A Report from Kenya

A new season has come to Kenya Crown Colony, bringing all its beauties and a change in the weather. But the climate has not changed--the climate of hatred and fear, of murder and vengeance. Cabled TIME Correspondent Alexander Campbell:

IN Nairobi's New Stanley Hotel, where His Excellency the Governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, occasionally dines to the accompaniment of a brassy military band, a London correspondent growled: "If I opened my shirt and showed you my breastbone, you would see it was black and blue from settlers making their points." The settlers have been remarkably successful in estranging their journalistic kith & kin from Britain, and others besides. They lie in wait for them, pounce and start jabbing their forefingers into them before they have had time to sign a hotel register. The points the settlers want to drive home, in loud and often hysterical voices, are mainly three: 1) the Kukes (their name for the big Kikuyu tribe which has spawned the Mau Mau terror fraternity) have only been "50 years down from the trees"; 2) the outside world loves the Kukes and hates the white settlers; 3) most visiting newspapermen are "bloody Bolshies."

Nairobi, the colony's capital, has not really been touched much by the war the white settlers are waging against the Mau Mau terror. You can still walk through the main thoroughfares after midnight alone. Nairobi remains comparatively safe, like a near frontier U.S. town of the 1880s, with Gary Cooper for U.S. marshal. But up-country is another part of the world.

Up in the Aberdares

You drive through the thickly populated Kikuyu reserve, where shaven-headed Kikuyu women stagger under headloads that would shatter the spines of pack mules, and the closely clustered thatched mud huts look like shaggy beehives. Then you come to the edge of the escarpment, and the Rift Valley lies below you like a giant frying pan. Over to the right, the Aberdare range begins to loom, blue and smoky, and that's where the Mau Mau gangs lurk, and strike from. There are no east-west roads across the Aberdares. You have to go round them. And that's where the sprawling white farms are scattered, round the Aberdares and between the Aberdare range and Mount Kenya. When the Mau Mau gangs took to the thick, tangled forests and chilly upper misted slopes, they put the white farmers on a vast perimeter--and on the defensive. The Mau Mau gangs strike and vanish, and the white & black soldiers and police and farmers-on-commando go blundering after them. A commando leader said: "We were doing a little maneuver with some Lancashire Fusiliers. The Fusiliers passed us a tree trunk's breadth away. There were 20 of us, and they never saw us. If we had been Mau Mau!" He made a crude gesture with a calloused hand across his throat.

Thomson's Falls has gone completely Wild West. In the bar of Barry's Hotel, men in checked shirts sat on high stools with gun butts sticking out of black leather holsters. Bearded commando riders shouldered their way in with Sten guns slung on their backs. The flames of a big log fire (it gets cold up here at night) flickered on reckless, sun-wrinkled faces. A pretty woman threw open her white fur coat; round her slim waist was a leather cartridge belt and a bolstered Smith & Wesson.

Brandy & Bitterness

They drank a good,deal, and there was a raw bitterness in their talk. "Some bastards still think Kukes are human," said a red-faced young man, hitching up his gun belt and gulping brandy. "They aren't."

"I still trust my Kukes," said a quiet, older man. He spoke a little defiantly. "They're not all Mau Mau."

"Trusting bastards like you are the ones who get it," said the young man angrily. " 'I like Kukes,' said the Meiklejohns. So he's dead and his wife has only half a face. Bowyer liked Kukes; they ripped him up in his bath, and we had hell's own job to stop his bowels going down the drain. Bingley and Ferguson trusted Kukes; they're both dead. Gibson said his Kuke servants would warn him if he was in danger; who let Gibson's murderers in?

"Let me tell you," said the red-faced man, downing his fourth brandy, "how the Rucks were murdered. The Mau Mau were on the farm for three days, hiding in the huts of the Rucks' 'trusted, loyal' Kukes. Nobody told the Rucks. When Roger Ruck spoke to one of his Kukes, the Kuke grinned, and said, 'Yes, bwana.' He didn't say, 'Bwana, it's all decided, we're going to kill you tonight.' When Mrs. Ruck was handing out medicine to sick Kukes, they didn't say, 'Look out, they're sharpening the pangas in the huts'; they just thanked her for the medicine. When the Rucks' six-year-old son walked among the huts, they didn't say, 'Little bwana, tonight, when you are sleeping, after we have killed your father and mother, we will break down the door of your room, while you scream and scream, and then cut your throat.' "

The red-faced young man spat. "So you trust your Kukes, after that, do you?" he bawled. The other man coughed nervously, and looked abashed.

