In moments of depression I sometimes wondered why I had bothered to come so far to be still so distant from the heart of the conflict. In Indo-China, even in Malaya, there was something approaching a front line; I could feel myself sharing to a small extent in the battle. Here the war was secret: it would happen the day after I left or the day before I arrived. It was a private African war which could be hidden so easily from white eyes, just as seventeen strangled bodies lay for weeks unnoticed in a squatters’ village on the outskirts of Nairobi, a mile from the highway and the houses of officials.
But if I was still far from the real stage, I was also far from the theatre gallery in London where I could hear only the voices of my fellow ‘gods’ telling how the play would end and how it should have been written. What seemed plausible there seemed complacent here, and ignorant.
‘Where is the man of courage who will see that so long as able men like Kenyatta or Kimathi are excluded from effective political power …?’ The voice droned on in the London theatre gallery. From there you could not see the group of burnt huts, the charred corpse of a woman, the body robbed of its entrails, the child cut in two halves across the waist, the officer found still living by the roadside with his lower jaw sliced off, a hand and foot severed. For that, here, was the political power of Kimathi, the power of the panga.
At best I had come down from the gallery to the front of the circle and could see a little more – not of what the play was about but of the movements and moods of the players: I could begin to understand that in this small area of Kenya it was unreasonable to expect people to talk reasonably. There was too much bewilderment and too much fear.
The 1950s had seen the triumph of guerrilla tactics: Indo-China, Malaya, the Central Province of Kenya. At the moment when the weapons of war had increased immeasurably in power and efficiency, the ill-armed guerrilla depending on surprise, mobility and the nature of his native ground had exhibited the limitations of the armament factory. The day of the Lee-Enfield and the Maxim gun were more favourable to the European than those of the dive-bomber and the Bren. (We may yet find this a happy augury in our own troubled future.)
Along the roads out of Saigon I had seen the return of the watch-tower and the border castle, and Kenya too had gone back to the bamboo tower, the wall of pointed thorns, the stakes slanting in the ditch; what we call civilisation – for want of a more accurate name – was on the defensive. The offensive was in the hands of the homemade gun and the steel panga. The Victorians had so taught us the idea of progress that we found it disquieting to go back in time. The world had been going in a particular way, and now it was going in another. The prophets had proved more wrong than the witch-doctors – even the prophets of the London School of Economics.
The liberal administrator – from governor to agricultural officer – had been honestly planning a land in which the position of the African would gradually, very gradually, improve, soil erosion would be stopped, new industries would be established, land-hunger be appeased. The day of colour prejudice would run its course: already the old conservative settler was dying out, and the task of ensuring justice between European, African and Asian was becoming a little easier. A common roll of electors and universal suffrage was still, of course, an impracticable dream – the liberal is never hasty – but perhaps one day the only bar would be a cultural one. Quite happily the administrator would administrate himself out of existence.
As for the settler, he had established that peculiarly English dream of a ‘home from home’ whether it was the rough farmhouse of the old settler, still lit by oil lamps, though surrounded by sixty thousand acres of his own ranching land, or the finely built traditional country house with a touch of Regency.
The Englishman, in those days, liked to be sentimental about the African: he admired the Masai because of their physical beauty, their indifference to civilisation (which removed a competitor), and because like Venice they were doomed to extinction (‘only born to bloom and drop’). But the Kikuyu were perhaps too close to ourselves. They were naturally a democracy (it was the Government which had forcibly substituted chiefs for the Councils of Elders), they believed in God, even their discontent had European parallels, and their passionate belief in their few lost acres around Fort Hall had something in common with the laments after 1870 for the lost land of Alsace. The half-affectionate nickname, ‘the Kukes’, was a measure of our limited acceptance. They were sometimes compared to the Jews because of their commercial astuteness, but the Jews are a deeply religious people and so too are the Kikuyu.
