Report From Kenya, 1955 – Part Seven

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

The first thing you notice when you step off the plane at Nairobi West and walk into the dusty little passengers’ lounge are two doors.

On one is plainly written “Gentlemen (European type).” And on the other, “Gentlemen (Asian type).”

This was my abrupt introduction to something which is splitting British Africa right down the middle — the colour bar.

Officially, of course, there is no colour bar in Kenya. In theory there is nothing to stop an African or an Indian from going into this hotel where I am staying and ordering a drink. Nothing but the absolute certainty that neither would be served.

I have spent hot, thirsty afternoons driving round and round with Cambridge-educated Africans simply because there was no common ground where we might enjoy a cup of tea together.

Naturally, Europeans in Kenya don’t like talking about this “non-existent” colour bar. They prefer to call it a culture bar, which becomes sheer nonsense when you see a courteous, impassive black barman waiting for a fuddled white man to collect his wits.

It is difficult for the European to understand fully the force of resentment, amounting only too often to unreasoning hatred, aroused by the colour bar. It is undoing all the good that 50 years of British government have undoubtedly brought to the African.

As one African put it to me: “I cannot understand you British. You tell me that the British way of life is the best in the world. You send me to London, all expenses paid, to find out just how good it is.

“While I am there you make a fuss of me and pat me on the back and call me ‘Old Chap.’ Then when I come back and want to practise what you preach you push me around and call me ‘Boy.'”

For Kenya this is a tragedy. For here far-sighted liberal-minded men are trying out an experiment unique in Africa. They call it Multi-Racial Government.

In theory, at least, the colony is governed by a legislative council which consists of 36 Europeans, eight Africans, eight Asians and three Arabs. This also includes a small miscellaneous group of non-Europeans who have to vote, except on rare occasions, whichever way the Government directs them.

Obviously this is a far from perfect arrangement. For instance, the African representatives are chosen by the Governor. They have no elected members as yet. So their influence on policy is virtually nil. But at least it is a step — if only a faltering step — in the right direction.

Kenya lies ideologically somewhere between Malan’s South Africa and Nkrumah’s Gold Coast. So long as British tutelage continues both the all-black and the all-white solutions are ruled out. For this is a land where members of three races — white, black and brown — have made their homes. About 40,000 Europeans, 120,000 Asians, and 5½M Africans are mixed up together and must make their future here.

Ironically both the African and the Indian, though they have no particular affection for the British as individuals, both passionately desire to share what the European already has — the British way of life.

I have been into smoky native huts where the only decoration has been a portrait of the Queen, cut from some magazine. I have seen young Indian noses glued to shop-windows where there has been a display of British bicycles.

Asian girls, so cool and beautiful in their colourful saris, prefer to dress like Janette Scott or Princess Margaret. My mission-educated Kikuyu driver greets me every morning not with the traditional “Jambo!” but with a cheerful “Good show!”

Listen to Mr. Ebrahim Nathoo, Nairobi-born son of an Indian who settled here in 1880. Educated at Manchester and Cambridge he has been an Unofficial Member of Kenya’s Legislative Council since 1946.

“My family has been established in Kenya now for three generations. As far as I know I have not a single relative living in Pakistan. We Asians look to the West for our culture, our way of 1ife. And our language must be English.

“Mr. Nathoo has a son at Cambridge and a daughter preparing to enter Cheltenham. Yet the other day, when travelling up-country on government business, he was refused accommodation at a hotel owned by Europeans.

Educated Africans, painfully aware that their countrymen lag centuries behind, are even more eager to share the advantages the West can give them. Without European leadership in this crucial period they know Africa will be plunged back into barbarism.

Sensitive, easily embarrassed, they feel that they are disliked both by the Asian and the European. But whereas the Asian’s dislike is passive, the European’s is often violently active. I have seen a white man push a black man away from a post office counter here in Nairobi and demand to be served first. English women will talk to an African servant as they would never dare talk to one of their own kind at home.

(And one of the saddest ironies is that the young English couple newly-arrived out here behave far worse in this respect than even the oldest and most reactionary white settler.)

Yet for all this the African feels instinctively closer to the European than he does to the Indian.

“At least you Europeans have done something for us — even if it is in your own interest in the long run. The Indian has done nothing for us. And never will.” How often have I heard that?

I went to see Mr. Benaiah Appolo Ohanga. Mr. Ohanga is a remarkable man in many ways. Born the son of a village carpenter in Nyanza Province, the most politically and economically advanced African area in Kenya, he is, at 41, Minister of Community Development in the Kenya Cabinet — not only the first African to hold Ministerial rank in Kenya but probably one of the youngest Ministers in Africa.

