Kenya: Slowing Up the Sunset

Amid rumors that Britain plans to postpone Uhuru (Freedom) beyond the 1963 deadline demanded by Kenya’s restive African leaders, London jolted the colony by abruptly announcing that Sir Patrick Renison, its Governor since 1959, has resigned. In fact, he had been fired, for, as he explained stiffly, “this change was not of my choosing.” Commonwealth and Colonial Secretary Duncan Sandys suggested that for “the final stages of Kenya’s advance to independence.” Renison simply does not have enough “political experience.”

An upright but unimaginative Governor, Renison has made little effort to win the confidence of African leaders. Socially he kept aloof in his gleaming white Nairobi residence amid its sprawling gardens, inviting the European elite in for an occasional cocktail party (with Lady Renison keeping a close personal eye on the liquor bills). He is particularly disliked by Jomo (“Burning Spear”) Kenyatta, who will probably be independent Kenya’s first ruler. In 1960, opposing Jomo’s release from detention as a ringleader of the 1952″59 Mau Mau terror, Renison warned that Kenyatta would lead the country to “darkness and to death.”

Though Harold Macmillan’s government says it is eager to grant Kenya its independence as soon as possible, such problems as defining its frontiers and drawing up an acceptable constitution now seem certain to delay nationhood until mid-1964. Renison favored a cautious approach to Uhuru. But Whitehall plainly felt that he was too unpopular to sell it to the Africans or to hold together the uneasy coalition of Kenya’s deeply antagonistic political parties, Kenyatta’s KANU and Ronald Ngala’s KADU. To succeed Renison, Duncan Sandys picked a man with a better chance of making delay palatable: Malcolm MacDonald, 61, a famed proconsul who has helped nurse more infant nations through independence than almost any other British official.

The affable, extravert son of Ramsay

MacDonald, Britain’s first socialist Prime Minister, “Mac” MacDonald as Governor General in Malaya spurred the far-reaching social and economic reforms that helped turn the tide there against the Communists. Later he served as Commissioner-General for Southeast Asia, last year was handed the delicate task of presiding (with a Soviet cochairman) over the protracted negotiations that led to the coalition government in Laos. A breezily informal administrator, MacDonald has frequently horrified pukka sahibs by allowing his photograph to be taken while walking hand in hand with bare-breasted native beauties. Among East-of-Suez Blimps, he earned the bitter sobriquet: “The Man Who Made the Sun Set on the British Empire.”

Though his appointment was greeted coolly by Nairobi’s Blimps, Kenya’s new Governor, its 13th, has a feeling for history and an unaffected sense of equality with Britain’s former subjects that has earned him the friendship of native leaders from Bangalore to Brunei. To hold Kenya together, as the East African Standard warned last week, he will also need “the wisdom of Solomon, the patience of Job and uncommon good luck.”