When the revolt came, it was to the English colonist like a revolt of the domestic staff. The Kikuyu were not savage, they made good clerks and stewards. It was as though Jeeves had taken to the jungle. Even worse, Jeeves had been seen crawling through an arch to drink on his knees from a banana-trough of blood: Jeeves had transfixed a sheep’s eye with seven kie-apple thorns; Jeeves had had sexual connection with a goat; Jeeves had sworn, however unwillingly, to kill Bertie Wooster ‘or this oath will kill me and all my seed will die’.
Only missionaries gave unheeded warnings two years before the outbreak of violence; perhaps love is really not so blind as superiority. A belief in God leaves you nearer to the aberrations of paganism than an interest in wattle-clearing or artificial insemination, and the celibate priest in a lonely mission in the Reserve praying daily to the Mother of God was closer to those dark assemblies around the naked woman and the dead goat.
A touch of hysteria was natural enough when the surprise came. Polo-players rode off into the forest carrying their polo sticks on the search for Mau Mau hide-outs; demonstrators, after the murder of a family, pushed aside African police at Government House; there were exaggerated demands that all Kikuyu should be returned to the Reserve, and more than sixty thousand squatters drifted back (twenty thousand by compulsion) from the Rift Valley, leaving the farmers without labour and the Reserve overcrowded and short of food. At a moment when the Kikuyu were dying in hundreds and Europeans only in tens, there were cries of ‘Send them back and let the loyal prove their loyalty and the disloyal get back into the forest with the Mau Mau.’
To me who had known Malaya, the settler at first seemed unduly susceptible to the idea of violent death. (Not only the settler: I have seen a judge trying a case in a tin hut at a police station surrounded by barbed wire and watch-towers, with two armed askaris sitting in the court, who yet found it necessary to place on the table before him a revolver covered by his wig – it was a warm day.) In Malaya there had been no demonstrations at Government House and the risks of death were far worse – in the state of Pahang alone, one tenth of the planters lost their lives in the first three years.
But I had only to stay a while in the countryside and I became aware of how this smaller conflict could prey worse on the nerves. I might smile at the tiny revolver-holster in crocodile, as becoming to a pretty girl as a Dior fashion, at the notice on the hotel board at Nyeri, ‘12-bore shotgun, lady wishes to exchange for 16-bore,’ but stay a while in a lonely farm on the edge of the Aberdare or Kenya forest and you would see the other side.
It is not only that human nature fears bullets less than steel (the photographs of a trunk from which the head has been severed remain long in memory), but that night is more the time of unreason than day. In Malaya it was the days which were dangerous – the morning inspection of the plantation, the ride into town between the walls of jungle: but at night one slept behind barbed wire; one’s Malay houseboy was on the same side; there was a Malayan guard who would at least sound the alarm. One’s enemy was better armed and trained, but he was more comprehensible. In Kenya the settler was often his only guard, he was well aware that his houseboy had taken the Mau Mau oath and any day might be required to help kill his employer, he had to depend for safety on a flimsy lock to his bedroom door, the revolver by his bed and the vigilance of his dog, and the night inevitably seems longer than the day and full of the creaks of wood and the trottings of a scavenger. I
remember one night in the Highlands at a kindly settler’s. He couldn’t find the key to my room which was separated from the rest of the house. He was afraid it might have been stolen for the Mau Mau, so, as I had no revolver, he lent me a young boxer. During the night there was the sound of a gunshot, and the dog spent the rest of the night awake pointing at the door, ready to spring.
In yet another way the hard lot of the Malayan planter was to be preferred. His stake in the country was thirty years’ service and a pension at the end of it. He was a salaried employee who would one day make his home in England (perhaps for that reason Malaya is more free from the hideous architecture of nostalgia). The Kenya planter on the other hand had sunk his capital in the land. Many hardly regarded themselves as English: even a certain bitterness crept into the voice of the second generation: ‘England isn’t my home. This is my home.’
Not all were rich men: the eccentric days of Happy Valley, of bright young people and free exchangeable love, had been over long ago – only a few haggard relics of Happy Valley remained.
