Report from Africa

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 779, 25 June 1954, Page 10

Report from Africa

T was not surprising that Colin Willis’s "Report on Kenya" should redound to the credit of British colonists, Britain is a Prospero with the problem of an emerging Caliban on her hands. Prospero is always admirable; but the intractable Caliban feeling a yoke, however light, remains a moral problem. We cannot answer for Kenya; still we may not feel inclined to nod sagely at the administration of our own mother country. Violence and terrorism, ugly as they are, are often a corrupt fruit whose causes it is our job to discover. Consider, for example, the unrest of so very many native colonial populations at the present time. Is evil and violence endemic to native populations? While Mr. Willis suggests that the settlers have been there so long that they might be its new native population one did not hear how the Kikuyu themselves regarded this statement. Without belittling the benefits the British have conferred upon this people, one must not forget that the greatest and most important gift any race can give another

is simply that interior sense of freedom from whose security a people may direct

their own destiny.

Westcliff