He is also one of the few Africans I have found with a Western-style sense of humour. In his position he certainly needs it.

The other day on his way to his office in Nairobi’s new imposing Secretariat (where he has a European secretary) he was stopped by a young Englishman from up-country, who called out to him: “Boy, get me a cab.” “O.K., son!” cheerfully replied Her Majesty’s Minister of Community Development. “He was quite a little surprised,” he adds.

Ohanga’s saving sense of humour makes him see this sort of thing in its right perspective. He is not pessimistic about the colour bar. Surprisingly he finds things better here in Nairobi than he did in London.

“As soon as the African can provide for himself his own social facilities — hotels, bars, restaurants — he will be treated as an equal by the other communities and this stupid colour bar will automatically disappear.”

But other members of Kenya’s Cabinet are not so optimistic. There is, for instance, Mr. Michael Blundell, European Minister Without Portfolio.

Mr. Blundell, burly farmer turned politician, is prepared to fight the next election on this thorny issue.

“There is no place in Kenya for a colour bar, culture bar, call it what you like. It is ridiculous that people, no matter what their colour, who have accepted the European way of life should be denied its privileges. We are aiming at a multi-racial society in the very fullest sense. There is a danger, of course, that we may press on too fast.

“But if the European wants to stick his toes in and keep privilege to himself then he will be ousted. If the Indian wants to remain ultra-Indian he will be isolated. If the African insists on remaining superbly African he will be left far behind.”

Tragically it is only a hard-core of European resistance which makes the situation so dangerous. Inflamed meetings of white settlers, eagerly reported in a partisan Press, fan the temper.

Over and over again you will come across statements like this (and I quote now from a recent issue of “Candour”): “Every sensible man who knows Africa is aware that the African is not to be trusted with power; that the more power he is given the more closely must he be watched in his exercise of it.”

It is true that 75 per cent of Kenya Africans are terribly backward. Temperamentally, they don’t like long hours of sustained hard work, though for short periods they can work like giants. And at this early stage in their development they are embarrassed by responsibility.

But as a European works manager from Lancashire put it to me the other day: “When you consider it is only 50 years since they saw a wheel, they have made fantastic strides.”

All over Kenya today there are signs that the colony is turning from a purely agricultural to a largely industrial country. New factories making soap and cement and cigarettes and shoes are springing up where only a few years ago was arid desert.

Significantly, most of the capital for these huge schemes is coming from outside Kenya. European employers with no preconceived colour prejudice are harnessing their labour and skills and where they can find it.

At Kericho, in fruitful, peaceful Nyanza Province, I have been taken round a huge tea plantation which employs 11,000 Africans. Many of these young Africans are beginning slowly, timidly, to take responsibility for jobs for which a white man would expect double and treble the wage. They and their families live in neat, attractive housing estates built by the management. And there their children can get the simple basic education which every African craves.

They are the most contented Africans I have met.

Journey the 350 miles to Mombasa and the enormous locomotive pulling you (built in Manchester by the way) will have an engineer who might be European, Asian, or African. Spend a morning walking round that incredibly active waterfront and you will see African truck drivers who can barely read or write driving up gradients that would make a British heavy transport driver turn his eyes away in horror.

If Kenya is to move forward — as she so easily could — to become the most progressive of African countries she must effect some permanent compromise that will weld European skill, Asian painstaking persistence, and the boundless resources of African energy into one “harmonious” whole.

And right across the path lies that insidious invisible colour bar.

Right through the Kenya administration today there is a growing recognition that this social colour bar must go. Many of the European businessmen in the colony are in favour of lifting it.

Only a stubborn hard core of reactionaries — retired army officers, pensioned civil servants, upper-middle-class evacuees, determined to keep Surbiton-on-the-Equator just as it was back in the good old days of 1930 — are passionately determined to retain it. And unfortunately they are the men and women whose influence counts most in Kenya today.

They have been warned. First, by Mau Mau. Then by one of their own class, the Governor himself.

Speaking to a meeting of African civil servants in April, 1953, Sir Evelyn Baring warned that the two main barriers to advancement towards a new and prosperous Kenya were “arrogance on the part of the European and suspicion on the part of the African.”

“If we can get over these barriers,” said the Governor, “or reduce them a little bit, to reach a basis of increased confidence, rising trust, moderation, and frankness, then we can build the type of country we all want to see.”

If those twin barriers are not pulled down, then it seems dreadfully obvious to me that Mau Mau is only the shape of things to come — not only in Kenya but throughout all East Africa.

Notes: For further information, see –
Ibrahim Nathoo
Appolo Ohanga
Michael_Blundell
Candour Magazine

Reproduced with permission
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Jerry F 2024