KENYA: Opening the Highlands

“Hello—have you sold your farm yet?” In Kenya last week, this was the standard greeting whenever white settlers met. Behind it lay the bitterest blow that Kenya’s settlers have yet suffered: a Kenya government proposal to open up to Africans and Asians the immensely fertile 12,700 sq. mi. of the British colony’s “White Highlands” (see map).

The White Highlands are “white” because since 1939 only Kenya’s 60,000 Europeans have been allowed to lease farms there—a state of affairs that has constituted a perennial political and psychological affront to the colony’s 6,000,000 Africans. The new plan might ease the affront, but even its proponents did not argue that it would admit more than a sprinkling of non-Europeans into the Highlands. As the plan now stands, an African farmer who wanted to move into the Highlands would first have to get financing, then find a European farmer who was willing to sell his lease to a nonwhite, and finally, make a convincing demonstration of his agricultural know-how to an “area control board” dominated by European settlers. The one limitation on the area control boards: any African or Asian who suspected that his application had been refused on racial grounds could appeal to a central control board made up of Asians, Africans and Europeans in equal number.

Mild as it was, the new plan pleased no one. Said Group Captain Leslie Briggs, hard-shell leader of the far-right, pure-white United Party: “This is dishonest and dangerous—we would have no right to stop a convicted Mau Mau gangster farming next door to us.” With equal vehemence, African Nationalist Leader Tom Mboya denounced the proposals as falling far short of the sweeping redistribution of White Highlands acreage demanded by Africans. Even members of the moderate New Kenya Party, led by Michael Blundell, Kenya’s most progressive white politician, raised the outcry that the plan was discriminatory against Europeans; it was unfair, they said, to open the Highlands to Africans, when white farmers were not allowed to buy any of the thousands of fertile acres lying unused in African tribal reserves.

At week’s end, in a naked bid for the support of the New Kenya Party, the government announced that henceforth African land boards would no longer be allowed to bar land sales to white farmers on racial grounds. And if it chose, the government could almost certainly push its new plan for the Highlands through Kenya’s Legislative Council. But in the process, it might well increase rather than diminish the tension between Kenya’s races. Departing Kenya Governor Sir Evelyn Baring, mused the London Times, had handed to his successor, Sir Patrick Renison, “a baton . . . that looks suspiciously like a stick of dynamite.”