In Kenya Colony

Loping over the Equatorial highlands of Kenya, about midway along-Africa's Cape Town-to-Cairo all-British backbone, a giraffe ran into a telegraph pole last fortnight and interrupted the African telegraph service the late great Cecil Rhodes was always worrying about. The news humming over the wires before the giraffe butted in would have interested Rhodes.

Exactly the kind of African Colonist Rhodes wanted was Major Geoffrey Selwyn who went to Kenya in 1920 with -L-1,700, an old wound and his indomitable Wife Helen Eugenie. He bought a farm in northwest Kenya near Eldoret, a town of some 700 Dutch-speaking Boers who trekked once more into the hinterland when Britain conquered the Transvaal. Eldoret has one of the British Empire's highest railway stations (7,000 ft.), just north of the Equator. Only 100 mi. to the southwest is vast Lake Victoria. The climate is bracing but wet. The blacks outnumber the whites more than 200 to 1.

Major Selwyn went to work. But he did not get along with Boers or blacks; his cattle did not thrive; he could not afford the guards the Boers maintained against native thievery; and finally his old wound began slowly to paralyze him. Four years ago he quit and his wife took over.

She tried to stop the petty thefts of cattle, maize, poultry and automobile tires by fining her own native Kitosh servants two shillings pay for every unauthorized trespasser on her farm. Last June she missed some cowbells. That worried her. It seemed to her it might be the first move in a conspiracy between her servants and outsiders to steal her bell-less oxen. She sent her men out straightway, rounded up five Suk natives and had them flogged vigorously with a tire. When the tire broke, she herself brought up a leather razor strop and the last man was flogged with that. Seventeen days later he died in hospital. Major and Mrs. Selwyn and five servants were jailed. Utterly finished, the major contracted blackwater fever in jail and died too. Mrs. Selwyn fell ill but recovered. Last week she and her servants were on trial in Eldoret for manslaughter.

Mrs. Selwyn testified "I had no intention of killing any of them, and did not intend any serious injury." A British woman doctor testified that the Kitale hospital, staffed largely by Indian assistants, had treated the black improperly and caused his death.

Pertinent to Mrs. Selwyn's situation was the British Government's Kenya White Paper of 1923 which Kenya whites hate and which would have astounded Empire Builder Rhodes. It laid down the rule: "The interests of the African natives must be paramount, and that if, and when, those interests, and the interests of the immigrant races should conflict, the former should prevail. . . . The principle of trusteeship for the natives ... is unassailable."

The British judge suggested last week that the facts did not amount to murder. The Boer jury pondered, brought in a verdict of guilty with a recommendation for mercy. The judge sentenced Mrs. Selwyn to twelve months in jail, her servants to one month. By that time the giraffe's injury to the telegraph line had been repaired and the news went out.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.