The Troubles in Kenya

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 782, 16 July 1954, Page 12

The Troubles in Kenya

THE STRUGGLE FOR KENYA, by D. H. Rawcliffe; Victor Gollancz, English price 13/6.

(Reviewed by

David

Hall

HIS is a. very fair and unpolemical account of recent events in Kenya and their background by a man whose sympathies are with the natives rather than the settlers. In spite of this predilection the dark savagery of the tribes and their cults is portrayed without any attempt to disguise their barbarity. Moreover, the portrait of Jomo Kenyatta is by no means idealised. The writer acknowledges the services of the white settlers to the economic life of the colony, but then decides that their continued occupation of the White Highlands in farms of large acreage will not make for the greatest efficiency and the highest productivity in the future. It is difficult to avoid concluding here | that his sympathy for the tribesmen has led him to equate the social value of

giving Africans in overcrowded reserves access to land with economic welfare. The trial of Kenyatta, which seemed to the outside world very imperfectly conducted, Mr. Rawcliffe feels was not so much an injustice as a tactical error. Little evidence could be given because witnesses were intimidated, and Ken-

yatta and his companions damaged their own defence by evasive answers to questions. The book suggests that the colonial, government failed to realise early enough the gravity of the Mau Mau movement, failed to give adequate support to loyal elements among the tribes,

and failed to take advantage of help proffered by the Indian community. The white settlers themselves-not all of them Blimps-have failed to face up to the emergence of a new spirit of independence and nationhood based on colour among the various African tribes, both in Kenya and beyond it. The alarming thing is that Mau Mau has spread beyond the Kikuyu tribe; and African "nationalism" is emerging everywhere in colonial territories. Reversing Gresham’s law for currency, good government (if one views the Gold Coast experiment as "good"’) is bound in the long run to drive out bad (if one regards the Kenya Government dominated by 40,000 white settlers as "bad"). And no Africans anywhere are willing to accept the humiliations of the colour bar much longer. The book would have been much improved by a closer scrutiny of the history of the Kikuyu; it needs a map. A settler spokesman makes the apt comparison between Mau Mau and the Hau Hau movement.