Votes for Black Men

In a dense papyrus swamp 50 miles from Nairobi last week, the Mau Mau were making what the British hoped was their last stand. Sixty terrorists were trapped, including several members of the hierarchy which has directed the four-year war against their fellow Kikuyu tribesmen and their white employers. With an estimated 3,000 Mau Mau at large in scattered groups, the British felt that "the emergency" was almost ended.

Since 1952, some 14,000 Mau Mau have been killed, captured, or have surrendered. Another 62,000 suspects, held in prisons and concentration camps, are being cleared and rehabilitated at the rate of 1,000 a month. Nearly a million

Kikuyu are no longer living in huts scattered through the reserves, and thus vulnerable to Mau Mau threats, but have been brought together into 850 villages, all policed and protected at night. On the fairway of No. 3 hole at Nyeri Golf Club, the square black tent which housed the gallows from which scores of Mau Mau were hanged has been taken away, and at Thomson's Falls, scene of several massacres, a horticultural show was recently held. Life, it seemed, was back to normal. The Multiple Vote. But the shadow of the Mau Mau panga has left Kenya in a thoughtful mood. The idea that Africans should take part in the government of the country, laughed at three years ago, is now being seriously discussed. Negroes, constituting 97% of Kenya's 5,900,000 population, are represented on the existing 56-member Legislative Council by six Africans appointed by the colonial governor. Under new recommendations made by the British Colonial Office and the Kenya government, these six members would henceforth be elected by direct secret ballot.

The enfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of illiterate tribesmen has its problems. Kenya's Minister for Education, Labor and Lands, Walter Fleming Coutts, appointed to study possible electoral systems, last week proposed multiple voting (an idea that Coutts had read about in Novelist Nevil Shute's satirical In the Wet), by which each voter will have voting points varying according to his educational advancement and status: if he can read, has finished high school, has served five years in the armed services, and been decorated, he can earn up to six votes. Coutts's proposals came under attack in England as discriminatory democracy, but they also won praise as an attempt to bridge the obvious difficulties and dangers in giving the vote to unschooled tribesmen. Their most important feature was conferring the secret ballot on individuals rather than relying on headmen to vote for all their people.

Numbered Days. The big question in the minds of Kenya's white settlers is: In multiracial government, when do you stop? Certainly not at a mere six African members in the legislature, say many white men, who feel that they have perhaps five years' grace in which to guide Kenya's future along peaceful channels. Moderate blacks, peacefully agitating, may be a stickier problem than the Mau Mau. No longer able to jail Africans for "seditious" talk about political rights, the white settler gulps hard and smiles wanly. He knows his days are numbered.

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