File)

A member of the Mau Mau, wrapped in the blanket in which he was sleeping, is held at gun point during a roundup at 2:30 a.m., by the Fifth Battalion King's African Rifles in the Nyeri district of Kenya on Nov. 13, 1952. Several prisoners were taken, including teachers at the Jomo Kenyatta sponsored Mungari School, where they are accused of spreading Mau Mau doctrines to the pupils. The man in this picture was arrested for being in the possession of subversive literature. (AP Photo, File)

But Kenya's outgoing president, Uhuru Kenyatta, whose father, Jomo Kenyatta, was imprisoned during the queen's rule before becoming the country's first president in 1964, overlooked past troubles, as did other African heads of state. “The most iconic figure of the 20th and 21st centuries,” Uhuru Kenyatta called her.

Anger came from ordinary people. Some called for apologies for past abuses like slavery, others for something more tangible.

“This commonwealth of nations, that wealth belongs to England. That wealth is something never shared in,” said Bert Samuels, a member of the National Council on Reparations in Jamaica.

Elizabeth's reign saw the hard-won independence of African countries from Ghana to Zimbabwe, along with a string of Caribbean islands and nations along the edge of the Arabian Peninsula.

Some historians see her as a monarch who helped oversee the mostly peaceful transition from empire to the Commonwealth, a voluntary association of 56 nations with historic and linguistic ties. But she was also the symbol of a nation that often rode roughshod over people it subjugated.

Cyprus 1957 - Violence flares anew as angry Turks take revenge for the slaying of a Turk policeman. they set seventy fires in the Greek section of Nicosia before British troops clear the streets. (AP Video)

There were few signs of public grief or even interest in her death across the Middle East, where many still hold Britain responsible for colonial actions that drew much of the region's borders and laid the groundwork for many of its modern conflicts. On Saturday, Gaza's Hamas rulers called on King Charles III to “correct” British mandate decisions that they said oppressed Palestinians.

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