Report From Kenya, 1955 – Part Two

In 1955, at the height of the Mau Mau Rebellion, my uncle John Alldridge produced a series of reports from Kenya for the Birmingham Mail and the Manchester Evening News – Jerry F

Nairobi

Terror stalks the African night. It lies in wait in every ditch bottom, under every plank bridge you cross. It is all the more terrible because you can never be sure. You only know it might be there — creeping steadily towards you from behind that creaking door, in the lonely cry of that night hawk.

I caught a foul whiff of that heart-stopping terror last night: stranded on an empty road in darkness while all around me, following the invisible contours of the hills, glowed a scarlet crescent of fire.

Now forest fires are common enough in Kenya at this time of year when the parched woods are tinder dry. But some of those fires were undoubtedly started by Mau Mau. And the thought of a blazing roadblock lying in wait for you round the next bend is not pretty.

And sitting there in that useless car, I remembered what they had warned us when we had foolishly started out at dusk: “If your car breaks down, switch off your lights, shove a bullet up the spout and sit tight till morning.”

We sat tight for a very long time, and I can assure you that when the good old British Army finally got a patrol car through to rescue us we were mightily relieved. Never have uniforms looked so well!

It is easy to sit, a tall Tom Collins in your hand, in the Long Bar of the New Stanley here in Nairobi and declare that the worst is over.

It is easy — dangerously easy — to start proving by statistics how the Mau Mau is beaten and the Kikuyu are back on the reserves again, chastened and repentant.

But that must be small comfort to Mr. Stan Armstrong, of Naivasha, not far from here, who was fired upon by terrorists as he and his mother were returning to their lonely farm last night.

And it is no comfort at all to Mr. Laurence Walker, corralling his cattle behind barbed wire — as he must do every evening before dark — up there on the slopes of Mount Kenya.

With two other farmers Laurence Walker shares a triangle of rich farm land which has been literally hacked out of the forest. On his 160 acres he raises pedigree cattle and pyrethrum — the flowers of which are used for insecticides and now form one of Kenya’s most valuable exports.

When the Walkers came out here from Cambridgeshire by way of British Columbia 25 years ago this was idle scrubland. For six months they lived in a tent while the first house was being built.

Now by day that pleasant bungalow farmhouse with its box hedge, its springy green lawns, its delphiniums and scented stocks might be a corner of Worcestershire. You have to look close to see the alarm rockets ready primed under the eaves, the searchlight trained on the stockyard.

For after nightfall Kabaro farm slips back into Darkest Africa. Pressing in on it from all three sides is the forest — and lurking somewhere in that forest are a handful of desperate starving Mau Mau.

For two years the Walkers have known terror as a nightly visitor. It has burned down their kitchen, maimed their stock, sent them to bed with a loaded revolver under the pillow.

Their ordeal began one dreadful day when a loyal farmhand, trembling with fear, warned them that their lives were in danger. Their cook, an old family servant who had been with them 12 years, was coldly and methodically planning their murder.

“Even now I don’t understand it,” says Mrs. Walker. “He had been with us since a boy. Only a few days before I had saved the life of his little girl who had fallen into a tub of boiling water.”

All over the White Highlands of Kenya — those fertile 12,000 square miles of rich agricultural land which only a European may own — pioneer settlers, middle-aged ordinary folk like the Walkers, are asking that question and finding no comfortable answer.

Their world is still that of an England which died finally in the summer of 1939. To them black is black and white is white and never the twain can meet.

You have responsibility to the black man, of course, but you must be firm with him just as you would be with a pet dog. You must feed him and clothe him and help to solve his little problems. But of course you must never ask him to sit down to table with you. He would be as embarrassed as you would be.

Now the Walkers’ world has fallen apart. As they see it their trust has been betrayed — not only by the black man but by the white politicians in the place they still call home.

“They begged us to come out here in the lean years and now when we’ve prospered, mainly by our own efforts, they want us to go shares with the African, who would only turn the land back into a desert, fit only for a few flea-bitten goats.”

You hear that sort of thing all over the White Highlands and for the first time in their lives they see themselves not as pioneers who have made a new promised land out of the wilderness but as a handful of whites surrounded by an overwhelming horde of envious bloodthirsty savages.

For — to use a common Kenya expression — the white farmer has gone “sour.” Settling is finished they will tell you in savage despair. The new settlers who are here will stick it out, to the end, but after that there will be no more.

From then on it will be Africa for the Africans.

“But, thank God, we shan’t be here to see it.”

On the other side of the fence — the anti-settler side — you hear a lot of talk about white arrogance.

The Walkers are not arrogant people. And quite rightly they would be horrified if you suggested they were. They will point out all the benefits the white man has brought to the African — how he abolished slavery and put a stop to the interminable tribal wars, controlled drought and pestilence and introduced hygiene and medical science to improve and prolong life.

Yet ironically it is these very benefits which have contributed to Africa’s vital problem — land-hunger.

By ridding the African of his natural enemies, by interfering with his often barbaric yet often strangely logical tribal customs they have upset the balance of nature.

Mau Mau is as much as anything a revolt against the over-rapid pace of Western advance, against a dissolution of the old native life and custom by the solvent of change.

Since 1930 — when the Walkers came out here — the African population of Kenya has swollen from 3,000,000 to 5,500,000. In the same time the number of Europeans has moved up only from 17,000 to 42,000.

That is the real problem in Kenya as in the rest of Africa today. Some white settlers are far-sighted enough to appreciate this, and, although not relaxing a jot their claim on what they insist is legally theirs, they will tell you it is no longer enough to regard yourself as a European.

You are, in fact, a White African, just a member of the latest tribe to ingrate into East Africa.

Their point of view is lucidly expressed by another veteran settler, Mr. Jack Lipscomb. He has been farming in Kenya for 35 years, and, starting from nothing, has built up the sort of dairy farm that people are taken to see as an example of what can be done in Kenya with hard work, intelligence, courage and vision.

“The land was empty of man when my tribe began to inhabit it,” he will tell you. “The titles under which we hold our land are Crown Land titles, signed by successive governors of Kenya on behalf of the Crown, and we consider that we could have no more valid titles to our lands than these…

“There are now 42,000 of our tribe in Kenya alone, and of all the tribes now inhabiting East Africa ours is the only one whose native system of agriculture does not destroy the land, and the only one on whose religious and economic custom a stable civilisation can be built in Africa.

“We teach our children to take a pride in the fact that they are native Africans in the correct sense of that word native.

“They will tell you: ‘We are Africans — White Africans — and Africa is as much our home and our country as it is the home and country of the Black African.'”

All of which may seem a fanciful pipe dream to Laurence Walker sitting there in the lamplight trying to read but listening all the time for the frantic jangling of cow bells down in the stockyard which would be a warning of yet another Mau Mau raid on his stock.

And Mrs. Walker, with a loaded .38 revolver at the bottom of her mending basket, remembers how nice it was when your soft-footed Kikuyu houseboy could do the washing up after supper. Now all house servants must spend the night in a guarded compound with the farmhands.

She wonders wearily whether the shadow will ever pass, and whether life will ever be the same again. For, though the Walkers might jib at the idea of being called White Africans, Africa is their home, too. And the wordless question they dare not ask is: “But for how long?”

Reproduced with permission
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Jerry F 2024