They were very bitter, up there in Thomson's Falls--and at Naro Moru, and Ol Kalou, and at Nyeri, and on the Kinangop, and in all that Mau Mau-infested country --about the politicians in Nairobi. "They sit," said a farmer vehemently, "on their fat behinds, in their nice offices, and make up soothing speeches. What we need is more men--far more men--and more action."

He spread out big hands. "Look, this way, how long will it go on? It could be years. But how long can we go on? Night after night, you lock the doors, and see to the guns, and kiss your wife and kids goodnight, and wonder if you'll see one another alive in the morning. We have no protection, except ourselves. And don't forget, most of us are out on commando duty. Some of us can't farm any more. So you go out a week or two weeks into the mountains, and you leave the farm to be run by your wife, or by a neighbor, in what time he can spare from his own farming, or to your aged parents. My father and mother are running my farm for me. Each time I go back, I can see they've got a little nearer the edge. They're going round the bend, under the strain of listening to every night noise, watching every black face. I bought them a radio." The farmer laughed derisively. "They don't dare to switch it on any longer! It might drown the other sort of noises they're always listening for!

"But what can I do? Give up the farm? All my life savings are in it. And who would buy it anyway? Nobody in Kenya is such a bloody fool as to want to buy a farm, today!"

Relatively a Liberal

On his 1,200-acre farm at Subukia, near Nakuru, Yorkshire-born Michael Blundell, the burly, boyish-faced political leader of the white settlers, admitted there was something in the farmers' case. "I try to force the government to take bigger steps, provide more armed protection for isolated farms," he said, "but it takes weeks to get them to move." Blundell, as political leader of the dominant whites in a colony that is still run from London, is in a difficult position. His influence is considerable, but intangible; officially he has little power. The governor of Kenya may listen to Blundell, but has to take his orders from the Colonial Office.

Blundell arrived in Kenya 18 years ago as a "farm pupil." During the war he bought the site of his present farm. It was virgin bush. Today it is a trim model farm, with neat contours and terraces, fields of asparagus (canned for export) and sleek Guernsey cattle. Relatively speaking, he is a liberal. That is to say, he thinks the whites should run Kenya with only a junior position for the Indians and the Africans (each of whom outnumber the whites). But at the same time he believes in uplift for the aborigines. Or did.

"I used to think reforms, especially economic, would solve most race problems," said Blundell. "But you just can't fight Mau Mau with new schools and indoor lavatories." This is how Blundell sees Mau Mau: "The Kikuyu have acquired our civilization faster than any of the other tribes. Mau Mau, however, is confined to the Kikuyu. Why? We whites are to blame. We've forced the Kikuyu to try to assimilate 2,000 years of civilization in 50. The result has been mental bewilderment, spiritual frustration. Mau Mau is a deliberate going back to primitive ways. They're rebelling against us primarily for taking away from them what they had--their tribal customs, their social structure --and putting nothing really satisfying in its place."

Blundell has advised farmers to "get rid of all Kikuyu or at least never to let a Kikuyu enter the farmhouse after dark. I've been told this was drastic, brutal and unnecessary. But the Mau Mau oath has a terrible binding power. One Kikuyu who had worked on a farm for 25 years went to his bwana. 'I'm leaving,' he said. 'They made me take the Mau Mau oath. This means they may ask me to kill you and I won't want to be in a position where I could obey. So it's better I get off the farm.' The 'loyalest' Kikuyu can't be trusted if he has taken the oath, even if he was forced to take it."

On Blundell's own farm, the Mau Mau oath administrators arrived one night at the huts, tortured several of his Kikuyu into taking the oath. The victims were beaten almost to death, and half-strangled. Only one, a sobbing teen-ager dared confide in Blundell what had happened. And the chief oath administrator was a well-dressed, well-educated young Kikuyu whom the Blundells had fully trusted

Playing It Rough

From most farms around the Aberdares, and from the Rift Valley, Kikuyu families are being evicted by the thousands (25,000 people, men, women & children from the Rift Valley alone). These families had "squatted" on the white farms, giving labor in exchange for a little land and a little cash. Now they are being returned to the Kikuyu reserves--whether they had land in the reserves or not. Most had not; the Kenya government hopes their relatives will feed them.

