Kenya: Return of the Native

So secret was the operation that each of the three aircraft involved took off carrying sealed orders. But once they understood their mission, the pilots understood the security. They were on their way to Maralal airstrip, 200 miles from Nairobi, to bring home Jomo (“Burning Spear”) Kenyatta. the man the British sent to jail in 1953 for organizing the ferocious Mau Mau terror. After eight years. Kenya’s Governor Sir Patrick Renison had convinced both himself and the Colonial Office in London that British forces could handle any threat to public order posed by the old African nationalist’s release.

Despite the secrecy, a crowd of 2,000 blacks was on hand to greet Kenyatta when he got home to Gatundu. Men had shinnied up cypress, mango and pawpaw trees for a better look; Kikuyu women showed up with their faces and bodies ceremonially daubed with bright paint. They banged on drums, cheered and sang Jomo Kenyatta Is Coming Home At Last, a song especially composed for the occasion. The Burning Spear (a Kikuyu title for the bravest warrior of all) acknowledged the greeting with an imperious wave of his horsetail fly whisk, then briskly got down to the business of making peace between Kenya’s two leading political parties—the K.A.D.U. and K.A.N.U.—who have been feuding interminably over who did the most to get Jomo Kenyatta released. Said Jomo. who is cautiously avoiding taking sides: “I want to thank you all for what you have done for me. Now you must help me build a united Kenya.”

No Grudge. It was the same old Jomo. The spade beard was mottled with grey, but the clothes that he wears like a uniform—brown leather jacket, baggy corduroy trousers, red tie—were the same as the clothes he wore at the time of his arrest by the British in 1952. Now as then, he denies complicity in the Mau Mau terror which cost the lives of more than 13,000. Says Kenyatta: “I have never been a violent man. My whole life has been antiviolence.” As for the eight years of detention, partly spent at remote Lodwar, where the hot winds have blown the land into a veritable moonscape, Kenyatta insists: “I bear no grudge against anybody. I would borrow from the New Testament where Jesus said: ‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.’ ”

While Kenyatta was in prison, the 1952-57 Mau Mau uprising was beaten down, but the political tension on which it was built never subsided. The wave of African nationalism would not recede, and the unrelenting pressure for freedom by the colony’s 5,500,000 blacks began to tell. Kenya’s economy faltered: $2,800,000 in white-settler capital left Kenya weekly, and 800 of the colony’s 3,600 white-settler farms went up for sale. In 1960 Sir Patrick Renison still denounced Kenyatta as “a leader to darkness and death.”

No Privileges. Belatedly, the whites conceded that Mau Mau had only begun in earnest after Kenyatta’s jailing, not before. By early this year, Sir Patrick was saying, “It is arguable that the economy is likely to be more damaged by the uncertainty of [Kenyatta’s] continued restriction.” Finally, as the British realized that there could be no stable government in Kenya without black leadership, and that there could be no black leadership without Jomo Kenyatta, his release became inevitable. To reassure panicky whites, Kenyatta now says that they may keep their farms even after independence, “if they think of themselves as Kenyans and demand no special privileges.”

For the time being Kenyatta remains restricted to his three-acre plot at Gatundu. disqualified from holding political office because of his conviction. But he promises that as soon as he is free to move he will stump the colony. (“My message will be one of unity.”) The British hint that they will be watching closely before deciding whether or not to restore Kenyatta’s eligibility to hold political office. But since they have promised Kenya independence—possibly by next summer—their control over the Burning Spear is at best temporary. British Colonial Secretary Iain Macleod himself has said: “As time goes on, Africans will be in the majority position and their voice will be the predominant voice.” And quite possibly. the predominant voice in Kenya will be that of Jomo Kenyatta.