Most farmers had a hard enough struggle without Mau Mau. Locusts came down from Abyssinia to destroy the maize. There were rinderpest, necrosis of the tongue, quarter evil, wireworm, fluke. Foot and mouth, common and uncontrollable, ran through the herds and weakened their resistance; even the puff adder sniped a few head every year. Now the margin of profit was threatened by the emergency. The Mau Mau stole and slashed, the best labour disappeared.
Fear of ruin was to most farmers worse than the fear of death, for their whole life had to be lived here. This was their burial ground. They had been settled, in some parts of Kenya, a third as long as the Kikuyu. In England they would be exiles.
1953 had been a bad year for drought; often there was not enough labour left to gather the pyrethrum crop – a harvest which cannot be delayed – or to dip the cattle with sufficient regularity. In some areas the Government had ordered all maize to be destroyed within three miles of the forest to prevent it falling into Mau Mau hands (the farmer was promised an ex gratia payment, but was reasonably anxious about the what and the when). In the ranching areas near Mount Kenya, where ‘General China’, one of the three Mau Mau leaders, carried on his war for food, the farmer was ordered to boma his cattle near his home, but this might mean that they starved on exhausted pastures.
Under these circumstances I was sometimes amazed that the liberal settler was as common as I found him: the young man who recognised that the White Highlands could not remain white for ever and that unused land would one day have to be sequestered: the old veteran who said: ‘Those who don’t love the African had better get out of here. It’s not the country for them.’
I have written of the farmer, but there was another type of settler who brought less good to his new country. You could see him drinking beer in the lounge of the New Stanley Hotel in Nairobi with all the arrogance of Brighton Pier: the day-tripper had found himself four thousand miles from home with black servants to command. Perhaps he worked in one of the big stores and was the more determined after shopping hours to assert himself by being served in his turn. He helped to give the Kenya Police Reserve an ambiguous name; no doubt in his gun-happy ‘cops and robbers’ romanticism he contributed some of the 460 revolvers and guns which had been lost and stolen during the rebellion.
It was one of the great problems here to convince the Africans that the white, too, was an individual – and that Europeans might be pagan or Christian.
What a strange divided country it was, even this small section of Kenya which one may call Kikuyuland, divided by geography and divided psychologically. The flat, parched acres of the ranchland to the north were no more different from the rolling Wiltshire landscapes and the Kentish lanes twenty miles away and two thousand feet down than were the minds of the whites from each other. The farmer everywhere would talk to you of the slowness of Government, of emergency regulations lying on a desk in Whitehall where the tempo of life goes with the regularity of the bus service outside. Every evening the local radio gave out the long list of violent crimes in Nairobi, and the criticism of the police increased. Periodically came the cry for more summary justice.
The long delays of Kenyatta’s trial, which could hardly reach any conclusion through the maze of technicalities for two years at least, the drawn-out mass trials of those concerned in the Lari massacre, were an irritation to worn nerves. Men and women living in the dangerous regions imagined that the speed of justice had been slowed down by inefficiency in gathering evidence – hardly a single bloodstained panga or shirt was unearthed by the police after Lari – by a lack of urgency in Nairobi and a lack of imagination. (There was something a little pedantic and absurd in the wooden shed like an outside lavatory at Githenguri, where the Lari trials were held, marked in chalk ‘Judge’s Chambers’.)
Some argued that, as the Mau Mau had declared war on their own tribesmen, their own tribesmen might be allowed to try them, and certainly it could be argued that it would be better for a wild African justice to prevail than for British justice to alter the strict requirements of evidence. There are occasions when Pilate’s gesture might well be imitated.
But if the settlers were united in their irritation at Colonial Office government, the irritation was returned. Even though the extreme conservative farmers were dying out they could not avoid all responsibility for what had occurred. You were more likely to hear about them from other farmers than to meet them, but somewhere among the parched uplands or the wooded valleys there must have existed that archetypal figure who would slap his servant’s face if he replied to him in English.
