KENYA: Black & Red Magic

In the British Crown Colony of Kenya, while 3,000 coal-black tribesmen, huddled in a kraal, watched in awe, a goat was slowly beaten to death and buried alongside a virgin ewe. After that ancient rite, supposedly strong magic against evil, an official representative of the Great White Queen Across the Waters pronounced a solemn curse against the Mau-Mau. The Mau-Mau (rhymes with yoyo) is a native secret society which has lately been worrying the British. London is afraid that the Mau-Mau might plunge Britain’s East African empire into guerrilla war, and turn Kenya into another Malaya.

In recent years, the black 97% of Kenya’s population has banded together in a dozen fanatic, anti-white secret societies run by witch doctors and pledged to the slogan: “Africa for the Africans.” One called itself the “Men of God”; another was the “Spirits of the Dead,” led by a soccer player named Elijah, who used his soccer medals to persuade the tribesmen that he was divine. The Mau-Mau is the most feared and successful of them all. From their jungle hideouts, Mau-Mau raiders burn the huts of tribesmen who go to work for the white man (at 7¢ a day), murder white farmers with knobkerries and assagais, snipe at British officials.

Their whispered propaganda makes much of the fact that 3,000 whites monopolize almost all the fertile land in the cool “White Highlands,” leaving the blacks to grub for a living in barren, low-lying “reserves.” The Mau-Mau teaches that the white man’s medicine (e.g., anti-rinderpest inoculation) kills instead of curing, and that pregnant black women are aborted in white hospitals.

Kenya’s British police have caught and jailed 1,000 Mau-Mau blacks, flogged thousands more. Yet the secret society is growing at a pace that suggests professional organization and funds from abroad. The Mau-Mau’s leader, Kenya officials are sure, is black-bearded Jomo (“Burning Spear”) Kenyatta, 50, a thickset Kikuyu dandy, who runs the outwardly respectable Kenya African Union (K.A.U.), whose stated purpose is Negro advancement. A London-trained anthropologist who wrote (1938) a first-rate study of his people, Facing Mt. Kenya, Kenyatta is a devotee of Red magic. He spent the ’30s in Moscow as a student-guest of the Kremlin, returned to Kenya after World War II. now heads a chain of 135 bush schools which spread anti-British propaganda and uphold old barbaric rites (e.g., female circumcision).

Last week, at their leader’s invitation, 30,000 members of K.A.U. attended an open-air meeting in the dusty village of Nyeri, 100 miles north of Nairobi. Those who wore hats were asked to take them off because, Kenyatta explained, hats are a symbol of the white man’s rule. In an impassioned speech, he pressed one demand : “The whites must give Kenya back to us Africans!” Then, while white Kenyans hollered for his arrest, Mr. Kenyatta quietly tucked his ebony walking stick under his arm, walked home to his nearby bungalow and settled down to a book of essays by Bertrand Russell.