KENYA: Panga War

Sir Evelyn Baring, Governor of Kenya, pulled on his medal-hung tunic with the silver & gold epaulettes, buckled on his ivory-handled sword, and patted his plumed cocked hat into place. Then he climbed into his big black Humber and drove into Nairobi to open, in the name of the Queen, the 56-man Legislative Council (42 Europeans, 6 Africans, 6 Indians, 2 Arabs) that serves as Kenya’s parliament.

On the front of the governor’s car waved his official flag: two crossed pangas (broad-bladed African knives used to chop bananas). The pangas seemed symbolic last week, for Kenya Colony, the brightest jewel in Britain’s East African Empire, is bleeding badly in a panga war.

Striking from the great morose forests of the Aberdare Range, Mau Mau terrorists last week hacked an elderly Briton to pieces as he sat in his evening tub. A quick chop of the pangas and all his fingers were gone. In the port of Mombasa, supposedly awed by the guns of a British cruiser, a British marine was stabbed.

British counteraction was swift and drastic. Thousands of Kikuyu tribesmen fled in terror to the mountains as troop carriers and armored cars rumbled through the native reserves kicking up clouds of red dust. Kenya cops tracked down “suspects” with bloodhounds, arrested thousands of Kikuyu who got in the way. The government started closing down the native schools operated by Jomo (“Burning Spear”) Kenyatta, the uncrowned king of the Kikuyu, whom the

British exiled (TIME, Nov. 3) because they suspect that he is 1) a Communist, 2) the brains behind the Mau Mau.

Arriving in Kenya last week to make a big-game movie, U.S. Cinemactor Clark Gable boldly announced that he wasn’t going to worry about Mau Mau terrorism. But Kenya’s 30,000 whites, who have been around a little longer, are frankly worried. They are slowly beginning to realize that the Kenya of the movies, of pink gins and polo and unchallenged white supremacy, is gone for good.

From Nairobi last week, TIME Correspondent Alexander Campbell cabled:

KENYA’S white farmers, many of them impoverished aristocrats and others ex-Indian army colonels and majors, live in lonely gimcrack farmsteads dotted about the exclusive White Highlands.They drink expensive wines and dine off good china, yet few have telephones; farmhouses are miles apart and roads are dreadful. The whites employ half a million Negroes, and could not do without them. The whites insist they don’t have a color bar, only a culture bar: a civilized man of any color is welcome. To most of Kenya’s 100,000 Indians and 5,500,000 Negroes, the effect is about the same.

Now, suddenly, the whites are compelled to patrol their farms by night and carry guns whenever they step outside. Fear is wearing them down. “We never get any sleep,” said a monocled German who fled to Kenya from the Nazis. “I hoped to settle here after a stormy life, but now I think the white man’s number is up.”

For all their studied nonchalance, white Kenyans love their land—for its rolling green pastures, fat with cattle, for its deep forests and smoke-blue mountains, garlanded with the tea and coffee plantations that earn the colony’s living. On the whole, they treat their blacks better than most white settlers in Africa. The tragedy of the whites is their failure to understand that the black Kikuyu tribesmen, who tend their crops, wash their dishes, nurse their babies and dig their graves when they die, are also equally fanatic land-lovers. The whites blandly reason: “If we’re kind to the Kukes [short for Kikuyus], what more can they want? They’ve only been down from the trees for 50 years …” One helpful farmer lined up his Kukes and told them to speak to me freely. The farmer is a good bwana, they said, but that isn’t the point. The land was always ours; now we are hired laborers who can never earn enough to buy a farm. We are caught in a trap.

The worst trap of all is the crowded Kikuyu reserve, north of Nairobi. Scores of thousands of Kukes live there; and in the fertile areas, population density reaches 600 per sq. mi. Every scrap of arable land is terraced to the hilltops, yet only one Kuke family in ten has enough land to feed itself. The white holdings vary from a few acres (for poultry) to several square miles (for cattle ranching).

Military action may or may not stamp out Mau Mau terror; only reform can get at the deep roots of black unrest. Big and bluff British Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton toured the colony last week to see what can be done. From the Kenya African Union (KAU), the only political body in Kenya that claims to represent Africans, he got a list of Kikuyu demands: 1) more land; 2) higher wages and better education; 3) votes for all Negroes who pass literacy and property tests. KAU also sought the release of its leader Jomo Kenyatta.

In London, the Tory government has set up a royal commission to investigate the Kenya trouble by early 1953. A major difficulty will be the white Kenyans, who now fear to concede anything lest they lose everything.