If emergency regulations remained too long in Whitehall, they were too often ignored when they had been issued. Farmers, for example, were asked, for their own protection and the protection of their neighbours, to group their squatter labour into villages, but in one district this was ignored by one of the leading farmers, and no action was taken by the local Police Reserve, who were themselves settlers. ‘We can’t enforce that on old So-and-so’ was too often the comment on a regulation.
On both sides strange fairy stories were half-believed – by Government, that in certain circumstances the farmers might go into armed rebellion; by farmers, that Government and Army plotted some political solution of the Mau Mau struggle, some form of self-government with equal rights for Europeans, Africans, Asiatics.
The nightmare of the common electoral roll disturbed the Mau-Mau-haunted sleep. For it was a land of rumour and division – the rumours came in by car with the neighbour from thirty miles away, rumours slipped along the red greasy roads and got bogged down in districts where the denial never turned up for supper: rumours of mass surrenders, of white Mau Mau leaders in the forest, of European desertions. If these were believed by Europeans, in what fantastic world of fantasy did the African live? ‘We are bewildered,’ an English-speaking Kikuyu said to me, ‘and we are afraid. A knock on the door at night. Is it the Mau Mau, the Home Guard, or the police? They all treat us like enemies.’ Europe seemed to have come to the Kikuyu Reserve, for nearly all Europe since 1933 has known that momentary stoppage of the heart at the sound of brakes, footsteps, a knock.
Sometimes one felt surprised that the Kikuyu tribe had not all taken to the forest, for the man who was called a loyal Kikuyu too often gained no friend, while if he became a Mau Mau he had one enemy less. Only in the forest, under the three ‘Generals’ – Dedan Kimathi, Stanley Methengi, and ‘China’ – did he know for good or ill where he stood.
Dedan Kimathi, a former clerk in the King’s African Rifles, was believed to be the chief leader of the forest gangs. He worked in the bamboo forest of the Aberdares, ‘China’ on the slopes of Mount Kenya. The total numbers were variously estimated, but it is quite possible that the hard core of fighters did not number five hundred men. Added to these were the food carriers and the camp-followers, and the fringe of frightened men who had taken a Mau Mau oath and believed themselves to be bound by it as long as life lasted – ho
useboys, farmhands, even clerks – these could be called upon at need to help in an elimination.
Perhaps ninety per cent of the Kikuyu tribe had taken the first oath, but the oaths varied in degree until they reached a stage of elaborate and literally bestial obscenity. These last oaths were believed by Europeans to leave the initiate forever doomed, uncleansable, outside his tribe, just as the atrocities at Auschwitz and Belsen put certain Germans for ever outside the pale. It is difficult not to believe that these oaths had been thought out by a mind erudite, complex and trained in anthropology. The leaders in the forest war were simpler men.
We know a little of ‘General’ Kimathi and his naive vanity. He was fond of writing letters, to police officers, district officers, even to the Press (signed sometimes ‘Askari of the Liberation’). They varied from absurd claims to be head of a Defence Council covering the whole of Africa, from touches of pathetic vanity when he referred to his tours of Africa and Palestine (who knows the satisfaction he may have got from such unlikely dreams cooped up with his followers in the caves and hide-outs of the Aberdare mountains?), to moments of moving simplicity which recall the last letters of Sacco and Vanzetti. ‘I am explaining clearly that there is no Mau Mau but the poor man is the Mau Mau and if so, it is only Mau Mau which can finish Mau Mau, and not bombs and other weapons.’
Who can say that he had no reason to be vain, when you consider that this African clerk now found himself confronted by three British generals, five British regular battalions, six battalions of the King’s African Rifles, a battalion of the Kenya Regiment, a squadron of bombers, twelve thousand regular and reserve police, not to speak of eighteen thousand Home Guard of his own tribe? (He was helped of course by his terrain: the altitude of ten thousand feet difficult for sustained operations, the depth and obscurity of the bamboo forest, even by the wild game – elephant, leopard, rhinoceros – who took their toll on the nerves of the young National Service men fresh from the cinemas of Margate or Folkestone.)