KENYA: Slight Change for the Worse

In the forest-girt village of Kirawara, 48 miles north of Nairobi, an awe-struck crowd of 2,000 Kikuyu tribesmen squatted in the market place amid green bananas and calabash gourds, clapping their hands to their mouths to signify their proper respect for “Big Magic.” A spindly-legged youth, thought to be a hopeless deaf-mute, had suddenly started prophesying that “God would arrive in Kirawara at one o’clock.” Attracted by the commotion, a British-led patrol of Kenya’s African police came crashing through the jungle, intent on arresting the prophet as a mouthpiece of the Mau Mau, the terrorist secret society that threatens to turn Kenya Crown Colony into a colonial golgotha. “God will destroy all government chiefs,” intoned the prophet defiantly. “Airplanes will fall to earth, and police bullets turn to water.” Thus encouraged, the prophet’s trusting admirers charged the cops, brandishing long knives. But not one of the bullets that met them turned to water. Sixteen Kikuyu fell dead, 17 were wounded; the prophet was jailed, and has not said a word since.

Song of Terror. British Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton, who toured Kenya last month, assured the House of Commons that “we will free Kenya from fear.” Yet fear still reigns, and what was once pooh-poohed as a “native” bushfire might easily engulf the richest colony in Britain’s East African empire in a racial holocaust. Last week, in the exclusive “White Highlands,” settlers went in fear of unseen Mau Mau snipers. One family found that its servants had fled to join the Mau Mau, leaving the beheaded trunks of its loyal “boys” sprawled across the doorstep. At Thomson’s Falls, Dr. Ian Meiklejohn was slashed to death by Mau-Mau knifemen; in retribution, British troops rounded up every Kikuyu in a area surrounding the murder scene, drove off their cattle, sheep and goats and pulled down every native hut in sight.

Game of Polo. The Lancashire Fusiliers, only white regulars in the field between the Sudan and South Africa, pushed into the equatorial highlands towering above Lake Nairasha. One detachment of Fusiliers chased a band of Mau Mau up the rain-rutted sides of a 9,000-ft. extinct volcano. A posse of Kenya planters threw the Mau Mau lookouts off guard by staging a mock polo tournament, then suddenly dropped their polo sticks, whipped out rifles and charged the Mau Mau redoubt. From the ridges above came the sweating Fusiliers; behind, the Mau Mau found their retreat cut off by tall, pig-tailed Masai spearmen, recruited by the British from the fierce nomadic tribes that roam Kenya’s vast Rift Valley. A hundred Mau Mau were captured.

Wizard of Oz. In the House of Commons, Oliver Lyttelton’s oblique comment on all this unpleasantness was: “The situation in Kenya has, to some extent, changed for the worse.” With Lyttelton’s approval, Sir Evelyn Baring, governor of Kenya, last week assumed emergency powers to punish whole villages (by confiscating of crops and livestock) for crimes committed in their vicinity. Jomo Kenyatta, exiled boss of the Kenya African Union (KAU), was hauled before a British district commissioner formally charged with “managing the Mau Mau.” Many white settlers proposed still tougher measures. There was talk of evicting the whole Kikuyu tribe (one million strong) from its tribal lands, and white-whiskered Colonel Ewart Grogan, 78, the oldest member of Kenya’s Legislative Council, gruffly suggested: “Hang the Mikuyu in batches of 25 in public, and send witnesses of the executions back to the Kikuyu reserves to spread the joyful news.”

Urgent Warning. Hemmed in between black barbarism and white Blimpery, moderates both in Kenya and in Britain worried that repression alone might drive the docile majority of the Kikuyu tribe into the hands of Mau Mau fanatics. In the House of Commons, bluff Jim Griffiths, the former Labor government’s able Colonial Secretary, urgently warned: “We are in danger of converting what began as a struggle of all the decent, moderate, loyal people—Africans, Asians and Europeans—against the Mau Mau into a Black-White struggle.”

Arriving in Nairobi last week to inspect Kenya’s “security services,” strapping Sir Percy Sillitoe, 64-year-old chief of Britain’s famed M.I.5 (Secret Service), theorized that Red undercover agents keep in touch with the Mau Mau through a big Russian hospital in Addis Ababa. African patients get free medical treatment, courtesy of the Kremlin; afterwards, they have a curious habit of turning up in trouble spots all over Africa. Sir Percy’s theory, if true, could plausibly explain the fact that Mau Mau agents have been caught infiltrating along the lower slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro into Tanganyika Territory, and that a Mau Mau-like society whose slogan is “Kill the Whites and Christians” is growing in the Belgian Congo. With Asia in flames, the Reds are apparently getting ready to fan the fires of revolt in colonial Africa.