Most farms in the danger zone never even had locks on the doors before the Mau Mau terror began. Often built of cedar logs or even clapboard, added to when the farmer wanted more space they are difficult places to fortify. Some farmers have put wire-screening over their windows and long verandas, hoping that at least they'll get some warning if attacked. They all, of course, keep watchdogs, and carry guns.

The white settlers are not cracking under the strain--yet--but they are playing it rough. After the massacre of the Ruck family, Kukes were rounded up in large numbers, marched to a barbed-wire camp for "screening," beaten and kicked (reliable witnesses say) en route, including women with babies strapped on their backs. The number of Kikuyu "shot trying to escape" has risen in remarkable fashion. One Kenya police reserve unit hauled in four Kikuyu men. The prisoners were taken away in a truck, but when the truck reached its destination, all four Kikuyu were dead. It was said that they had "tried to escape." None of the four was armed. Kikuyu (including at least one woman) have also been shot dead "while trying to wrest a Sten gun from a guard"--although the settlers all swear the Kikuyu are a cowardly, not a desperately suicidal, people. Stray Kikuyu picked up by the commandos in the forests (called jungilis), who may or may not be working with Mau Mau gangs, are asked for information. They are seldom prepared to talk.

"But we bloody well make the beggars talk," said a commando leader grimly without going into further details.

Most of Kenya's white farmers are hard-working men who, if they despised the Kukes as "only 50 years out of the trees," did not ill-treat their labor. Now circumstances are making them as tough and ruthless as South Africans. They are men who have a lot to lose--including their lives. The Mau Mau hit first, now they are hitting back, without drawing fine distinctions between Kikuyu who are or are not Mau Mau.

Since the war against the Mau Mau is run from Nairobi, and Nairobi is by & large run by the sons of old Colonel Blimp, the ex-Indian army colonels, the not-so-young younger sons of aristocratic families with hyphenated names, it is not surprising that the embattled farmers explode with numerous complaints about Nairobi's incompetence and muddle-mindedness. Kenya, though by population a small country, has a baffling superstructure of government departments. "There is no liaison whatsoever," an upcountry district commissioner complained. "God knows what happens to my reports when they reach Nairobi; they never bear the slightest relevance to the instructions I receive afterwards--if I receive any."

The mass movements of Kikuyu have naturally worsened a confusion that was already chronic. One official orders a thousand Kukes to be at a railroad siding at dawn for shipment in trucks to the reserves; but another official delivers only sufficient trucks for 300 people. The farmers who have been told to deliver the Kukes at the railroad siding are then left to dispose of the 700 overflow as best they can. Nobody so far has seriously faced up to the position that will soon exist, when there are more Kikuyu in the reserves than the reserves can possibly feed; one district commissioner openly prophesies famine in his area this year.

Flame Trees & Fear

Kenya looks beautiful this week. The Nandi flame trees are ablaze with crimson against the clear blue sky, and in the sky glisten the snowy crests of Mount Kenya and Kilimanjaro. The giraffes gracefully nod their tall necks on the plains. Even the Aberdares, if you do not know what they shelter, could be called beautifully peaceful.

But it is really a land of murder and muddle. And there is little likelihood that either murder or muddle will halt soon. The sullen masses of evicted blacks in the overrun reserves; the white farmers and their wives besieged in their farmhouses with revolvers next to the dinner plates; the bearded commandos stumbling through forests after the elusive Mau Mau; the brittle Mayfair-in-suburbia life of spuriously gay Nairobi ; the purple-faced ex-colonels in the very, very particular Rift Valley Club-- none of them seeming to know what to do. Not even the Mau Mau themselves seem to know what they really want--except to kill and disembowel as many whites, chiefs, head men, and non-Mau Mau Kikuyu as possible.

Nobody can guess how long it may drag on, how far Mau Mauism may spread, how infectious its example might prove to be. What thoughts pass through the minds of Samburu, Turkana, Wakamba or Masai tribesmen as they watch the white man harried by the hitherto despised and pacific Kikuyu? What thoughts down in Central Africa, where the British plan a political federation opposed by the natives, or in Uganda or the Belgian Congo? In South Africa, the Negro-hating Boers use the Mau Mau's terror to win support for even more brutal suppression of the nonwhites. Kenya, the Land of the Shining Mountain, has become a smoldering ember in Africa. And the surrounding brush vast, white-run, black-populated, miles of it, is tinder-dry.

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